Are You Gardening, or Are You Managing Waste?

[music]

[00:00:04] Announcer: You’re listening to Community Signal, the podcast for online community professionals. Sponsored by Vanilla, a one-stop-shop for online community. Tweet with @communitysignal as you listen. Here’s your host, Patrick O’Keefe.

[00:00:25] Patrick O’Keefe: Hello and welcome to the show. Our guest is Lydia Fiedler, who has been the community manager for Splitcoaststampers for over a decade. If you’re into paper crafting, there’s a great chance that you’ve heard of this community. Our topics include splitting up your community’s activity, gardening versus waste management, and the power of a good challenge.

Rachel Medanic, Paul Bradley, and Jules Standen, those are three of our supporters on Patreon, and we’re really grateful for them. If you’re interested in becoming one of our supporters, please visit communitysignal.com/innercircle for more info.

Before we get started, I wanted to mention that November 25th, we’ll mark four years that Carol Benovic-Bradley has been our editorial lead at Community Signal. Carol, congrats on four years, and thank you for making the show better.

Lydia Fiedler is the community manager of Splitcoaststampers, where she has been for 11 years. Lydia has been creating art for nearly 40 years and creating online content for about 20. Crafting spaces that feel friendly and welcoming is her mission, whether at work teaching online, or engaging in social media. She also spent 20 years in the construction industry as an HR director and marketing director, and has worked in software development and at great startups in the Austin, Texas area, but the art industry has been her home for more than a decade. Lydia lives in Austin with her husband and two feline overlords, Maddie and Splotchy.

Lydia, welcome to the show.

[00:01:43] Lydia Fiedler: Thank you. Happy to be here.

[00:01:21] Patrick O’Keefe: As I was putting together this podcast, I realized just how long we’ve been randomly talking on the internet, more than a decade now, mostly on Twitter. I used to be @iFroggy on Twitter. I changed my name to @PatrickOKeefe. I was looking back at the history of our conversation and I was like, I had to go back and change it to be your Twitter handle, and then @iFroggy to really see the depth of the length of time we’ve been talking without meeting a person speaking in this forum. It’s great to finally get to chat with you a little more deeply.

[00:02:15] Lydia Fiedler: I love that. Twitter is great for that kind of connection, I think, where you just absorbed people’s content over the years and you feel like you know them. It’s fun. It’s been a quick 10 years.

[00:02:28] Patrick O’Keefe: It has been. Before the show, you told me that you believe you “have a gift for diffusing difficult situations that you didn’t really hone in on until I started community management, and I feel like that was really the beginning of my understanding of what keeps communities alive and what threatens them.” Talk about that.

[00:02:46] Lydia Fiedler: In a former life, I was an HR director, and I think part of the reason I was good at it, and I didn’t know it at the time, was that I was the person who could work with difficult people. People that nobody else wanted to work with, I could get through to those people. After I left that work, I realized that that skill translated into community basically, so which ended up becoming my career. But easy people to work with are easy to work with. The time that you spend on the people with the rough edges is time very well spent if you can pull it off successfully.

[00:03:30] Patrick O’Keefe: I like to think of that in two ways. I think first is that our guidelines apply to people we like and people we don’t. You’re always tested when your guidelines are defending people who maybe aren’t that great, aren’t the easiest people to get along with. In one context, I manage a martial arts community. Within the martial arts, there are lots of different arts. Some arts are viewed more legitimately than others, and yet we want people to be able to talk about those other arts without it becoming a series of personal attacks or, without being able to stick to the facts of the matter.

What happens in a lot of people’s eyes is we almost, in some cases, defend the arts that maybe are being criticized, but really it’s not that we’re defending them. It’s just that we don’t want you to say the F word or say, “Everyone who uses that art is an idiot,” because you can’t have a conversation if that’s the foundation of what you’re doing.

Then the other part is that there’s a lot of community members, in my experience, who have violated our guidelines many times, but then because of our patience and understanding, and time spent talking to them privately around how the guidelines work and how they should be contributing, they turn it around and they become just amazing incredible members.

