AUTHOR NOTE

This was originally posted on my WordPress blog, which I have deleted after migrating the blog's posts to this website in November 2025. Differences from the original are minimal and include: adding punctuation for flair/clarification of tone, changed formatting on the section headings, adding in paragraphs to reduce the wall of text, changing Twitter to Xitter every chance I get, and adjusted phrasing for a couple lines to be grammatically correct.

Let’s be real, most communities have something bad about them. There’s no way around it. Personalities clash, moderators can power trip, admins/staff neglecting the space allowing bad seeds to creep up… And it really doesn’t take much for a community to be soured by a bad egg. Since a lot of what I do is ensure that users are heard, I dig hard into community spaces for these companies/products - regardless if I am applying for a product marketing, community management, or product management role.

If you think you don’t have a community, you’re pretty much wrong - I built a community for a web browser, and I went into that role not thinking the active Insider community would be in the tens of thousands. Your community members are congregating in social spaces, likely complaining about a poor experience with your product or company, breeding negative sentiment - these are the ones you need to start listening to first when you step into a role that includes building a new community. You can really tell a lot about how a company values its community by the state of it, but it’s important to remember that they are looking for someone to listen to these people (at least, according to their job postings). Think of these as flags that may make your job easier or something you need to address to improve brand loyalty and the quality of whatever space you’ll own. Here are the good, the bad, and the ugly (from my experience) that you may find in the communities you need to advocate for in your role.

the good

I want to start with the good things because, I’ll be honest, there is a lot more bad out there than good. This doesn’t mean every community is bad, you just need to weigh both sides as you are introduced to a new community.

One of the things I love seeing is active volunteer moderators. Having a healthy set of moderators who can handle the volume of posts that come in shows you an understanding of a) how active and engaging the community is and b) the well-being of the volunteers - the people who are giving their free time to help out a company they are not beholden to. Most times, you’re going to step into a role that has an avid fan base who created their own community that you want to become a part of. As long as the community is relatively self-reliant, all you should do is slide in as a representative, not attempt a takeover.

If you already have a self-sustained, healthy community, all you really need to do is hop in and join the conversation! They don’t want you to come in and disrupt what has worked without you, so don’t. At this point, you get to focus on becoming a valuable part of your new community and building relationships with them. This really removes some of the stress of needing to fully organize a community when you are tasked to be their champion.

I get downright giddy when I see community members putting together documentation about changes and/or troubleshooting for the product. These people love your stuff - like, LOVE love. They are taking time out of their day to make a support article for you and share it with others so they have the information - FOR FREE. The other side of this coin (and makes this a weird aspect of the bad - we’ll get there) is I start to wonder where the official documentation is… But these people are your big fans, and they want to help others - they’re likely your biggest external advocates, and they need to be shown a ton of appreciation. These are the ones you want to win over immediately when you get into a community, trust me.

I look for staff or employee activity in these social spaces, and I love seeing staff acting like humans when they engage instead of stiff like PR wrote everything for them. Most tech communities can tell when marketing is giving an approved message and will spot a script-reading support agent from a mile away. It’s not difficult to be a human, so seeing companies trust that their employees won’t make an ass of themselves is a breath of fresh air. This means you get to step into a role that already knows its voice and you don’t need to rework or fight to rework their image.

I don’t think most people think about this, but how lively off-topic spaces are shows a welcoming community. I view an off-topic space as something you have either already pre-built into your official spaces (like a forum or subreddit you manage, with off-topic sections or tags) or a 3rd-party site that hosts communities allowing for conversations (including Reddit, Xitter, Facebook, Discord… holy shit there’s way too fucking much). Reddit is still kinda viewed as “that platform with the trolls” so communities there are often afterthoughts. My time on Xbox and Edge proved that, yes, there are trolls, but there are way more people willing to help solve whatever issue someone else is having.

Finding out your share of conversation on any 3rd-party social site is a path to seeing the health of your product’s community. If these sections are talking about more than just your product, you have friendships forming and those people truly value their community. This takes us to…

the bad

These are things that can be solved but may take some more effort - you’re likely going to run into one or more of these things when you look into a community. This first example is almost too easy to spot and a sign I’m gonna have a rough start because I’ll need to drop a hammer - moderators who appear to be power-tripping.

Most communities have engagement metrics you can track; whether you hold anyone to them or not is up to you, but they are there. A power-tripping mod can be identified by them marking their comments as an answer, especially before the user comes back. There are exceptions to this - there may be literally one answer (“contact support”), the person is spamming, or the thread is getting locked for violating community guidelines - it shouldn’t be blatantly obvious that they are abusing their status to anyone outside of the community. If I can spot this, then the community for sure sees it, and they probably don’t respect the moderators or staff who help run things. Why should they? When they see one power-tripping mod they assume that all the mods are power-tripping, and this further’s the community’s perspective that the staff do not care. You have to be willing to have hard conversations coming into situations like this to change that perspective.

I’ll absolutely do an in-depth dive into community guidelines, Terms of Service/Use, and Privacy Policies for a company. Having community guidelines set up for abuse contributes to power-tripping mods and can silence your community in a way you didn’t intend (or maybe you did? fuck you, if so). I keep an eye out for guidelines that allows moderators to do whatever they want without much oversight, polices how users engage outside of harmful, spamming, and hateful situations, or condescending language in guidelines. These things are harder to adjust because, from my experience, moderators who are used to behaving a certain way without repurcussions will cling to that until they are removed from their position. This is where I take a step back for a bigger picture, review the guidelines that were set up, and see where I need to make appropriate changes. Then I work on re-educating the moderators and/or community on best practices.

