Stop measuring community engagement
The profit motive is being blamed here for optimizing for engagement.<p>But how do you assess progress when you remove all desire to monetize?<p>I run r/WallStreetBets and "quality" is an extremely nebulous term.<p>I look for things like "novelty", "thought-provoking / well reasoned commentary", "original content", "authenticity", "self-awareness" or "primary research". But these are human assessed metrics.<p>Some more easily measurable metrics might include, "length of submissions", or "number of outbound links excluding blacklisted domains". Or even "number of tickers or quality-correlated keywords mentioned".<p>All these metrics have very clear downsides, and if generally well-known, become useless. Interestingly, a score too high can also result in something being unlikely to be authentic.<p>Another challenge is your relationship with users. Surprisingly, moderators are not innately adversarial to users, they can also promote content through other channels (discord, twitter) or sticky threads for a viewership boost.<p>So, even without a profit motive, what do you do?