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

[LinkedMusicians]

On fossile said

probably need some more: KVR, Fender Studio One, Avid Pro Tools, Home Theater, AVS 🙂

also, i would probably exclude things like “off-topic”, and “coffee house” etc sections since by design they’re meant to be a free-for-all.

A community’s policies for user behavior have to be implemented consistently across the community, not allow anything goes. A free-for-all should never mean permission for allowing racist, bigoted, or hyper partisan rants. That’s reprehensible. No ethical forum permits that. Now, I realize that you and I might have a philosophical difference on that call. Obviously, I  created this place with a specific mission against toxicity, trolling, racism. bigotry, politics, religious proclamations — the very stuff that flourishes at Cakewalk Discuss and violate their community guidelines, which they’ve basically stopped implementing in recent years. That’s likely due to BandLab writing off the Forum has basically just there for legacy reasons. Third-party estimates are that Cakewalk Discuss, in whole, receives less than 50,000 active users per month, for a $450 million software company with a social media property with millions of users, that’s the equivalent of a rounding error on the balance sheet at best. Now, I get if you take a more libertarian perspective and say — anything goes, including bigotry, trolling, harassment of other users, let the community members fight it out. But that would qualify as a toxic community. Even if you enjoy that kind of environment, it still falls under the title of toxic.

Gemini was examining the entire Coffee House Forum, BTW, which includes the Deals forum we grew out of. I actually never spent much time at the Cakewalk Coffee House. I didn’t share the more detailed analysis that Gemini provided to keep things simple and stuck to the chart summary. I thought it did a great job of analyzing the various sites.

My take, I would rate VI-Control as the most toxic forum — by far. Though it’s a ghost town, I included Cakewalk Discuss Forum because our early members came out of it, but it easily ranks as the second most toxic forum at this point. It’s always been hyperpartisan, but the air was sucked out of it when there was a group attack against an LGBTQ member last year (one of our members alerted  me and I copied the text of the pages; candidly it was shocking to see the moderation fail an LGBTQ member being harassed and bullied so blatantly; it appears that Gemini noticed that, but didn’t make a specific reference to it in the more detailed summary it made along with the chart). Back when I was part of Cakewalk Discuss, that was the kind of thing I was openly reporting, and getting shut down; clearly, since I left no one has been doing that. I would put GearSpace in third. While I registered there many years ago, I never felt it was a fit for me. It’s, far too often, people getting angry over petty things. But I’ve since learned, largely from one of our members who is a former music magazine co-editor, about their practices, that are very consistent with what Gemini described. I would rank KVR last for toxicity. It’s there, and that is why I eventually gave up on a forum I once loved. I still stay in touch with a moderator from there and I made a bunch of friends from the 00s at KVR. I just think that they grew so fast they couldn’t manage moderation and, all too often, there are waves of trolls that suck all of the oxygen out of the place. But, like all of these forums, it has become a money grab. Still, on a relative basis, out of all of the forums included in this analysis that aren’t LinkedMusicians, KVR would rank as the one I like the best.

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