Return /r/VORONDesign To Us

[trey123]

Reposting a discussion from /r/voroncorexy that was removed by mods

TL;DR: There is a strong sentiment among the Voron community to reactivate the r/VORONDesign reddit sub. Leadership should consider listening to the community, or passing the reigns to members interested in maintaining it

The original post garnered 100+ upvotes and 50 comments over 3h, making it a top 5 post over the last 12 months for /r/voroncorexy. Review the post at your leisure, comments should still be publically accessable. Top takeaways included:

• Discord is insufficient as a total community solution. Discord's strengths are rapid-fire, bite-sized responses, ideal for brainstorming and quick, obvious issues. Discord is a weak platform for long, thoughtful discussions or complex problem solving. As a long- form blog platform, Reddit often yields better, more helpful responses for complex technical discussions
• Discord is very difficult to search through years of past messages and find useful posts. Its stream-of-consciousness format is not compatible with researching past discussions. It is a poor tool to use as a repository of information, yet it is the current tool of choice
• In theory, forums.vorondesign should fill the capability gap created by the closure of /r/vorondesign. In practice, it does not
  • The market this forum reaches is small compared to the reddit and discord communities. Many express explicit disinterest in joining and maintaining a dedicated third-party platform with a small reach (myself included).
  • It's fair to debate the merits of a small community of dedicated members vs a large community of diverse members, but we can't debate the fact that relying exlusively on this third party platform is a choice that ultimately limits VORON's reach and engagement
• Every single VORON user has reddit, as it's the only way to submit a serial request. From a marketing perspective, pipelining users to another reddit community will have much higher engagement rates than trying to send them to forums.vorondesign. Source: a similar post on this forum last year garnered 2 responses over 2 months, vs reddit's 50 responses over 2h
• Some additional, good points were made in the initial release of /r/vorondesign

/u/TheRemedialPolymath and /u/Next_Ad3398 articulated the core concerns very well in their comments:

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The Voron mission has always been ease of access & creating gentle onramps so that more people can access & build these designs. While the community sympathizes with the Reddit strike and our mod team, the closure of r/vorondesign now contravenes our core principles with no clear goal. Reddit isn’t changing, and no new subreddits are signing up to go dark again.​

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Leaving the sub blacked out and thereby de-platforming a large portion of technical folks in our community just serves to alienate new users. This is a net bad for our community, and doesn’t have a net positive in the wider internet.​

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Removing /r/VORONDesign is not hurting reddit - it is hurting VORON.​

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There have been pitches to "go rogue" and start an independent VORON sub to fill this capability gap, but it always gets shut down quickly - this community respects VoronDesign team leadership, and does not want to take any actions in the name of VORON without their blessing. The community wants nothing more than reciprocation of this respect. If the past mods have no interest in returning, that's their right. But if this is the case, the community deserves the option to find new mods willing to step forward. Acknowledge the clear demand for /r/vorondesign, and at the very least, open a discussion with the community to hear and share pros/cons.

 

[niemand]

Before getting to the meat of the matter, I'll just note that the post in the sub was yanked by automod after people reported it, correctly, as "Not A Serial Request". Seeing as the purpose of that sub is serial requests, this action is generally considered correct. Whether it is popular or not with the people supportive of the post is a different story.

Largely there is considerable merit to the existence of the subreddit, and while yes, it was originally turned private as part of the protest, its continued status on that front has more to do with internal discussions and competing priorities than a preference to not have it or to attempt to make any change in Reddit's concepts of leadership.
The actual mod workload with the sub was generally low, the Voron community has largely been a polite and well mannered one across most platforms. Rest assured that it is not still dark because of concerns on that front. We have willing hands.

We are also very much aware that there is eagerness among a subset of our audience to have access to the sub, and I very much want to move towards a re-opening of the resource, but we are a group that operates on a basis of internal consensus, and while you can usually get a dozen people to agree on 90% of a thing, the remaining 10% is where the devil lies. It may be that the course will be to reopen as-is, essentially remaining private for now but accepting join requests, and it may be that the decision swings completely back to fully public, or anywhere in between. Love to hear your thoughts on the pros and cons of the various approaches if you've got any and to take them back to the team.

We appreciate the community's patience as our squirrelbrains chase after ridiculous numbers of projects and goals while pondering the best ways to proceed.

 

[lord-carlos]

• Every single VORON user has reddit, as it's the only way to submit a serial request.

I feel personally attacked.
Overall sounds like a reasonable request though I would not call it de-platforming. A bit dramatic.

 

[H4kunaMatata]

Don't get me wrong, I prefer a well designed forum over Reddit/Discord anytime but atm we have none.
Look around you, this forum is dead, minimal to no interaction, any help takes ages to receive a reply because folks are on Discord.

