Social Media vs Technical Discussion

I have long contended that business people some times get confused and take advice that is out of context. Sometimes people just don’t understand the difference between information and useful information. Or as Dex (from the diner on Coruscant) would say, “the difference between knowledge and wisdom”.

For example. It seems common knowledge that everybody uses phones these days. Marketing people seem to listen to kids for everything. Kids use phones. Thus CAD must go on phones. Stats for my sites tell me that ~90% of CAD traffic is on desktops. Less than 10% is on phones. CAD is used by professional people, but still, we listen to kids.

So. (Kids all start their paragraphs with “So” these days). So. Kids use texting all the time, and other styles of communication where you just have a serial list of interjections. You don’t refer to what was said before because no one cares. It’s not really a discussion leading to a conclusion, it’s not information that you want to keep, it’s just throw away words.

Have you ever tried to find something old in Twitter, Facebook, Instagram?

Technical discussions among professionals or people trying to solve problems generally try to build on things that have been said, and might even refer back to other parts of the discussion. Here the overall discussion is more important than individual interjections. We want to see what each contributor said, and this discussion may even have more value after it actually took place than it does in the moment.

The debate about social media vs forums is old and worn out, and it really comes down to context. If you have people for whom the simple connection is the main thing, then do social media. It focuses less on content, more on connection. If however you have people who may not even be connected, but they are having a discussion on a particular topic, and trying to find a technical answer or a consensus (so the content is really the focus), then a forum style discussion is more appropriate. As dated as it may seem for these marketing people, sometimes what the users really need is an open discussion area.

Have you ever tried to get a rational answer about a technical question on social media? You can’t just search it and get answers. If you don’t catch it nearly as it happens, you’re not likely to know. Are forums dated? Maybe. Are they out of fashion? With certain types of people, yes. But they still are a better way to collect information in a searchable format where you can see the details about how an answer was found. It’s like if Wikipedia had to show it’s work on all answers.

I do a fair bit of research on all sorts of topics, and I wind up on forums of different types to find the information that I’m looking for. Very often YouTube has information, and you have to sort through if it’s useful or not. From time to time LinkedIn or Reddit has something. I have to say that I never get referred to Twitter or Facebook or Snapchat or Instagram. YouTube information definitely has to be vetted. You just get whatever someone has to say, usually not a discussion that weighs or evaluates ideas. Forums give you a searchable record of the discussion and often the reasoning involved. Yes, there can be a lot of bad information on forums as well, but it is often called out as a part of the discussion. It’s like real time peer review.

What am I saying? For companies selling technical products, it’s great to allow users to share ideas and help build and share a trove of real information. To kill off a beloved technical discussion area in the name of “progress” or moving to a more modern vision that doesn’t really serve the needs of users very well is a huge mistake. Modernization moving from Usenet to hosted discussion forums? That’s fine, it just makes sure there’s a real owner of the information and process. “Updating” from a forum to a social media style discussion just hampers the discussion and decreases the value of that discussion for searchers later on. The two types of discussions aren’t equivalent, don’t have the same goals and don’t treat relationships between people the same way.

Context is important. Chasing shiny bits of trends is all well and good, but you need to understand if a particular trend actually applies to your market or not. When you get a decision like this wrong, it has consequences. When you double down on a wrong decision, it can be tough to recover.