[00:04:49] Lydia Fiedler: I think what’s hard about that, first of all, fairness has to be at the center of everything you do. Treating people the same way for the same types of infractions is really important because there’s a lot of persecution complex on the internet that you’re going to run into in communities. Also, and this is the hardest thing to communicate, is judgment calls. If you have a community that you’re taking care of, and there’s something that maybe doesn’t exactly violate the letter of one of your guidelines, you have to be able to make the judgment call that you still don’t want it in your community. Then you have to be able to communicate that, “I’m a human being and I make judgment calls and I do it to preserve the culture of this community.”

That gray area is a place where a lot of really bad actors like to live. They like to say, “Well, it’s not in the rules.” But you have to feel super confident about your purpose and say, “I know it doesn’t fit. Even if I can explain to you why it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t belong here.” You’ve got to be able to move past that sometimes with people. I find that those gray areas are where a lot of conflict lives.

[00:06:05] Patrick O’Keefe: Yes. I think that that area of judgment is where you can do things like say that, “The benefit of the doubt is something that is earned.” When you enter an existing, active community of people, we want people to feel welcome, but there are areas, and a very easy, low-hanging fruit area is like links. Showing up, posting a link that it doesn’t look like they’re affiliated with, but it’s still their first post.

They haven’t necessarily earned the benefit of the doubt that they can make that post the same way that someone who’s made a thousand posts, and who we know that they’re operating in good faith because they’ve done demonstrated it to us over a long period of time, they can post a random link and we’ll be like, “Oh, okay. Well, they know the community. They know the guidelines. We can give them that benefit of the doubt.”

Someone who shows up, brand new, it’s no different than getting a phone call from a friend asking you about this service, than getting a phone call from someone you’ve never talked to before asking about this service. That’s an area that I think the large social networks obviously, obviously struggle with. But at the ground level, for most online communities that are hosted on their own platforms and managed by either a team of volunteers or one person in a team or a full paid team, you do have that knowledge of the community and its members where you can say, “Frankly, you could be okay. You might not be, but because we don’t know you, you really need to participate in a different way until we can get to know you a little bit better.”

[00:07:36] Lydia Fiedler: Right. That person’s reaction to that first test at the relationship will tell you a lot about where that’s going. If you find that somebody just completely freaks out and melts down at that first hint that they’ve rubbed up against a guideline, that’s usually an indicator of how things are going to go. Whereas you have the people who are like, “Oh my gosh. I’m so sorry. I’m new here. I didn’t know.” That kind of thing. Then, you’ve got a good egg versus somebody who might be trouble in the long term.

[00:14:35] Patrick O’Keefe: Let’s pause right here to talk about our generous sponsor, Vanilla.

Vanilla provides a one-stop-shop solution that gives community leaders all the tools they need to create a thriving community. Engagement tools like ideation and gamification promote vibrant discussion and powerful moderation tools allow admins to stay on top of conversations and keep things on track. All of these features are available out of the box, and come with best-in-class technical and community support from Vanilla’s Success Team. Vanilla is trusted by King, Acer, Qualtrics, and many more leading brands. Visit vanillaforums.com.

We reconnected over a tweet from Jason Kottke that I found through Derek Powazek and then retweeted in Kottke’s tweet, “social media would be a better place to connect with people if the folks building it and using these services had spent formative time on and taken inspiration from Flickr and MetaFilter instead of 4chan and Reddit. Gardening versus waste management.”

Both Heather Champ, formerly of Flickr, who is married to Derek, and Matthew Haughey, who founded MetaFilter have been on the show before. What caught your attention about that tweet?

[00:09:12] Lydia Fiedler: That really resonated with me. That was like the tweet of that week, I felt like. I think because, well, one, I am a gardener, so I get the metaphor but the other thing is, I figured out just reading that, that the most important thing that you have is the definition of what you want out of your community. That’s your little seed that you’re going to protect.

For me, for example, I’m in a creative industry, and so the cultural little seed that I have to protect with everything in my online communities is people’s ability to feel creative. Just creativity at its most basic. Once you know that, then the threat assessment, what threatens people’s creativity well, harsh comments obviously, or people not interacting with their art. That kind of a thing. Once, you know what you’re protecting, then you can better protect it. You know what’s bad for it, and what’s good for it. You can attract the good things to your community like Flickr did.

