[avolcano]

> In the replies of a March 2 Tesla forum post announcing the 13-day countdown until the platform’s demise, one commenter with supposed “inside info” alleged that the forums were closing because Tesla couldn’t afford to hire multiple full-time moderators to keep up with the barrage of spam and trolls that would frequent the threads.

Truly amazed at the number of companies that set up social platforms like this and then refuse to actually moderate them in any way. 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'm sure they think of a forum's overhead as just being hosting and maintenance, without considering the human cost of moderation until they were forced to, at which point they said "eh, fuck it."

We all talk about the moderation problem a lot with massive platforms like Facebook, but the number of people who just think "let's just throw up a small little forum/Reddit clone/Discord channel for people to talk to each other on" and then don't consider that, maybe, there might be some bad actors on there, is... I dunno, the majority, it seems.

Maybe it's because I grew up posting on forums like Something Awful that were famed for strong moderation, and IRC channels with as many ops as lurkers, but it almost seems like this was a weird forgotten aspect of building social platforms. I kinda blame the proliferation of upvotes and downvotes, which people seem to think is a replacement for moderation.

[PragmaticPulp]

I assume they decided the ROI of the forum was negative for the company.

Even if expenses could be zero, official forums aren't a great look for a large company. Customers can be confused as to whether the forum is a good source of support or not. Some disgruntled customers have unlimited free time to throw shade at the company via forum posts.

If Tesla employees weren't participating on a level that could keep up with the discussion, it's probably better hosted on some other community forum anyway.

[dehrmann]

Ever search for an issue with an Apple product, landed in the Apple forums, see hundreds of people with the same issue, and Apple ignoring it? Can't say it instills confidence. Without the forums, especially with a fanboy brand, you're more likely to assume you're "holding the phone wrong."

[belorn]

The question that a company need to answer is if its better that the primary forum is hosted by themselves or by a third party which they have zero control over. There are distinct benefits and drawbacks. Tesla has a much harder time to do damage control and manage special circomstances if the platform moderation is out of their control.

I would hazard a guess that both Microsoft forums and Apple forums exist because of that reason.

[im3w1l]

I was really impressed with the way Bitcoin project disowned the official forums. They were moved to a separate domain and declared inofficial. But accounts and posts and everything was retained on the new domain. Went smoothly and without any drama or hard feelings.

[drivingmenuts]

My understanding is that only reason Tesla makes money is by selling carbon offsets. Basically, everything is negative ROI for them.

[Klwohu]

Look at Apple's forums, it's a complete morass with some moderation removing comments hostile to Apple, but without any solution or interaction from any Apple personnel. It's notoriously bad.

[smoldesu]

A few years ago my friend dropped their Macbook with mission-critical info on it, and they took to the Apple forums to see if there was a way to retrieve the data on it. A few hours passed and a couple community members echoed the "no, it's impossible" sentiment. The next day, I woke up to check the thread and found it was deleted. According to my friend, someone outlined the exact process of recovering data from a Macbook SSD in the replies, prompting the whole thread to get removed an hour later. I heard horror stories of things like that in the past, but I never knew it was that bad.

[riffic]

you can't automate good content moderation, and it's just not worthwhile to provide this service if you can't keep up with the duties. Another link to Masnick's Impossibility Theorem:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191111/23032743367/masni...

[SilasX]

They can't fob off that work on the numerous Tesla die-hards out there?

[vinger]

Why can't ai?

[boardwaalk]

To Tesla's credit, their forum has been around a long time. Before, it was probably small enough to not need much attention. But between growth, the financial incentives (shorts), Elon's antics, etc I'm sure it turned into something they stopped wanting to deal with.

[camjohnson26]

Can we stop using shorts as the bogeyman? Tesla shorts have lost billions and true believers have made billions. Short sellers have an important function in the market of both rooting out fraud and as buyers when the stock price starts to decline. Short sellers were blowing the whistle on Wirecard for years, and have been the voice of reason on Nikola, MiMedx, GSX, Valeant, and countless others. Not everyone with a bearish opinion on a stock is going to maliciously sabotage it.

[xoa]

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.

[microtherion]

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.

[hilbertseries]

I remember around a decade ago, when metacritc shut down their forums. Also citing an inability to keep up with moderation duties. I suppose in their defense we were posting a lot of download links at the time.

[oceanghost]

Do you have stairs in your house?

I think the cost of moderation grows at a rate higher than revenue that can be earned in most cases.

[ampdepolymerase]

Are there any Reddit clones aside from HN? Tree style threaded forum software are awfully rare.

[riffic]

lemmy: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy