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I regularly use AI tools behind the scenes to keep things running smoothly, so I recently turned to Google’s Gemini to perform a comparative sentinment analysis of our community against some established music production legacy forums: VI-Control, KVR, GearSpace, and the Cakewalk Discuss Forum. The mission? To examine and compare the rates of toxic posts across each community using uniform criteria. You can see the unedited results summary in the chart below (I literally posted the HTML exactly as Gemini provided it). Here is the unedited data comparison, which clearly illustrates the difference between legacy forums and a community built specifically for creators:
| Platform | Politicization | Toxicity | Owner/Commercial Bias |
|---|---|---|---|
| LinkedMusicians | Zero / Apolitical | < 1% | Affiliate-Supported: Non-developer owned. Uses affiliate links to help pay for site operations. Potential bias toward retailers with affiliate programs; offset by a strict “Anti-Censorship” policy. |
| VI-Control | Moderate | 15% – 20% | Direct Developer Bias: Owned by a developer with a history of attacking competitors and deleting hundreds of dissenting posts to control the narrative. |
| Cakewalk Discuss | High (Far-Right) | 15% – 20% | Brand-Centric: Owned by the software developer. Biased toward parent brand; “Coffee House” forum is a hub for aggressive political polarization. |
| Gearspace | Low / Forced | 12% – 18% | Advertiser Bias: Relies on major ad revenue. Known for “cleaning up” threads or silencing criticisms that might offend high-paying sponsors. |
| KVR Audio | High | 25% – 30% | E-Commerce Bias: Operates a major software marketplace. Discussions are often steered toward products and developers sold in their shop. |
How The Criteria was Defined
To get these results, I created a prompt instructing the AI to analyze these spaces and look for “toxicity,” which I defined as posts falling into one or more of these categories:
- Inflammatory remarks or trolling
- Hostile argumentation
- Political or religious proclamations
- Racist, bigoted, or discriminatory remarks
- Culture war commentary
- Insults, name-calling, or berating other users
- Gaslighting
If you’re unfamiliar with the process, this is essentially sentiment analysis (or opinion mining). Marketers have been using early forms of sentiment analysis since the 1990s, and today it relies on sophisticated Natural Language Processing (NLP) to quantify emotional tone and attitudes from text. While I wouldn’t call this a peer-reviewed scientific study, it does provide valuable insights. Gemini is powered by highly advanced semantic analysis—built on the kind of machine learning Google has refined for over a decade—making it incredibly adept at identifying these conversational patterns.
Context and The “Affiliate Bias” Question
To be entirely fair, LinkedMusicians is a newer community. We don’t have the decades of history, the massive user base, or the sheer volume of posts that these other sites do. Naturally, as any community grows, managing toxic behavior becomes exponentially more difficult. Furthermore, Gemini astutely pointed out that our use of affiliate links could be a potential source of bias. I completely agree—any even-handed analysis should take that into account, and I’ve designed the foundational rules to ensure transparency and our members voices will always be heard. But this brings up a question every user should ask of the platforms they frequent: Does the forum’s history reflect a bias toward developers/developer owners/advertisers, leading to unchallenged bias and the censorship of community members just to protect developer, advertiser, and/or affiliate relationships?
Where LinkedMusicians Stands
At LinkedMusicians, our track record speaks for itself and is plain to see in our forum (and in the deeper analysis that went along with the chart, Google’s AI made note of it). Take the major Best Service website outage, for example. At the time, they were our largest source of affiliate income. I created a thread speculating on what might be behind such an extended downtime because the fact is, Best Service not only stopped communicating with the public, they stopped communicating with affiliate partners. One LM member even criticized me for what he saw as me being too harsh on Best Service, suggesting my speculation as potentially harmful to their business. But the thread stayed up. In another instance, a member shared a very bad experience with a developer I had previously posted sales for. When the developer refused to rectify the situation with our member, I stopped posting their sales entirely and issued a warning to our community. I reached out to the developer directly to recommend that they make things right with our member. After one post in our thread claiming he was without fault, he ignored my follow-up emails. There were zero edits to that thread.
This is consistent with the values we’ve established here: to be fair, transparent, and friendly to our music creator members and developer members, but above all, to serve as an advocate for music creators. That mindset runs counter to the developer- and advertiser- centric environments you’ll find on the big legacy forums. I have been transparent about consulting for certain developers and considering some of them friends. But if you think I am being too kind to a developer, or if you have a negative opinion of a product, you can share it here without fear of censorship or repercussions. As long as your criticism abides by our standards for civility, it will not be silenced. That stands in stark contrast to some of the other forums out there—and that is entirely by design.
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