Flickr was a really supportive community. It was about creativity, and people encouraging other people in their art. That can go astray really quickly if you don’t have all the cultural defenses built-in, where the behavior that hurts an artist’s creativity is just never allowed in the community. I just really felt that. That was so well stated.

[00:10:45] Patrick O’Keefe: Yes.

[00:10:45] Lydia Fiedler: On the other hand, when he was talking about waste management, the example that I thought of was, I saw this guy making ramen noodles on YouTube, and it was one of the most beautiful videos I’d ever seen in my life and he said he had a Discord server.

[00:10:59] Patrick O’Keefe: Yes.

[00:10:59] Lydia Fiedler: I joined the Discord server. [laugh] I joined at exactly the wrong time. It melted down in just this volcano of just hateful behavior in just a couple of days. The guy finally said, “I have to close the server. We were here to talk about making ramen noodles,” and like “What went wrong?”

[00:11:18] Patrick O’Keefe: Yes.

[00:11:18] Lydia Fiedler: That’s instantly what I thought of when I read that tweet, when he was talking about waste management because those things get out of hand so fast if you’re not on top of them, and then you lose that little treasure that was at the center of your community.

[00:11:31] Patrick O’Keefe: It’s funny, this wasn’t planned. I didn’t know that I still had this here, but my mom bought me and my wife a daily motivational thing, or like a daily quote. I think that we’d look at it each day, and then there was this quote that we pulled a while back. It’s from May, 13th so that tells you how long it’s been here because I was like, “I’m going to write a tweet about this, and I’m going to add in the word community, but it’s this quote.”

I’m going to hold it up for Lydia’s benefit. I’ll read it out on the podcast here, but it says, “To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow. Audrey Hepburn.” What I’m going to tweet out, I’m going to give away a tweet now, but I’ll still tweet this out because I took a photo of this and that’s why it’s here. It’s literally here as a reminder to build a community, yes, to believe in tomorrow.

[00:12:07] Lydia Fiedler: Yes.

[00:12:08] Patrick O’Keefe: I think that the really loaded phrase here, is “gardening versus waste management.” That’s really interesting because, as you said, gardening is about creating a place where things can grow usually specific seeds or crops that you are actively interested in growing, where waste management assumes the waste, right? It’s about accepting the existence of the waste and simply managing it as effectively as you can. “We have this pile of trash, we will always have this pile of trash. [laugh] We can do nothing about this pile of trash. We’re not going to get rid of this pile of trash, so how can we divide this pile of trash up in a more effective or attractive way perhaps?”

[00:12:44] Lydia Fiedler: Right.

[00:12:45] Patrick O’Keefe: To me, that speaks to platforms that accept or allow toxic voices to exist, and then trying to work around them, limit their reach, take temporary actions instead of just actively rooting them out.

[00:12:57] Lydia Fiedler: Yes, absolutely. Then from the inside of the community, what happens just like what happens in the garden is, when you have a really good, strong community culture, those people take the trash out on their way out. The people that love what you’re building, they help you take out the trash. [laugh] They don’t want it there anymore or than you do, and you know you have a good thing going when you have people helping you with the trash.

[00:13:24] Patrick O’Keefe: Yes, it’s very true. It’s one of those things that comes with time and work and investment, but when you have it, it’s beautiful. Like I have a martial arts community, KarateForums.com. I’m sure people are tired of me referencing it on the show, but it turned 20 this year in May and I’ve managed it-

[00:13:38] Lydia Fiedler: Wow.

[00:13:38] Patrick O’Keefe: -the whole time. To most people, you look at it, it’s a simple martial arts community, probably how a lot of people who live on big social media platforms look at Splitcoaststampers like, “What is this?” It’s just like, “Look at this old forum, look at this group of people talking about paper crafting.” You get beneath the hood, I don’t have any real fear of anything bad happening to that community. That doesn’t mean I’m not active there, it doesn’t mean we don’t have moderators who are there watching it. It doesn’t mean we don’t have active processes around moderation and managing reports and removing content and banning people.

This community is so good at self-rejecting where, if you come in there and you do something, they are going to either say something about it or hopefully through us talking over the years report it and then ignore it, and just let it die on the vine there to use more gardening vernacular accidentally. Just let it die on the vine, that you just won’t get the rise out of it.

[00:14:33] Lydia Fiedler: Right.

