Learning from Theme Park Design

Welcome to Community Signal, the podcast for online community professionals, sponsored by Emoderation: smart social, globally. Here’s your host, Patrick O’Keefe.

Patrick O’Keefe: Hello, and happy new year! Welcome to the first Community Signal of 2016. As we begin the new year, I’d like you to remember something. Within any space during this time of the year, people are making predictions about the future. Community is no different. We have our own experts, conferences, speakers, books, courses, webinars, workshops, blogs, and yes, podcasts. There are people who work very hard to differentiate themselves, and they use emotional triggers and social psychology to make you feel as though you are inferior or lacking unless you learn what they have to teach you. Let me tell you, this could not be further from the truth. You don’t need them and you don’t need me. You, humble professional with your head down, doing the work, have the potential to move us forward.

It seems like every year I am asked for predictions about the future of this profession. Once in a while, I play along, but for the most part I decline. The future is not anyone’s prediction. No one really knows what comes next, no matter how confident they may sound. What makes the future is the work that you actually do. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that people like me, people who regularly write, speak, podcast about this profession, are the people that you should necessarily be listening to. Guard your mind, and don’t let everybody influence you, just because they have a podcast, wrote a book, or have a lot of Twitter followers. Be very careful about who you allow to influence you and who you allow to inform you of your self-worth as a professional.

The future is not decided by predictions. The future is not what we talk about. It’s what we do. The future is decided by professionals like you doing the work. With that said, I’m so happy to have Scott Moore as my guest today. Scott has spent 20 years helping organizations of all sizes to build solid, successful, connected communities and the teams that support those communities. He offers consulting services to develop community strategies, identify key community analytics, mentor community management teams, and guide organizations through unique community challenges. Scott co-hosts the Social Media Clarity Podcast at socialmediaclarity.net, discussing analysis, design, and management of online communities. Scott, welcome to the show.

Scott Moore: Hey, Patrick. Thanks for having me.

Patrick O’Keefe: You go to college, you earn degrees in physics and electronic engineering, you go to work at Logitech as a tech support analyst. From there, you go to Fujitsu who had purchased the technology that powered Habitat, an influential online role-playing game and virtual graphics based community that originally ran in beta between 1986 and 1988 and was co-created by your podcast co-host Randy Farmer. Tell me about that move. Was it because they were looking for someone with a support background, or how did you end up there?

Scott Moore: It was pure nepotism. I can say that 20 years after the fact. What happened was Randy had hired a writer to work on the backstory for what was then called Worlds Away. That was the platform technology. The world itself was called Dreamscape. She was the spouse of a friend of mine who had worked at Logitech, who then became their first community manager. He left Logitech at some point and became their very first beta community manager. They hadn’t actually even launched anything yet. It was still in the building process. Before they actually launched, I think it was May of ’95, I had left Logitech because I was unhappy there doing tech support. It wound up being dead end. Was looking for other opportunities. Because we had been in groups of role players and live role-playing and theatrics, I have a renaissance fair background, I have a living history background, reenactment background.

Patrick O’Keefe: Very cool.

Scott Moore: They were looking for someone who had this theatrical background. Since I knew the folks who were already working there, I applied. Now, we went through several rounds of interviews, so it wasn’t as though it was pure nepotism, but I did know what they were looking for, and I knew how to arrange my background of theater and live role-playing. The reason I made the shift was I was looking for work at the time, and I was looking for something interesting. We thought we were going to be gamemasters. We thought we would be these benevolent overseers of this graphical game playing type community thing. We didn’t even use the word community. We got in there, and almost immediately I had to read True Names by Vernor Vinge, Rape in Cyberspace, all of Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar’s lessons from Lucasfilm Habitat’s and started pulling up all kinds of other things, and really quickly came to the realization this wasn’t going to be gaming. This was way more than just gaming.

