You've gotten a lot of replies all negative to company forums, and I feel compelled to gently push back. While for certain companies it can clearly be a problem, I'm not sure this applies in the same way to more technical/niche areas and community forums can be immensely valuable resources for a company and support. One example that instantly comes to mind is Ubiquiti, despite them trashing their good old forums in favor of a shitty new in-house "modern" thing. They have no bug tracker or a lot of other basic stuff too, one of a long series of examples of corporate decay over the last 3-4 years.
Even so, their forums and community are still an extremely valuable source of useful advice, and actually pretty critical to use of their platform given how bad their official support is and how they've allowed their documentation to decay in many areas as well. While it's gone downhill from before and there is increased noise from upset people, it's still important, and the decline isn't due to moderation or any sort of spam/trolling.
Again, I can see this being easier for forums that are pretty focused. Tesla, or Apple, cover a vastly broader range of the general population and inspire stronger feelings both ways. But forums can be very positive. Yet even so I know there was valuable information on the Tesla forums and people coming together, fans and tinkerers and such. Throwing out that baby with the bathwater does seem so unnecessary...
...particularly in the context of you mentioning SA which I also once used a lot. That brings up that there are a lot of tools that for whatever reason don't get used that can make it much, much easier to deal with moderation, ie:
>"While it's obvious Tesla "could afford" to moderate it, it's also probably the kind of line-item no one actually considered being part of running a forum."
I wonder why so many places are allergic to just plain charging money. Posting in a first party forum isn't a right. Just make it $10 or whatever, must repay if banned. That'll gate spam/trolls pretty hard. Moderation is fundamentally an economic equation: the time/resources it takes to moderate a rule breaking post VS the time/resources it takes to violate/evade moderation. Yet for some reason everyone always acts as if only the first part can be changed. Not so. There are plenty of ways to shift the second part too that almost never get used. Adding money, or even time cost (make someone perform an hour/day/week of computational work to earn a level 1/2/3 token etc), then changes the balance with no additional cost on the moderation side by making evasion more costly.
As other examples, the Glowforge forums are positive in tone, members are mutually supportive, and the company is reasonably tolerant of criticism and of discussion of dangerous experiments, and despite selling materials themselves does not interfere with members discussing alternate sources of materials.
I also remember the Sphero forums as quite useful, although I haven't visited for a while.
Even so, their forums and community are still an extremely valuable source of useful advice, and actually pretty critical to use of their platform given how bad their official support is and how they've allowed their documentation to decay in many areas as well. While it's gone downhill from before and there is increased noise from upset people, it's still important, and the decline isn't due to moderation or any sort of spam/trolling.
Again, I can see this being easier for forums that are pretty focused. Tesla, or Apple, cover a vastly broader range of the general population and inspire stronger feelings both ways. But forums can be very positive. Yet even so I know there was valuable information on the Tesla forums and people coming together, fans and tinkerers and such. Throwing out that baby with the bathwater does seem so unnecessary...
...particularly in the context of you mentioning SA which I also once used a lot. That brings up that there are a lot of tools that for whatever reason don't get used that can make it much, much easier to deal with moderation, ie:
>"While it's obvious Tesla "could afford" to moderate it, it's also probably the kind of line-item no one actually considered being part of running a forum."
I wonder why so many places are allergic to just plain charging money. Posting in a first party forum isn't a right. Just make it $10 or whatever, must repay if banned. That'll gate spam/trolls pretty hard. Moderation is fundamentally an economic equation: the time/resources it takes to moderate a rule breaking post VS the time/resources it takes to violate/evade moderation. Yet for some reason everyone always acts as if only the first part can be changed. Not so. There are plenty of ways to shift the second part too that almost never get used. Adding money, or even time cost (make someone perform an hour/day/week of computational work to earn a level 1/2/3 token etc), then changes the balance with no additional cost on the moderation side by making evasion more costly.