[00:14:33] Patrick O’Keefe: It won’t really matter. They’re just so good at that. I see it so often, that they just self-reject, and it’s such a great powerful thing. I think part of that is also expectation setting. I’ve set an expectation with people where there’s like a few emergencies in the world, in my view, when it comes to community. One of those, and the main one, is anything that impacts life, a threat to life, someone that might become a victim of suicide, that is an emergency. The F-word, not an emergency, spam, not an emergency. Report it, forget it, move on, go to something else. We’ll get it. When someone sees it next, when the queue’s next viewed, it’ll be cleaned out. No problem.

We actively talk to people who come into the community new, who might freak out about something, we have a specific template we’ll send them and say, “Hey, just report it. Don’t worry about it. It’s not that big a deal. Move on to something else.” People learn over time.

[00:15:24] Lydia Fiedler: Well, and you might be onto something. My approach is the same kind of approach. I like a calm response to a perceived emergency. What I always tell people is no one has ever died in paper crafting. Just to keep it in perspective, it’s going to be fine. It could very well be that, that is the secret to calmer, more peaceful communities, is people know they don’t have to wig out over a spammer because that is a very, self-fulfilling culture.

You’ve seen it on Facebook and Twitter and everywhere else. That ratcheting up of that type of freak out, people feed off that kind of energy, but they also feed off the calmer energy, and a calmer presence in your community will lead to a calmer community overall. That kind of thing won’t get this sort of play, won’t get pumped up. Honestly, I’m assuming yours is a forum too, similar to Splitcoast. You got to be okay with just, “That doesn’t belong here. I’m removing it.”

There’s that huge confusion on forums where they think their rights are being violated if a forum post gets deleted like, “I’m being censored.” No, you’re not. That’s not what’s happening at all. Your approach, a community manager’s approach, for sure, but even just the members of the community being calm and not easily having their tails stepped on and getting them all wound up is a good culture to build, I think, in any online community,

[00:17:02] Patrick O’Keefe: For sure. Speaking of larger social networks, in our pre-show questionnaire, you said something that I found fascinating, which was that, you were dealing with fractured attention, that “Our community has definitely suffered with the proliferation of social media sites, but we still have so many advantages in our ‘old school community’ that, things that people pine for on social media.”

You mentioned a couple of things that are funny, but also it’s true, which is that– you mentioned chronological order and editing. Just the other day, Twitter opened their subscription service, Twitter Blue to the US and New Zealand following earlier availability in Australia and Canada, and among the features is an undo tweet option that essentially holds your tweet for 30 seconds in case you have any regrets. That’s not a true editing feature. Online communities have allowed editing for a very long time.

[00:17:50] Lydia Fiedler: What is going on, Twitter? I want answers. I want answers on the edit button. Even Facebook, to even say that Facebook is doing that better than Twitter is so shocking to me because Twitter had so many great features, in my opinion, long before Facebook did. But Facebook’s edit history, if the idea is transparency, just put the edit history out there. It’s no big deal. It’s not like they’re really counting on super-accurate content from every tweet, so they just need to be super practical about that and give people the edit button.

The algorithm is everybody’s number one complaint about Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. I want to see the people that I follow. I want to see their tweets in chronological order or their Facebook posts or their Instagram posts. That’s all they want. It’s such a simple ask. I know all the reasons behind it, but old-school forums are great for that. “Come to a place where time makes sense.” That’s what I always say.

[00:18:54] Patrick O’Keefe: Yes. It’s such a funny thing, but it’s true. There’s even things that forums, recognizing issues that I think can sometimes create, have done, there’s timed edits, right? Starting off editing after a certain amount of time, which then you can provisionally allow if you choose to on a smaller scale, but like, whatever, you earn the ability to edit your posts for a longer period of time. Things like that. Chronological order is obviously there.

There is this great accessibility that exists within most text-based online forums where that content is digestible by a screen reader. It’s simply there. These things that Twitter has tied to Blue, I saw something about making texts larger in some views. It’s like, what does that even mean? That’s an accessibility thing. You shouldn’t tie the size of text to anything. You should be able to make that big, small, whatever, no matter what you want to do.