We were still kind of thinking about puzzles. It was a virtual world. You needed to interact with objects in the world. What was interesting was it wasn’t a game. There were no guns in the world. In fact, we had this meta-definition of a gun. Anything that somebody could do to another person without that person’s consent was considered a weapon. Everything had to have consent just because we figured the amount of conflict, it wasn’t designed to handle combat. We started building the space, and most of it was just graphical building of the space and then reading the lessons about this. The real lessons didn’t start until we opened up the gates with a small number of people who flooded in, and we just had to run in order to keep up with them. It was an empty space. People had some of the backstory, but it really was just kind of there. It was just explaining the context of the virtual world. People were developing their own clubs and relationships really, really quickly. From that point on, we were running just to keep up with what people were doing.

Patrick O’Keefe: You mentioned that they weren’t even using the word community yet. What was the job you were applying for? I know on LinkedIn it says community manager, but I’m sure that’s just more of a summary in hindsight. The actual job that they were hiring for, what was it? Was it just an open-ended thing or what?

Scott Moore: My job title was Oracle.

Patrick O’Keefe: That sounds all-knowing.

Scott Moore: Yeah, it was really funny. The context of the world was Morpheus and the Dreamscape, and the virtual world was where you went to when you went to sleep. There was a bit of the Greek god and Greek mythology that played into this. That was just the conceit. Once people got into the virtual world, it was a way for us to deny that the real world existed. We were creating this self-contained bubble. The idea of an oracle serving a non-existent overseeing god that really wasn’t around was kind of a lesson that Randy had learned about wizards and gods in the early MUD, Multi-User Dungeon, days where people would see the administrators as these all-seeing gods. They could do anything.

The idea was we were just the oracles to the god, so we couldn’t do anything. We were at the whims of the god, which technically was the rest of the organization within our team. It’s like I can’t go build this magical thing for you. I can’t make the virtual world do one thing or another thing. I have to go appease the gods of development. We wouldn’t say that, but it was. I have to go pray to the god. I have to go talk to the god and find out if this is actually going to happen or not.

Patrick O’Keefe: That’s funny. That’s funny. I enjoyed reading about this bit of community history tied to Habitat and the development of it and the release of it in its various iterations. As we were talking about before the show, I think it’s something that if anyone’s interested in that part of community history, and I think it’s a good thing to read about and know about, just Google it. Have a look. There’s some good articles out there about Lucasfilm’s Habitat. I hear a lot about The WELL, and it’s a great story and there’s a lot of lessons there, but there were other online virtual communities that are really fascinating stories.

Scott Moore: Absolutely. Because I started community back in the mid-90’s and have stuck with it for so long, I’m the person who hangs around and says, “Hey, you remember that lesson that you’re trying to learn from? Yeah, we learned that 20 years ago, or somebody before me learned that lesson.” There’s actually a lot of really good information, because deep down communities are not about a particular technology in a particular time. They’re about people. Yeah, computers allow us to do certain things or they prevent us from doing other ways of interacting with folks, but really deep down, the lessons of these are people who are trying to connect with each other, build relationships with each other, and get something done, hasn’t changed at all ever. That’s the essence of community. The lessons from The WELL, there are books out about the early history of The WELL. Howard Reingold’s The Virtual Community is still worth reading. It might seem dated because it’s older technology, but the underlying lessons have not changed at all.

Patrick O’Keefe: Yeah. It’s very true. It’s cool to hear you say that. I think there’s a thing where people act like challenges are new when it’s all cyclical in many ways, what we deal with online community-wise. Even in my time, which would be 15 years, not 20 or 30 as some people, or even longer, the same kind of things come around. You see different takes on the same theme. It seems like a lot of the things that I face that may seem new are really just a different theme on something I faced in my first 5 years or so.

Scott Moore: Exactly. The first trolls were Usenet trolls who figured out how to crosspost. They would say something that was game for one audience and they would crosspost it to the anti-version of that audience and then watch the sparks fly.

Patrick O’Keefe: Right.

Scott Moore: Trolling, spamming, these all come from way before us working on the web or on social.

Patrick O’Keefe: When they were writing subversive messages on cave walls.

Scott Moore: That, too.

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I had Rebecca Newton on recently, and she mentioned VirCom and how the e-mint listserv was spawned out of some attendees sitting in the lobby. You spoke at the one in 1999, VirCom ’99. I’d love to hear about it.

