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Codidact marketing for community posts
In the last few months the Codidact team has opened several pages across various social media platforms (see the bottom of this post for a list). Up until now the admins have occasionally shared posts on Twitter, but we’d like to use these platforms more intentionally to promote community content.
We recognize that different communities might want different kinds of content promoted. A generalist group like Cooking might prefer broad outreach, while a more specialized site like Electrical Engineering may struggle to cope with an influx of uninformed questions. Please use this thread to tell us what your community wants, and what you don’t want.
A few questions to start the conversation:
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We currently let users with the Curate ability promote posts across the Codidact network. Should we choose some subset of these for promotion?
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Should we take submissions from moderators only or let anyone suggest a post to be shared?
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Would it make sense for us to open a meta thread and let people nominate high-quality posts there?
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Are there any guidelines we should put in place around the content we share, e.g. avoiding controversial questions?
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How should we enable community members (or anyone else) to object to a promotion or proposed promotion? We don’t want to create controversy; how do we avoid unintentionally doing so?
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How should we treat posts that are timely? (Promoting it now seems helpful; it might be less relevant by the time a meta discussion resolves.)
We’d like to do something lightweight (likely manual at first) where mods, admins, or community members can share high quality posts quickly. We also want the communities to have a voice, and we want anybody to be able to easily let us know that we ought to reconsider something we’ve promoted. Additionally, nominations will be minimally curated by the community admins for quality and equitable distribution among communities.
Social Pages
Edit based on discussion:
We've had some really good suggestions on ways to get posts nominated. Based on some of the discussion, we've opened a separate question on obtaining ability privileges. We would love to have some of the automated processes suggested and we'll work toward those in the future, but for now I think we'll just open a post and let anyone make suggestions and vote. The Codidact social admins will then post what seems appropriate from those nominations and other community content. We want to be really transparent and flexible with this process, so if anyone has concerns or questions let us know!
2 answers
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We currently let users with the Curate ability promote posts across the Codidact network. Should we choose some subset of these for promotion?
Well this seems like an extremely hard ability to earn. Does anyone but moderators and staff actually have it? As an example from Software Development, Curate is described as:
To earn this ability, you need to have at least a 90% positive reception rate for your posts, with a hard minimum of 16 positively-received posts. You also need at least a 99% helpful rate for flags you have raised, with a hard minimum of 196 helpful flags. (These numbers may vary from site to site.)
196 helpful flags! Meaning 198 in total, where 196 have to be helpful. Seriously!?
This community gets some 2-3 posts per day and then it's one of the more active. What are we even supposed to flag? And woe if you make a mistake...
To compare with SO, I have 85% helpful post flags after some 10 years of using the site. Been doing lots of custom flags. And 94% helpful comment flags - not even those reach 99%.
Would it make sense for us to open a meta thread and let people nominate high-quality posts there?
That could work. Though why not just pick from whatever is recent and somewhat up-voted? Preferably with as varied topics as possible per community.
Are there any guidelines we should put in place around the content we share, e.g. avoiding controversial questions?
If it fulfils the Code of Conduct (be nice; be respectful) & local community rules, that should be sufficient. I believe there was some drama over at Someplace Else when some supposedly controversial question was posted. But since we don't have the same Twitter-Driven Development as they do, I think we can be more far more lenient in freedom of speech.
How should we enable community members (or anyone else) to object to a promotion or proposed promotion? We don’t want to create controversy; how do we avoid unintentionally doing so?
I think it should be integrated with the flagging system so that objections can be done without confronting anyone in public. I think the community-specific moderators can be trusted to deal with such flags at their own best judgment. Unless they are partial, either because they made the nomination in the first place, or in case they posted anything under the post getting flagged. Then the site should simply hand the flag to an impartial mod/staff instead.
Everything below is my opinion and not that of the Codidact project or any other user.
We currently let users with the Curate ability promote posts across the Codidact network. Should we choose some subset of these for promotion?
We should allow some sort of process like the similar to occur:
- Someone with Curate ability promotes the post (this applies to the individual site/community)
- Some sort of extra social media promotion requirement is met (e.g. a fixed amount of people with the ability then try to promote it, some sort of vote score or other check is run and returns an "OK" result). One of the options (from my understanding) that I have considered for this check is to flag a mod only tag in each category as making this check pass (via a site setting maybe?), adding a flag (or history entry, similar to the post closed one) on the question if it has been promoted, and then posts tagged with that tag and without the history entry can be queued for the next stage.
- The Communities application (Qpixel) then pushes the post to social media via API. Depending on the desired social streams, I'm thinking an API integration with a social media manager tool (similar to Hootsuite/Buffer, but Buffer has no API support) or a direct API integration with a particular social media system (e.g. Twitter) will do the job. Alternately, a page that collects eligible posts in one place and allows Codidact community team members to copy and paste directly into social media or a social media manager tool in their browser (or a static share button that has a similar effect) could also work, assuming we have a Community Team member available to do this manually.
Should we take submissions from moderators only or let anyone suggest a post to be shared?
We should allow anyone with access to nominate posts for promotion (people with Curate ability) to make the suggestion, however some sort of software enforced check (like that I outlined above) should have the final say on what submissions go out. If we do not want to allow the software to make these decisions or until we code the appropriate checks, making the submissions for social media promotion a moderator only thing may also work.
Would it make sense for us to open a meta thread and let people nominate high-quality posts there?
In the short term and if we are unable/unwilling to build an integration with a social media platform or manager, this could be a suitable solution for nominations.
In the long term, if the amount of content increases or we are able/willing to build a semi-automated integration with a social media platform or manager, I would say that appropriate automation rules be introduced and adjusted as is necessary - the community should nominate privately, and the software should decide using the rules whether to queue or not queue.
Are there any guidelines we should put in place around the content we share, e.g. avoiding controversial questions?
These discussions are best held on individual communities, due to the differing opinions and views held by each of them, and to allow them to self-regulate the use of the tool wherever possible.
A global policy may be created and enforced such the community policies need to be compliant with it, in which we can put in baseline requirements that are relatively uncontroversial. Discussion and creation of the global policy should happen on this Meta community/site.
How should we enable community members (or anyone else) to object to a promotion or proposed promotion? We don’t want to create controversy; how do we avoid unintentionally doing so?
Create a meta post on the issue, or add a comment/answer to a meta post created for objecting to this. If there is community consensus or a legitimate requirement (e.g. for Twitter, the kind of account lock that requires you to delete content before the account can be used is applied to our account) to remove a piece of social media promoted content or remove it from the promotion queue, we should take the relevant action and notify the community where possible.
How should we treat posts that are timely? (Promoting it now seems helpful; it might be less relevant by the time a meta discussion resolves.)
Some ideas for handling this are:
- Notify a Community Team member via the relevant channel on Discord who can manually post it
- Raise a flag for a moderator, who can nominate the post and then add the tag to trigger the promotion.
- Build some sort of tool to allow Community Team/Moderators to promote with a toggleable "override" setting that is logged in post history/maybe on a mod only page somewhere (in this case, the override setting would assume all checks passed and would place the post in the promotion queue directly).
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