On a related point, staff not believing they need community guidelines is a recipe for creating a toxic community. Your community can self-manage, as I called out in the good, but only if that community has inclusive and diverse volunteer leaders who already created a welcoming set of guidelines. If you decide you want to do No Code of Conduct, I am taking that as a flag that you don’t truly care about your users, their psychological safety, or building a community. Having no guidelines will allow users to create a toxic community and makes room for groups like <Anonymous to form.

I may be exaggerating here for effect, but sometimes you need to see the way bad to know what could happen when you decide to not have a way to moderate your community.

While community members making documentation and training materials can be seen as a good thing, I look into official documentation at that point. Where is it? Is it written for the wrong audience? Should the community-crafted articles be turned into something official? Are these people being recognized by the company for the content they create? Most of these I note and plan on bringing into an interview - at this point I want to find out who I need to work with to improve whatever documentation problems I find.

Tribal knowledge is something that makes it really hard to support legacy products and having good documentation really goes a long way in product adoption. It takes a lot of product management to organize who knows what internally, confirm the community-created content is accurate, then build up ways to celebrate these community members. It’s 100% worth the work to get through this process to get to celebrating those volunteer efforts, though.

Now it’s time to dig into…

the ugly

Nearly everything related to an ugly community is linked to the employees/staff/the company, and these directly influence if I will put more effort into getting the job. I’m putting employees being condescending to community members as an ugly because this is one of the worst things you need to address coming into a new role. This isn’t just coming in to improve a community, you are also going to have to talk with your new colleagues and train them to properly engage with humans. This is a really odd thing as an autistic woman - training others how to properly engage - because compensating so that I fit in is something I do naturally. I find it weird that others don’t. But it’s one of my superpowers along with empathy, which makes me a great teacher in this case.

This process is exhausting to me, though, because on top of needing to mask with a new group of people I also need to teach them how to not be dicks to their users, all without being perceived as a bitch. It’s very intimidating coming to long-standing public faces of a company to let them know, “Hey, maybe you should phrase things this way going forward.” I’m always worried that my colleagues think I am there to police their activity - but I guess I did it well enough in my last role. 😉 If I find during my investigating that it appears to be C-suite people who are doing this, it’s huge red flag that tells me that I shouldn’t move forward with that company - I’m not about to spend my time in that role butting heads with C-suites, it will be a miserable experience for everyone involved. 🫠

Worse than that is when I discover employees are nowhere to be found! There are a few things I assume when I see this: employees are scared of engaging due to negative sentiment, employees only make a product based on usage data and not the user base, or their PR/Marketing teams have too tight of a hold on how to engage. The “best” part is when all three of these are true. 😵‍💫 I have been told in the past when trying to get an approved message for a product change, “Oh, we show that we’re listening to our users through pRoDucT cHaNgEs, not cOmMuNiCaTiOnS.” That is such utter bullshit that indicates to me a group is scared of engaging with users for fear of pissing them off more.

Honestly, if you see that you only piss your users off when you try to communicate with them, great job being self-aware! 👏🏻 But also maybe find someone to fix that frame of mind because your community cannot find changes you made if you already pushed them off your product (how is this not common sense?). Becoming best friends with your new PR and Marketing partners when stepping into a role will go a long way in earning their trust that you will engage in a manner that won’t damage the brand or company, but if your main problem here is leadership, you have a bigger bridge to cross to improve communication from the company.

If your community members are only posting negative things, you have another communication problem. Are you a meme on 3rd-party platforms? Is your product a meme even in official spaces? You are going to have a real uphill battle regaining or even earning the trust of your community at that point. They are used to being neglected by the staff but are still so incredibly passionate that they continue to try to bring these issues up to you. Turning this around involves taking all of their feedback and responding to it, the being open with your community about decisions and why they are made. Along with your superfans and volunteer moderators, you need to listen to the most vocally negative members.

Creating a product in a social vacuum will alienate certain groups; user research teams don’t ignore the negatives someone brings up during a study, you shouldn’t ignore the same with social listening.

Finally, the perception that the company is just out for a money grab is something I look for in complaints. It’s on my list of the reasons why I won’t take a new role, and I feel duped by a job listing when I spot these - I am not stepping into a role to sell things, I’m stepping in to improve community sentiment with your product and evangelize your brand. People want empathy, they want to be heard, they want to see meaningful change based on their passion for your product.

If you decide to implement something that increases costs for your user base, unfairly targets users to encourage them to spend money, and move forward with other business decisions as if your user base isn’t poor, that’s a choice you as a company get to make that I will not support. Inflation is happening worldwide right now, companies are cutting employees solely because others are, but the big push to consumers is consistently BUY BUY BUY. People are losing their incomes, unable to afford basic necessities, and you are looking at their spending habits instead of their social-economic situation. 😤

Deep breath, Missy, this wasn’t about your hate of capitalism…

There are nuances that can fall into any of these situations which can tip them to another aspect of this list. I’m sure there are things I missed that I’ve ranted about in the past. If I am looking at your company and the community you want me to help with, this is the stuff that helps me determine if I will push forward with helping you…

…or if I am just gonna politely step back with my hands up, and run. 💨

-🧜‍♀️🦄