Scott Moore: That was so long ago.

Patrick O’Keefe: The reason I ask you is because we have community conferences these days, obviously, and they’re great. I think that something that a lot of people don’t realize is that there were these older conferences.

Scott Moore: Oh my goodness. Yes, there were older conferences.

Patrick O’Keefe: Yes, and I don’t mean 2005. I mean 1999 VirCom. What was it like back then?

Scott Moore: I’ll go even earlier than that. The first community conference I ever attended, or even knew about, it was called Avatars ’96. It was put on by Bruce Damer. It was a virtual world conference, and that’s how it was billed was a virtual world conference. It had folks from The WELL, we had sociologists, it had people who were doing research, and it had the builders. That’s where I first met Amy Jo Kim and a bunch of the people who were doing various things with community at that time. Virtual community, or this idea of community as a branded community, as organizations building community around products or around services, did have a longer history. I know that Toshiba way back in the early ’90’s had a product community on CompuServe. There were a lot of product based forums on CompuServe. Toshiba was one of the few ones that actually had a company that was participating in that community. It was kind of intentional.

By the time you go to ’98, ’99, a lot more companies were paying attention to this. There were more people who were experimenting with it and who were getting experience at doing this, but it was still really early days. You got to remember, 1998, ’99, this was before AOL actually got sued by their volunteers. This was just before you have Ultima online, their volunteer suit. People were still figuring out how to do volunteer management. I think it’s really funny because I think the talk I gave was on organizing volunteers. I can’t recall. It was that long ago. There was this loose confederation of folks who were just finding each other, honestly. I think even later, we still were finding each other. I noticed that there was an East Coast/West Coast divide.

It was about 10 years ago that I showed up at one of the very first Community Leadership Summits that was put on by Jono Bacon and for the first time got to meet some of the original AOL moderators, the folks who were in charge of the AOL chat moderation teams. It’s fun to meet somebody, and it’s like, “Well, I have 10 years of community experience.” “Well, so do I.” It’s like, “Whoa! I’ve never heard of you! We need to talk!” It was really fun meeting other professionals who understood what you were going through, because you always felt so alone. Really back in the early ’90’s, there were maybe, outside of AOL, I’m going to guess, 2 dozen or so people who were really deep into building these kind of intentional communities as just the people who were focusing on the communities. I might be low-balling that, but it felt that way. It felt like there was nobody else who was doing this job.

Patrick O’Keefe: Right, no one who was focused on it, right? It was a side thing. It was something that someone else did as part of their other responsibilities.

Scott Moore: If at all.

Patrick O’Keefe: I know you are big into community culture. I want to talk about some of the areas that I know you think a lot about, such as empathy. How do we teach empathy in an online community? I think it’s really important for members to see each other as fellow humans, as someone who’s just like me. I think that really starts with empathy, with understanding someone else’s feelings. How do we teach that?

Scott Moore: That’s a huge question. I don’t have the magic answer. If I did, I think I think I would be broadcasting it everywhere. I’d have it tattooed on my forehead. A lot of it is, in my opinion, the community managers are demonstrating empathy. Also protecting the voices that need protecting if they are in the minority, or if they seem like an outsider voice, or they’re proposing something that’s new and different. It may rub the community norms the wrong way, but I think it’s part of what the community management team can do about, not stepping on top of other people, but basically supporting and saying, “Hey, I’d like to hear more about what you’re saying. Hey, let’s give this person more room to speak. Let’s listen to more of what they have to say.” I think there’s also a matter of just reminding people within your community that people are human, that people do have emotions, and playing that out in the round.

I found it useful that if there is a situation where there is conflict, and one party is not empathizing with another party, playing that conflict resolution out in the public can help a lot. It’s super hard, but it can help a lot because you’re essentially teaching, partly by osmosis, how to handle this type of situation. How do you make sure that you’re actually listening to somebody? I’m not going to say that it’s a guarantee, but I think it’s a matter of always modeling the behavior that you want to be able to see. Sometimes you can model that publicly. Praise publicly, and then privately if you need to pull somebody on the side and say, “Hey, could you give this person a little space to get their thoughts out?” “Hey, this person needs a little bit more effort to think through what they’re doing. They might be having issues.”

