Reply To: The State of Digital Discourse: What a Sentiment Analysis Reveals About Popular Music Producer Forums

[Peter DeLegge]

On joegyork said

Thanks Peter – the blog is really interesting and confirms what we all either knew or were becoming increasingly aware of in terms of the toxicity of certain platforms and the civility and kindness of this one. I imagine if you put Facebook through this process it would come out as 80% toxic!

I completely agree with you on Facebook. But I don’t think VI-Control is any less toxic than Facebook. And don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of wonderful people there and at every one of those forums. It’s really more about management, policies, the tone management sets, and what they permit. While I realize that the idealism behind LinkedMusicians is unlikely to happen in these profit-centric communities, I think they could all do much better IF their management cared to do better.  I think that a community like LinkedMusicians could survive long-term if it had enough funding to do the advertising it took to reach a large group of targets. But on its own, as it is, I would need to continue to be the primary sponsor. It’s very difficult to persuade people to fund something they think of as free.

There’s an old saying in the digital world — if you’re not paying, you’re the product. These forums, especially the developer-owned VI-Control, are really just marketing tools for developers. They’re not designed around musicians. Music producers are the target market, and the prey. And in some cases, like VI-Control, you’re getting some of the most deceptive marketing practices that you’ll find in any legitimate industry online today. That was the inspiration for this experiment called LinkedMusicians. If I had the time and budget, I would continue LinkedMusicians for much longer.

LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

Check out my music. 

2