Reply To: Thank You to Our Community

[LinkedMusicians]

On Satya said

u should invite and allow developers to post deals too

I have done that — but not very much, and I have shared why on the site before. I’ve advised more than 3 dozen developers. But I’ve only reached out to a few to tell them about LinkedMusicians. Why? Because our level of community interaction is so low and people’s first impressions are so important. I don’t want to invite a developer only to see them disappear because they don’t see much interaction.

The developer from WrongTools found this site because, I think, he found us in a Google search. I think it was because he saw that I made a post stating how much I love his sample libraries, that they’re really creative and I compared them to Sound Dust, in that they’re really different and have a lot of personality in them. A couple of weeks ago he sent me an email and stated that he posts here and he sees more traffic and sales from LinkedMusicians than VI-Control, yet no one besides me has ever interacted in any threads where he posts about his new libraries and sales. This guy is seriously talented. He’s a film composer that does sample libraries. You’d think that our community, even our early group from Cakewalk Forum, would be interested, but they’re not engaged.

So, very candidly, that’s one of the challenges this community has, to bring up engagement. I had hoped that the early adopters of the site would continue posting, but except for a small group, they’ve largely disappeared, and they’re not posting at Cakewalk Forum either. My guess is that when Larry made a racist trope post about a certain race of Americans being lazy and on welfare — like he prolifically posts about in social media — and I wrote, “Hey Larry, you’re my friend, but if we start making political posts, this place will implode.” And Larry responded by calling me a stupid, useful ****** idiot,” and announced he was leaving the community, a lot of our early adopters stopped posting. Then he did a campaign sending people emails and PMs — I know because a couple people forwarded them to me, making a bunch of false claims that there was something else that happened — there wasn’t. But I think in all of that, our early adopters stopped posting for the most part, and posting activity here — and at Cakewalk Forum when Larry returned to try to kill off LinkedMusicians  (there have been three LM / Peter hate threads about it since; we’ve also had several people register here to troll me and the community from Larry’s group of friends; earlier this month, one of them registered under an insult nickname someone made up for me at Cakewalk Forum earlier this year; I banned them, but I sent them an email, and surprisingly, after I told the guy the true story of what happened with Larry behind the scenes, how Larry called me vile names after I shared that my family is part Jewish after I saw some very sickening antisemitic posts that Larry made on Facebook, the guy apologized to me for creating a troll account here; I then created an account for him under the same username he has at Cakewalk Forum — okay, I ended up misspelling it — oops — but he never posted here or at Cakewalk Forum since then) — have resulted in a lot of the early adopter group just not feeling the same.

Of course, as we opened registration to the public, the majority of our community is not from Cakewalk Forum. However, it’s still difficult to get conversations started in a new community and that’s the biggest challenge, not website traffic, which is robust because I’m posting a lot of deals. I do have plans to impact that which I will roll out in 2026. From my experience growing online communities, I anticipate that we will see this community grow by several times in 2026. When we start seeing more interaction — not just more website traffic — I will invite developers I know.  I’m probably going to speak to Tawnia — 8Dio’s CEO soon. FTR, while I’ve consulted to 8Dio, Tawnia and I quickly became friends. She even introduced me to her employees as her “newest BFF!” So I think her and I could have a lot of fun here. If I start a podcast in 2026, I absolutely want to interview the developers I’ve given advice to over the years, including 8Dio, Steven Slate, SonicCouture, Orange Tree Samples, Kirk Hunter… and friends like Peter from IK, my new friend, Jon from WrongTools… I have much more experience with small sample developers, as opposed to effects developers, BTW.

I am hoping as we enter the holiday season that we’ll see more social interactions on the site. I’m very open to everyone’s suggestions. I look at this place as it belongs to all of us. I’m just the manager of it. In all candor, I would rather be a regular member!

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