Also, when you see people practicing empathy in your community, supporting that is also really important. That’s true for any kind of culture behavior, any kind of custom or norm that you want to establish within your community. When somebody else does the thing that you like to see, supporting that person. “Hey, thanks. I’m really glad you did that. I’m glad you stepped in. I really appreciate what you’re saying. I agree with what you’re saying.” This is how you can lend your community managerial weight to a conversation.

Patrick O’Keefe: You know there’s really nothing that makes me prouder of my own communities than when I enter a discussion and people are being so thoughtful. It sounds like that’s no big deal, but really when you spend years or a substantial amount of time helping to mold an environment where people are respectful and are thoughtful and are empathetic, I think it’s one of the most rewarding things. Like you alluded to, it’s hard to quantify or prove or show metrics for, but you know it when you see it, and it’s a wonderful thing.

Scott Moore: Absolutely, and it is. It’s the reward from all the long hours. Exercising patience is something that also that the community managers are the holders of. Folks in a community can get so tired of answering the same questions over and over. Having the patience to, “Okay. Somebody’s new coming in, and I’m going to help make sure that they integrate into the community and that they’re a part of that community,” and then it pays off. Then you see somebody else doing that kind of work. What’s even better is they beat you to it, or they start doing a better job of it. That’s always fun because it’s just like, “Hey! I kind of don’t have to do this anymore.” It’s not true, but I can do it less. Now I can be in the supportive role rather than in the active role. That’s really true especially when you’re starting communities.

When you’re starting a community, the folks who are on the community team are the ones who are doing a lot of the pushing. You’re doing a lot of the welcoming, you’re doing a lot of the participation because you’re trying to gather enough people together where it might start kicking off on its own. I don’t believe in critical mass and that there’s some magic number of you get enough people together and it happens. It’s more like there’s critical culture where you have the right people together, and they start to participate in ways. I have a story about this that fits. This was at Charles and Helen Schwab Learning. I have a lot of stories from that because it was 7 years of working on one community. Somewhere around year 5, the community members starting praising another member and said, “You’re so wonderful. You welcome people to the community, and you talk to the new people and make people feel welcome. That’s really great.”

They go on this long thread of where they’re praising this person. I know the person had been there for about 5 years, but when that person came back and said, “Well, the reason I do this is because when I first came here 5 years ago, somebody welcomed me, and I didn’t know there was any other way to behave, so that’s how I’ve been behaving. By the way, that person was Scott.” It was just a chill. It was like, “Yes!” It took 5 years, and now she’s teaching this lesson that kind of happened, and I didn’t have to be the one to be authoritarian about it. It just happened in this really kind of bottom up way, and that’s always just the best to see that.

Patrick O’Keefe: That was a great day, and it reminds me of a member we have on a community I managed. When he first joined, he was problematic to say the least. Over a long period of time, over months, maybe a year even, he would do things that we would privately pull him aside and say, “You know, that’s not really how it works here. That’s not how we treat people.” It’s always the example of moving forward. It’s never this is bad. It’s always, “In the future, let’s do this.” You’re always trying to guide people toward the path. It took a while, and it took a long time. There was at a point where he was almost banned, and I had a really frank discussion with him. I just told him that, “At some point, this is going to have to come to an end because up to this point I feel like you’re putting in an effort, but when it seems like you’re no longer doing that, then something has to change.”

Those discussions are thankfully somewhat rare, but they happen for me anyway. Then he took the message to heart and he changed. He turned it around. Now, years later, he really is probably the most liked person in the community, if not maybe top 3. I say it in the kindest way that people really like him. They like what he brings to the table. They like his knowledge. He welcomes people. People just love this guy, and he deserves it. He’s put in the effort and turned it around, and he really treats people very well. It’s a member that a lot of people would have banned. I will say a lot of people managing communities might have banned him, and I can’t say that I would have blamed them necessarily.

