[HN Gopher] Tesla has closed its forums to launch a social platf...
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Tesla has closed its forums to launch a social platform and fans
are not happy
Author : _Microft
Score : 83 points
Date : 2021-03-06 19:02 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| Shakahs wrote:
| This will just push people towards independently operated forums
| (Tesla Motors Club) and Reddit, which is already the norm for
| other car subcultures.
|
| Most discussion already happens on enthusiast run platforms
| dedicated to one manufacturer or even specific models/years.
| adamkittelson wrote:
| Yeah, the teslamotorsclub.com forums have been the dominant
| forum for Tesla owners for at least the last 5+ years anyway.
| pjscott wrote:
| That could be their goal: they get all the advantages of having
| a forum, but with none of the moderation expense or guilt-by-
| association-with-trolls risk to their reputation that come with
| having an _official_ forum.
| mrfinn wrote:
| I wonder what Aldous Hurley would say about a bunch of people
| fans of a big T, coming from a car manufacturing company :) No
| hard feelings against Tesla, on the contrary. Just thought about
| the curious parallel.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Huxley.
| x775 wrote:
| Outline: https://outline.com/V8LGp7
| alacombe wrote:
| > 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.
|
| They can afford putting 1.5b aside to buy bitcoins, but not spend
| the money to hire actual people ?
| xirbeosbwo1234 wrote:
| Tesla is cash-poor. I entirely believe the penny-pinching
| story. This makes blowing so much money on Bitcoin all the more
| awesomely stupid.
| fabianfabian wrote:
| Because having bitcoins preserves value, you might see it as
| spending but it is actually saving. They can still choose to
| spend it on hiring people if they wanted.
| mrkramer wrote:
| The day when Satoshi left Bitcoin Project is going downhill.
| Bitcoin without Satoshi is like Apple without Steve Jobs.
| Without good leadership it is hard for anything to survive.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The price has gone up by several orders of magnitude, and
| Satoshi hardly provided much leadership beyond the original
| paper.
| lupire wrote:
| Is the price going up good?
| pjc50 wrote:
| It's the only thing it really has going for it.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >Satoshi hardly provided much leadership beyond the
| original paper
|
| Except he designed and coded the whole thing and provided
| every day support for 2 years.
|
| >The price has gone up by several orders of magnitude
|
| Price of the Bitcoin doesn't mean anything if it is not
| used as cash as Satoshi intended. You don't receive your
| salary in Bitcoin and you don't shop with Bitcoin.
| Speaking of price even regulated assets like stocks are
| prone to hype and excessive speculation see Dot-com
| bubble [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
| xirbeosbwo1234 wrote:
| And the market agrees with you! Spending $1.5 billion on
| Bitcoin during the middle of a massive speculative bubble is
| just the sort of responsible leadership investors want to see
| in these uncertain times. That's why Tesla's stock has been
| as rock-solid as Bitcoin since they announced their purchase.
| alacombe wrote:
| Just wait for the next dip, I'm gonna laugh my ass off...
| spurdoman77 wrote:
| Their BTC bet is already profitable to the tune of 1bln.
| Yeah BTC will crash at some point but still those who
| either manage to sell at good enough levels or have long
| enough time preference to hold til the next rally will make
| some serious profit.
| emteycz wrote:
| Tesla has resources for hundreds of engineers but not a few
| community managers (which they do employ, btw)? Obviously that
| commenter is bullshitting.
| yablak wrote:
| Charging a one time fee of $1 per account on credit card feels
| like it would keep most of the trolls out and reduce moderation
| costs. I miss MetaFilter.
| lupire wrote:
| Metafilter still exists.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Google arguably killed MetaFilter as collateral damage from
| search algorithm changes mean to combat spam.
| kgin wrote:
| MetaFilter did a lot of damage to itself by overmoderating.
| It was my online home for years but eventually there was so
| much meta-meta handwringing that the sense of community was
| lost, for me at least.
| benley wrote:
| Can you elaborate on this? I thought Metafilter was alive and
| doing just fine - in fact I still visit it regularly
| [deleted]
| avolcano wrote:
| > 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.
| riffic wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| They can't fob off that work on the numerous Tesla die-hards
| out there?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It's often not a good idea to have the die-hards do the
| moderation.
| xeromal wrote:
| You'll end up a stack overflow situation haha
| tester756 wrote:
| You guys realize that if SO community/mods weren't like
| they are, then you'd end up with tons of garbage in
| search results?
| rozab wrote:
| I find the majority of SO questions in search results
| have been wrongly closed as duplicates
| ceejayoz wrote:
| SO has strict moderation. That's a very different
| scenario.
|
| I've moderated forums and tend to generally agree with
| SO's approach. Not sure I'd leave it to users; we had
| dedicated moderators do everything. I've seen loosely or
| unmoderated programming forums, and it quickly goes to
| shit.
|
| Handing moderation over to _fans_ is a different issue.
| It leads to strict _and_ horribly biased moderation.
| vinger wrote:
| Why can't ai?
| Klwohu wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| chordalkeyboard wrote:
| Did your friend save the thread before it was deleted?
| ampdepolymerase wrote:
| Are there any Reddit clones aside from HN? Tree style threaded
| forum software are awfully rare.
| boardwaalk wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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."
| fossuser wrote:
| For every useful reddit post that helps users get a shitty
| project working despite its useless official documentation
| (recently for me, this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/WeMo/c
| omments/k2gem9/easiest_wemo_h... ) there are hundreds of
| dumb forum posts from clueless users that are not helpful
| to anyone.
|
| Also, the quote wasn't "you're holding it wrong" - but
| "just avoid holding it that way" which makes a lot more
| sense/is a pragmatic answer when people are tightly
| wrapping their hands around the bottom of the phone for the
| purpose of intentionally degrading signal.
| caconym_ wrote:
| Yeah, and there's always some apologist acting like it's
| the average consumer's responsibility to have relatively
| obscure technical knowledge, e.g. that diamond-like carbon
| coatings are harder than sapphire and will readily scratch
| it.
|
| It would be funny if it wasn't so depressing.
| xoa wrote:
| 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.
| hilbertseries wrote:
| 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.
| fermienrico wrote:
| I expect this story to hit Twitter and Elon will interject and
| restore faith in customers. In the end, nothing will be lost, PR
| game will end and Tesla will garner free goodwill through Elon as
| a proxy from this manufactured saga. It's hard to not be cynical.
| djanogo wrote:
| Smart move by Tesla, instead of letting their customers and
| enthusiasts discuss general forum topics, pivot them to social
| goals which also benefit Tesla. Weaponize forum members to help
| achieve Tesla goals (The first item in "engage.tesla.com" is
| asking people to send letters to Nebraska Senators).
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