This forum was as poorly coordinated as Reddit movement, cannot recall a single push to bring users in to make this a decent forum, it was rushed and sometimes here and there you see somebody mentioning about it on Discord which nobody gives credit because it's a dead forum.
It's gonna be harder now to remove the "VD forum is dead" bias.

The "Reddit thing" was poorly coordinate, went nowhere and we as user got screwed, back then even without account, search engines take you there and make good use of the posts.
I was already using custom app coz privacy concerns so deleting my account was not an issue.

Discord has been very helpful as long as you are within the right channel and away from problematic/noisier ones like "gchat". The main issue is the search, it's beyond dogshit.
It isn't perfect but I can get help and help others within a fairly decent timeframe, win-win.

VD abandoned Reddit and yet I'll need a Reddit account to request serials for my LDO builds. You either abandon a platform or you don't
Now we have a Discord as usual, a half dead forum and Reddit to request serials, I mean....

 

[120decibell]

Don't get me wrong, I prefer a well designed forum over Reddit/Discord anytime but atm we have none.
Look around you, this forum is dead, minimal to no interaction, any help takes ages to receive a reply because folks are on Discord.

This forum was as poorly coordinated as Reddit movement, cannot recall a single push to bring users in to make this a decent forum, it was rushed and sometimes here and there you see somebody mentioning about it on Discord which nobody gives credit because it's a dead forum.
It's gonna be harder now to remove the "VD forum is dead" bias.

The "Reddit thing" was poorly coordinate, went nowhere and we as user got screwed, back then even without account, search engines take you there and make good use of the posts.
I was already using custom app coz privacy concerns so deleting my account was not an issue.

Discord has been very helpful as long as you are within the right channel and away from problematic/noisier ones like "gchat". The main issue is the search, it's beyond dogshit.
It isn't perfect but I can get help and help others within a fairly decent timeframe, win-win.

VD abandoned Reddit and yet I'll need a Reddit account to request serials for my LDO builds. You either abandon a platform or you don't
Now we have a Discord as usual, a half dead forum and Reddit to request serials, I mean....

Actually, the forum has the most daily traffic now that its ever had. It's not busy but I don't consider it dead.

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt though. Why do you call it badly designed?

 

[H4kunaMatata]

Why do you call it badly designed?

I don't think this forum is badly design, in fact it's simple, clean, pleasant

It was poorly made public making it harder for Discord/Reddit folks to somewhat "accept it". This post is a vivid example of it.
If there's one thing hard on this world is changing user mindset.
I work in IT so that hits home, if you don't deliver things right at first, it will be harder to get an idea delivered to the users haha

The well designed forum mention was in general comparing forums vs Discord/Reddit. There are some goodlord forums out there, again, this one is pleasant imo just feels dead but based on what you said, there's a high chance of me being wrong.

I continue using Discord because right now it's the most active "Voron social media". Let's hope things change.

 

[can man]

honestly, it's weird that the forum is supposed to be the place to talk and reddit is the place you get your serial, since they both seem less optimal for their current task than the other.
putting serials on reddit seems weird, because it's much harder to find individual devices and it means you HAVE to have a reddit account to get one. Having all discussion on a forum when there obviously is a lot of interest to being able to discuss things on reddit is an interesting choice.
I get that you want all knowledge about vorons and discussions not reliant on reddit - if reddit were to kick the bucket or fail in any other way, you'd lose a lot of irreplaceable information - but in terms of engagement of a community it seems to me that at least providing an official subreddit would be an obvious choice, with the hardcore users being more willing to sign up to a dedicated forum.

As to the "one more account"-folks: I would have agreed with you about 15 years ago. But ever since then, both browsers with login credential save features have been invented and keepass and it's derivatives exist. IDK about you, but I probably have about 120 login credentials to various sites accumulated in my keepass at this point and I literally do not care if that number reaches 500 in the near future. No need to remember anything.

 

[arhodiewithsoul]

Personally, Discord drove me away - it was too 'noisy'.

I find it very difficult to follow a logical discussion about a particular topic without having to filter hundreds of other comments. Worse still if you wanted assistance about a little supported feature or 'discontinued' model of printer. You could post and never get a reply. Don't get me wrong, Discord is great for instantaneous replies or rapid fire conversations and to that end I appreciate all the help I have received there. Forums on the other hand (maybe I'm a little old fashioned), I've always viewed as the places for the retention of historic knowledge or more nuanced, technical and/or slower paced conversation. I thought that the Voron Reddit would offer that and maybe Reddit actually does the job better than a traditional forum, but it seems that Reddit was largely abandoned once the Discord server took off. As far as having multiple Voron platforms goes...

You all raise interesting points.

Honestly, I just really appreciate finding forum.vorondesign.com and I hope to make meaningful connections with you all in the future