I could personally justify investing the time in this member because I saw the potential there to help him back. Now he’s a staff member and a loyal guy and just a great guy in the community. Sometimes it’s not an easy path. Not every member turns it around after 1 or 2 messages. Sometimes you can invest a little more and get a lot out of people. I understand some folks, you have to make a choice. It depends on your scale, what your goals are, who you work for. If you can invest in people in that way that you can spend time talking to people who you feel are making an effort, I think it’s just such a rewarding thing.

Scott Moore: I completely agree. What you get out of your community is what you put into the people in your community. I think this actually extends beyond even community. What we put into our work, what we put into who we work for and who we hire, matters. It is a return on the investment, but you can’t quantify this or expect the quick return. You’re right. There are some folks who are in situations, and I’ve been in those situations, where you just don’t have the time, the effort, or the scale, to worry about saving every single person. There are some people who, unfortunately, really are not fit for your particular organization, your community. It’s not harmful to filter those folks out, but I think it’s useful to always think about, is there a second chance for this person. Is there a way I can handle this so that it gives them an opportunity? It’s a matter of teaching folks how to be online, again, by demonstrating that kind of empathy towards somebody.

I have several responses to spam where it’s not always, “Hey, you’re spamming. You’re violating the terms of service. Get out.” There’s levels of it where there’s the, “Hey, did you realize that the way you’re posting kind of looks like spam? Hey, we’d love to hear back from you. I think you’re an interesting person. If you want to talk about other things besides your product or this product or something else, we’d love to hear it,” and leave it there and see if they ever come back. I have done that before, and I’ve done that in front of community members.

Then again, this is one of those things where they then pick up on the, “Oh, I see somebody who might be spamming. I’m going to approach them in this way and see what happens.”Basically, I’ve had pretty decent community policing of spam. I wouldn’t say it was a high trafficked community, but it’s fun when you get up in the morning, and you check in on your community. There’s an email. It’s like, “Hey, here’s this person. I think they’re spamming, but I already talked to them and they didn’t respond,” or “I talked to them, and they’re kind of being belligerent back.” It’s like, “Wow! You just did half my job for me.”

Again, it’s not really my job. It’s our job. It’s helping people understand that you don’t hold all of the keys to everything and giving folks that second chance and letting people do it in their own way. It’s a lesson that I’ve learned in communities and outside of communities, and it is don’t fret over the details of how something gets done. Let somebody do it, and if they find their own way and it works, don’t interfere. Let them do it, and maybe even support it or adopt it yourself because it came out organically from the community. If it doesn’t go very well, then you can help the person. You can say, “Hey, next time this happens, try something else.” I like to contrast authoritarian, which is top down, and authoritative which is bottom up. If community managers operate in a bottom up way, it has a lot of authority without being domineering or without making people feel like they’re not able to step up themselves.

Patrick O’Keefe: I like that. As with all my guests I send a questionnaire, and in that questionnaire you mentioned to me the idea of learning from the world around you. You mentioned an interesting example to me off show, theme park design. What can we learn from theme parks that we can apply to our online communities?

Scott Moore: Oh, man. It’s funny. It started with virtual worlds, but it’s bled into just in general community, and it’s about environmental design in a way. If you are a community manager and you don’t have access to designing your own interface, don’t sweat it. The same ideas can help you determine what interfaces you want. If you’re looking at vendors, you can pick out features that you want. The basic idea is this, and it’s not just theme parks, unless you consider Las Vegas a theme park, which I do. It’s the same thing, and the base idea is that our physical environment can have a strong influence on behaviors. If you have that happen enough, those behaviors become customs. The opposite of a custom is a taboo, so you can ward people away from certain behaviors, you can guide people toward certain behaviors. Theme parks are one example of doing this. I love going to Disney just to examine how they handle crowd control and how they handle expectations.

Really quickly, the lessons from Disney are about reassurance and keeping people entertained, even when they’re doing something that might not be entertaining, so the 2 sides of this. Reassurance is about the way Disneys tend to be laid out is they make adults feel bigger, and that may make kids feel a little bit bigger because they have a weird scaling. They have weird perspective designs on some of their streets. They seem closer when you’re walking into the park, they seem a little bit farther away when you’re walking out of the park. The intent is that it will draw you into the park, but if you’re planning on leaving the park, it looks further away, and so maybe you’ll take a little more time leaving the park. That’s reassurance.