It’s interesting because, in a lot of ways, online forums and communities were developed essentially to be sandboxes where people have taken them in all sorts of directions, whether it be the obvious ones like conversation and collaboration over work or creative projects, or actually, this is the same thing, other creative projects like literature, or collaborating on stories, or creating these worlds of RPG’s. There are these large, large RPG forums that are just people in character, building out worlds and talking to one another, like a tech space RPG of the past, but it’s interactive and it’s with the people who are active on it, building up these personas. They were just that flexible sandbox and they weren’t built with an eye for limiting those types of creative features.

[00:20:00] Lydia Fiedler: Right. They were also born in an era before we had such an overwhelming amount of information available to us. The way that you can see that in the bones of these forums, is they were designed to get information in an organized way to as many people as possible, without a lot of bells and whistles. The search features are very robust. You can go back and search our site from the time that it existed until now you can get information from that long ago.

If you try the search feature on any current social media outlet, it’s a nightmare, one, because there’s the algorithm fighting you. The other thing is that they are not optimized to deliver information because they’re part of this information assault that we all have. They’re designed to stop your scrolling, instead of curated content that is meant to inform people about one particular topic. It’s just, “What can I catch your eye with on the way by?” That’s a big difference just in philosophy and in the purpose of those two types of websites, I think.

[00:21:15] Patrick O’Keefe: Speaking of fractured attention on the Splitcoaststampers community, you have several areas where people can interact. I realized when I spent some time on the community, that if you only look at the forums, you are really only getting a part of the picture, maybe even a small-ish part. Speaking especially towards your galleries, they are just exceptionally active. I don’t know if they’re more active in the forums or not, but there is a ton happening there. I could refresh the page and see a new gallery post that had 13 new views in 30 seconds.

[00:21:49] Lydia Fiedler: Right.

[00:21:50] Patrick O’Keefe: It’s like, there’s just constant posts, comments, views, and we’re very used to a single feed experience these days. I wanted to ask you about the pros and cons, in your eyes, of splitting up activity like that.

[00:22:03] Lydia Fiedler: Splitting it up on our site?

[00:22:05] Patrick O’Keefe: Yes.

[00:22:05] Lydia Fiedler: Yes. Initially, the site was really started with the forums. It was a place for a specific group of people to gather, and then it just got bigger until there were hundreds of thousands of members. Initially, the forum started it all, but we are a visual community. It’s a visual art community. When the gallery was put in and you’ve probably seen this, in both sections of our site, there are going to be people who are too afraid to share. You’re going to have the people who just read the forums and they get the information and they never say a word, and those are people that are looking for specific skills, specific tools, information about tools.

Then there are the extroverts, the people like us who are talking all the time, who are in the forums, but gallery is a place that connects not just the members of our community with their art and their techniques and their beautiful cards and scrapbook pages, whatever they’re doing, but it also connects designers with the manufacturers in our industry. We were one of the first sites to have a really robust, big gallery like that where company owners could come and find examples that designers had made with their brands.

Those are really two fundamentally different activities. It’s the same group of people, but the designers and the people who are working for manufacturers directly having their artwork out there and tied to that manufacturer, that gallery serves an incredible function there. Like I said, there are going to be people who are too scared to share a card or two, but we also tie the gallery back to the forum because we have daily challenges. We’ll say, “Here is a color challenge.” You might have seen some keywords at the front of different gallery entries. Those are from our daily challenges. That is the bridge between the gallery and the forums, but you can happily exist in either, or both on the site.

[00:24:07] Patrick O’Keefe: That makes it sound like to me that you’ve seen a different type of member sometimes, who’s more comfortable participating in the gallery versus the forum?

[00:24:14] Lydia Fiedler: For sure. I would say that’s more of like a social media type feel. “Here’s this pretty thing I made. Now, people are going to interact with it in a positive way,” versus the people who wanna have a conversation or learn a skill in the forums. Those can be two very different personality types.

[00:24:33] Patrick O’Keefe: You mentioned the challenge forums, and I wanted to talk about them because that was another thing that jumped out to me as I looked deeper at the community is just how active the challenge forums were. For example, the Falliday Fest Challenge Forum was one that I spent some time looking through. I feel like there are things there that other communities can learn from when it comes to this idea of challenges in a forum, daily challenges, posting challenges in that format. I wanted to ask you to talk about that. What do you think other communities can learn from your challenge forums?

