8bit.minimal.net

How to destroy a community with software.

I admit to being slightly more obsessed with cars than i probably should be for a latte-sipping Manhattanite. It certainly started out with my dad - he and his brothers were all gearheads growing up, all had multiple cars and bikes - everything from big block v8 American muscle cars to Honda v-twin motorcycles. The petrol fumes definitely had their influence on my brain, resulting in me tinkering with car-related toys most of my childhood - from plastic model engines through RC cars. After being a car luddite for a few years in high-school/college - odd considering thats when i got my license - i rediscovered my love of cars in my mid 20’s.

After a few years with a fun but impractical ‘ass-engined-nazi-mobile’, i sought out a new car - the ultimate combination of fun and practicality - the Audi S4. Right-sized, four doors, fast, very capable in the snow, comfortable around town, and got OK mileage on the highway. No problem with track-days in the summer, and all the traction needed to hit the ski house in the winter.

So being both a gearhead and an Audi owner, it makes sense i’d seek out more information. Started in 1998, AudiWorld became one of the most popular car forums on the net - certainly the most popular Audi forum. Users mixed a combination of technical knowledge and macho banter using the site’s threaded, conversationally aware software, “Kawf”. It wasn’t much to look at, but it worked well - much better than forums based on ostensibly more sophisticated software.

Since 98 there were often calls by new users of the forums to upgrade to “newer” software, but these calls were beaten back by the large and loyal user base - many of whom had been with the site since day one. Perhaps Kawf had a higher learning curve, but once a user was used to how fast you could scan new threads, and see updates to old threads that you had ‘tracked’, it was difficult to go back to standard message boards - most of whom had a linear, paged format. (see a Kawf example here).

The ironic thing about the calls to upgrade the board software was that in my view, Kawf was never outdated software - while it didn’t look like much, the core functionality was actually where most social software has moved or is moving - threaded conversations. If you look at the heralded reddit.com comments section, they’re really just a web 2.0 version (eg. social ratings) of what Kawf was doing already. That said, Kawf did suffer from not being updated over the years. The general look and feel was very web1.0.

After many years of general happiness and growth, Audiworld had over 150,000 registered members, millions of threads, and a large and important niche in the auto-site world. In 2007, media aggregator Internet Brands bought Audiworld from the original owners. The owners stayed on as the general managers of the site. Finally, AudiWorld would have the resources to update the site with more modern features and in theory, a better, more common UI. The users were promised that nothing would happen to the existing features, but rather everything would be improved upon.

Nearly 18 months after the acquisition, the upgrade finally happened. It was a disaster.

While many of the promised features were there, almost all of the existing features were removed - in particular the threaded discussion format that existed previously. While tons of work was likely done in order to preserve the data, the previous formatting was destroyed in the process so that a thread that made sense previously:

• joe: How many pounds of pressure are required on my lug bolts?
  • ed: Hey Nice car, btw, how much do those seats weigh?
    
    • phil: iirc, 75lbs.
      
      • ed: thanks!
        • joe: mine are 65 lbs.
  • mary: 95 lbs.
    • joe: Thanks!

now looked like:

• joe: How many pounds of pressure are required on my lug bolts?
• ed: Hey Nice car, btw, how much do those seats weigh?
• phil: iirc, 75lbs.
• ed: thanks!
• joe: mine are 65 lbs.
• mary: 95 lbs.
• joe: Thanks!

Ok, who’s talking about the seats, and who is talking about the bolt torque? It’s an egregious example, but shows how tons of context was lost in the process. Many users, who used the old software as a simplistic wiki, saw years worth of technical knowledge destroyed in the format change.

From a UI perspective, checking the general contents of a page full of threads went from a single click to 100 clicks, or more.

The cut-over caused a full-on user revolt. At the same time that the revolt was brewing, another team of users was in the process of installing the now open-sourced Kawf software on another site - QuattroWorld.

Within hours of Audiworld’s software change, QuattroWorld went live. The numbers are somewhat staggering - here broken down by an Audiworld user (I can’t find the original post):

AudiWorld has 159,146 registered members
68,441 have never posted, not even once
54,599 have posted, but fewer than ten times
Add up those figures and one will see, 123,040 of AudiWorld’s registered users barely ever (if ever) post.
In fact, only 3,434 of AudiWorld’s registered members have posted more than one-thousand times. Of those, only 508 have posted over ten-thousand times.

In the past 24 hours, 2702 people have signed up on QuattroWorld. Almost all of them have moved exclusively from Audiworld to QuattroWorld. AudiWorld is now a shell of its former self. Forums that used to have dozens to hundreds of threads a day now sit vacant. Complete and utter destruction of a once vibrant online community.

While i don’t think the situation is irreversible, in the matter of one software upgrade, Internet Brands took a once valuable Internet property and reduced it to a wasteland.

There are a lot of lessons for software people out of this story. The lack of user acceptance testing being the most glaring. I’ll post again on the lessons soon. Hopefully the audiworld founders were paid cash for their property. :-)