Also, their design in what’s called a hub and weenie design so that no matter where you are in the park, you can see at least 2 things above the treeline and have a rough understanding of where you are in the park. If you have a map, you can look above the treeline. You can, “Oh, there’s the Matterhorn, and there’s Splash Mountain, so now I know where I’m at. I can see these 2 things roughly where I’m at.” It’s this matter of it helps you reassure that you’re not lost. You have a place where you’re at. You don’t want people to feel anxious when you’re in your theme park, or in your store, or in Las Vegas.

The other part of it also is the line design. Disney lines are famous for being fun, just the line. My favorite example is Indiana Jones Temple of Doom. First time it opened up, this was when Worlds Away Dreamscape first opened, the whole team went to Disneyland because it was like a real life virtual world. We were embodying this virtual world. Indiana Jones had just opened up, the Temple of Doom, and we rushed to see it. There was no lines. We rushed in to see it, and we went into the ride, and we’re like, “Okay. That’s interesting.” Then at the end of the day we decided let’s go one more time because it’s new, and we don’t know when we’ll be back. There was this huge line, and that’s when we realized, “Wait. Half of the ride is the line, is all this world building that they’ve done around the ride. This is fascinating, and I don’t care about the ride now. This is the part I want to spend … I just want to stand in line.”

Back to the lessons. The lessons are how you are design your physical environment around your UI and your UX can have an influence on people. Again, I’ll give you a real specific design idea for forums. One time when I had an opportunity to design the UI of the forum, it was set up such a way that you could not start a discussion until you had scrolled down past the list of the most recent 10 discussions that were being talked about. Every UI person just balked at that and said, “You have to have the action button above the scroll.” I said, “No, no, no, no, no. I need it below the scroll because I want to guide people into here’s the community. Search the community. Browse discussions that already exist, because I want people to participate in existing discussions rather than just starting discussions.”

“If I put that above, then people will ignore everything. They’ll just click start a new discussion, and they’ll just start going and I will have a page of 0 reply discussion starters. All my threads will be 0 to 1 reply, and they will scroll really, really fast. My community won’t be able to keep up. I’ll have the older folks, the elders of the community, will get annoyed. I need to slow that down. I need to slow everyone’s scroll, so to speak.” I resisted. I think that’s just one way in which you can think, “Here is the design. What happens if I put 1,000 people hitting that button at the same time?” It matters. You can design things so that if you want particular behaviors, you can think about what is it when somebody’s working on a behavior. Do I want to slow them down? Do I want them to talk to other people, or do I want them to generate a new discussion? That can have a huge impact on what kind of community that you have.

Patrick O’Keefe: Very cool. Scott, it’s always a pleasure. Where can people find you online?

Scott Moore: You can find me on Twitter @scottmoore.

Patrick O’Keefe: Good man.

Scott Moore: That’s the best place.

Patrick O’Keefe: Got your name.

Scott Moore: Yes. That’s one of the advantages of being around for a long time is I pretty much own Scott Moore on a lot of the social media.

Patrick O’Keefe: Yeah, I own Patrick O’Keefe except for that damn shirtless kid on Instagram who beat me to patrickokeefe because I don’t know. When it was iOS only, I should have had someone with an iPhone register the account for me, but now the shirtless kid on Instagram will always have Patrick O’Keefe, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

Scott Moore: I admit to refreshing my screen a whole lot when Facebook released names as URLs.

Patrick O’Keefe: Yeah. I was there. The time it dropped, I was there to get patrickokeefe and make sure it didn’t have the period in it, patrick.okeefe, which a lot of people got. Thank you for coming on the program, Scott.

Scott Moore: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure talking to you.

Patrick O’Keefe: This has been Community Signal. Visit our website at communitysignal.com for subscription options and more. Community Signal is produced by Karn Broad, and I’m Patrick O’Keefe. Thank you for listening.