Reply To: The Evolution Begins: Why LinkedMusicians 2.0 is the Future + THE LATEST UPDATES

[LinkedMusicians]

Yesterday I took the same post I made in our subreddit and reposted it to r/nativeinstruments. While the original post in our subreddit only had a single comment and one up vote in two days, within a half hour, the repost in NI’s subreddit had 11 comments. Before anyone sees that and thinks to themselves — “wow, that’s depressing” — consider this. That lack of reaction to the original post is very similar to what would happen if I posted that thread on LinkedMusicians — actually, I did post it here, and the response was non-existent. And if you delved into the site stats, you would see that A LOT of people viewed that thread here — but none of them commented. That is the reality of our situation, lots of visitors and extremely low interaction.

So why is it better to have that problem on our subreddit than this site? Because Reddit is one of the ten most popular sites on the web. Reddit users can search and join other communities of interest in a single click. Even more, our presence there means that I can repost r/LinkedMusicians post in other relevant communities where those posts will be of value and grow our community in a way that is not possible with a standalone social media platform like LinkedMusicians.com. Our subreddit gives us an incredible opportunity to reach and grow our community that is perfect for LinkedMusicians. Over the past year, far more than 100,000 web users have come to use LinkedMusicians as a great resource for deals on DAWs, plugins, and sample libraries, for finding lists of excellent, curated and recommended tools, for researching the tools they use to make music, and to learn more about the deceptive practices in the industry, all in an environment that aggressively works to ensure that toxicity isn’t a part of this community. Even more, we do it in a place that advocates for music producers. That’s not just rare in this industry, it’s non-existent. Part of the reason is that it’s not profitable.

So my job is to take this attention and grow our registered membership and the social interactions of the LinkedMusicians membership. My passion project was never to create a deal site. That doesn’t drive me to invest my time and money in this admittedly idealistic project. My objective was to create an environment without the deceptive and manipulative marketing practices that are pervasive in the major and non-major forums, subreddits, and Facebook Groups in this industry and to create an environment where toxicity — which is extremely profitable for these communities — is not accepted.  The reason toxicity is profitable is that controversy interests people. That drives up activity and things like time spent on sites, increases page views, leads to more clicks, etc — all of which is how these businesses make money.

What doesn’t drive revenue? Creating a non-toxic environment where unethical, illegal, and regulation-violating business practices are specifically forbidden. Encouraging community members to share negative experiences as well as positive ones with the companies they buy from, including our affiliate partners. That’s unheard of, and, from a revenue standpoint, it’s an outrageously bad idea that no for-profit business is going to do. But that’s exactly what LinkedMusicians allows. Not off-the-rails, crazy hate rants against developers  — that’s of no value when you’re researching products and brands, and that kind of incivility creates a toxic environment. Honest, civil, and open conversations about experiences is what it’s about. And this separates the mission of LinkedMusicians from every other existing online community, and it’s starting to be noticed by Google and Gemini, and the various LLMs as well as among Redditors.

So right now, as we transition from this Forum and OPEN MIC, I recommend that everyone register over at the subreddit. While @fretman has stepped up to be our Deal Master, I’m going to focus on making this transition easy for everyone. Consider me our community’s guide for this evolution of our community. I’ve posted helpful posts here on our subreddit that explain the differences between legacy forums like ours, KVR, GearSpace, and VI-Control to make the transition is easier — and to show why Reddit is one of the ten most popular websites.

If you have any questions, please post them! I realize that change isn’t always embraced. But this change is not only going to preserve the mission of LinkedMusicians, I believe it’s going to take us to a completely different level, and in time, to a level of interaction that we’ve never seen before. I’ll post updates in this thread.

– Peter

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