[00:25:03] Lydia Fiedler: Well, here’s the little seed that I protect with regard to the forums. This is really, really important to me. With very few exceptions, our challenges have no prizes, nothing associated with them. They are purely for inspiration and education, and that’s very hard to find in our industry across the internet. Most of the time, if manufacturers or websites want to have a challenge to get people to participate in the challenge, they have to offer a prize.

We’ve always, really, really stayed away from that because the community exists to serve the creative needs of these people. We wanted them to be free of any kind of outside influence. In my opinion, that makes the people who are creating the challenges that much more creative. We have some really cool challenges and ideas. Falliday is a fun one because we also, in addition to the daily challenges, we do six tutorials in a week, which, that might not sound like a lot, but it’s a lot of work. [chuckles] We put those all together in one week, whereas normally, we just have one tutorial a week. We’re giving them all the inspiration they can take headed into the holiday season.

[00:26:19] Patrick O’Keefe: When I hear that, one thing that I take away from it is that, by limiting the amount of challenges tied to some prize or monetary gain, you tend to attract people who are there for the reason of participating in the community, and because they enjoy paper crafting probably as a hobby and something that’s fun for them, that they really have a passion for, as opposed to participating for the act of winning something, or receiving some form of compensation, or because they see it as their job to win this competition and beat everyone else. It encourages the type of spirit that you’re looking for.

[00:27:08] Lydia Fiedler: That is a good point. I hadn’t even thought of that. You’ll have to rerecord this is if I were saying that. The competitive spirit there just doesn’t exist. You’re just playing along in a challenge that a bunch of other people are doing. You’re looking at their work, they’re looking at yours. You’re right. There’s no dog-eat-dog aspect to that at all. Everybody can appreciate everybody else’s work while losing nothing basically.

The only thing I would add to your list is skill-building. There are a lot of people who are really trying to build their skills. We have a watercolor challenge that we just started last year, and that is real skill-building. Once a week, you were going to learn a very specific skill in watercolor. There are a lot of people who are at that phase where they’re just trying to get better.

[00:27:55] Patrick O’Keefe: It’s interesting. This is a model that I think can apply to a lot of different communities. If I applied it to the martial arts, for example, I think there is room for a daily, weekly challenge around each particular technique within a specific art. Film yourself, photograph yourself in that stance as a progression through that move, share how other people are doing it, compare how you all look at that move. What did you do different? Is it better? Is it worse? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it’s just a flavor, a taste of that particular martial arts move or stance, but you’re looking at it more collaboratively.

“Here is how we all train in this similar art around the world. Here’s how we look when we do it. The challenge is to complete the move today. There’s not going to be a winner. We don’t even allow discussions on what the best martial artist is.” You can’t ask, like “What’s the best martial art? We learned long ago. Don’t do that stuff.” You can look at how everyone else is expressing themselves to this move and get something out of that and feel a sense of kinship with other martial artists just by seeing them doing the same kind of thing.

That’s just off the top of my head. I’m sure that people listening with more time and more creative energy than I have, could probably come with a lot of fun things to do within a community that is based around this model of challenges.

[00:29:04] Lydia Fiedler: Yes, it’s very inspiring. A lot of people will tell me whenever they get stuck, if they get in a rut, all they have to do is head to the challenge forum. There are hundreds of thousands of challenges in there for them to pick from. That’s the other advantage of a forum, too. They can go back to a color challenge from 2004. It doesn’t have to be something that was posted yesterday and they can use that for inspiration.

[00:29:28] Patrick O’Keefe: Hopefully, if you’re a community builder stuck in a rut, this podcast, once in a while, helps you to get through that. Lydia, thank you for spending some time with us. I really enjoyed the conversation and it was great to have you on the show.

[00:29:39] Lydia Fiedler: Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

[00:29:42] Patrick O’Keefe: We’ve been talking with Lydia Fiedler community manager for Splitcoaststampers at splitcoaststampers.com. You can visit her website understandblue.com her YouTube channel at youtube.com/c/understandblue and follow her on Instagram @understandblue.

For the transcript from this episode, plus highlights and links that we mentioned, please visit communitysignal.com. Community Signal is produced by Karn Broad and Carol Benovic-Bradley is our editorial lead. Until next time.

[music]