Stop measuring community engagement
The profit motive is being blamed here for optimizing for engagement.But how do you assess progress when you remove all desire to monetize?I run r/WallStreetBets and "quality" is an extremely nebulous term.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.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".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.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.So, even without a profit motive, what do you do?