[This post is part of a 4 part series on the key tensions in growing a high quality community-generated content site. It was presented at PubCon, Las Vegas, 2011.]

Growing a community is like rocket science

Growing a community is like rocket science. It takes an enormous amount of energy per mile to get off the ground and to break through Earth’s atmosphere. It takes far, far less energy per mile after that. (Full disclosure: I’m not a rocket scientist.)

Don’t worry about using scalable practices to get off the ground. Very simple example in the blog world is 8 friends who agreed to interact with and promote each other’s content. Does it scale? Not really. But it’s a great way to start.

You have to get off the ground in a high quality fashion. It’s an investment. Don’t expect to break even yet. Ask your friends and family to help. Hire people. Don’t worry that it doesn’t scale, it doesn’t have to yet.

Growing a community is not like rocket science

I lied, it’s not like rocket science. One key difference is that if you’re sending a rocket to the moon you better have all the launch details exactly right. You can’t just say “well, let’s see if we can break through the atmosphere, and then we’ll figure out where we want to go next.”

With a community site you need to make sure you’re pushing it in the right direction. But you’re just kidding yourself if you try to plan too precisely. Try to get the site live quickly, and then listen to your users and respond to their needs. Don’t delay launch because you’re trying to get it exactly right.

Starting & Scaling

When a community site starts, you want to try to use every user contribution. It’s worth putting effort into fixing low quality contributions. When the site gets bigger, the value of each mediocre contribution is lower, but the cost of fixing it hasn’t changed, and you may decide to be more aggressive about just deleting contributions that aren’t good enough for the site. You always have to ask “Is this worth it now?” So when you’re starting, don’t say “we shouldn’t do this, it won’t scale when we get big.” If it’s worth it now, do it. And then when you grow, don’t say “but we grew the site by spending a lot of time fixing low quality contributions.” OK, that’s how you got here. But now that the site scaled, is it worth it now?

Does it Scale?

There’s another way the “Does it scale” question can trip you up. You may have a model that scales, let’s say one paid editor per 10,000 community members. Then as the community grows, you panic. “If we get to 5 million users we’ll need 50 paid editors!” OK, great! If you did the math that the value created by X members more than covers the expense of a paid moderator, then you should be thrilled. Of course you need to check and make sure the model is still working. But don’t drop the model because you’re afraid that if you have a billion members you’re going to need ten thousand moderators.

Summary

Getting off the ground requires significant investment. Don’t worry that your initial strategies don’t scale. On the other side, when you get big, don’t say “we should continue doing this because we used to do this.” Do what’s right for the stage that your community is at. Yes, you need a business model that scales. But at your initial stages be prepared to do things that don’t scale, that use your friends and family, and that lose money. Don’t limit yourself by only looking for techniques that scale.

Also in this series:

• In Search of UGC Excellence
• UGC: Social Context & Market Context
• UGC: Tribal Elders & Noobs

[This post is part of a 4 part series on the key tensions in growing a high quality community-generated content site. It was presented at PubCon, Las Vegas, 2011.]

“Given that you have worked on this tool … I believe you should recuse yourself of any discussion of this feature.”

Wikipedia user suggesting WikiMedia product designers should have no say in the future of the features they design http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Article_feedback#Please_stop_4386

When you’re running a community you desperately want to give your members a strong sense of ownership, the feeling that this is their community. But that can go too far. There’s a great video from The Onion of Star Trek fans hating the latest Star Trek movie because it was “fun, watchable.” Fans complained that because the Klingon dialogue had subtitles you could enjoy the movie even without having learned the imaginary language.

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So on the one hand you want your community members to feel a strong sense of ownership, on the other hand you have to remember that your most committed members’ instincts and interests aren’t always the same as your company’s.

Here are some of the natural desires of the most committed and admired members of a group:

• Maintain their status within the community (and prevent others from matching or challenging that status).
• Have others “pay their dues,” go through the same initiation that they went through.
• Protect the community from bad changes.
• Maintain what makes the community so great (for them).

None of those desires are bad, but you have to be aware of them, work with them, and make sure they’re working for the entire community.

This is a classic leadership problem. You need to give people ownership, and at the same time you need it to be clear that the community has certain values and goals that you have the authority and responsibility to uphold and to pursue. And that includes doing things that welcome newcomers, and that help you grow the community without diluting the brand.

One spot on some community sites that can be hostile to newcomers is your points system, if you have one. Randy Farmer gives an example of The Sims Online, where some veteran players actually formed a mafia to shake down newer players. In less dramatic examples a site displays a leaderboard, which can be a great incentive for the few top contributors, but signal newcomers that until they do a million contributions they can’t earn respect or recognition.

If you want to have a leaderboard, consider having a Hall of Fame or something to recognize lifetime achievements, but then have your normal leaderboard refresh monthly.
Another issue with newcomers is to make sure you’re guiding them to proper behavior. Wikipedia has a bot called “Huggle” which makes it easy to send semi-automated messages to people who make bad contributions. But they’re really trying to get their senior members to give personal, constructive feedback to new users.

I went to StackOverflow, a Q&A site for programmers, and I asked “what kind of computer should I use for programming, a Mac or a PC.” OK, not a great question, I was just trying to explore their site. But my question got quickly closed as “Blatantly offensive.” Blatantly offensive, really? I mean that’s like coming into a store, asking for a tangentially related product, and having them push you out and slam the door in your face.

Some people think “just get the vandals out of the system quickly, don’t waste time and effort on them.” But Wikipedia found that of their current dedicated editors, 30% had their first edits reverted. And perhaps others had mediocre first edits that managed to slide through. So don’t assume that if a user is imperfect in his first interaction with your system that he’s a loser and that your system is better off without him. You want your existing community to personally engage the new members and help them join the community.
When you’re trying to encourage new users, you really want to focus on that first engagement. Get the user to do something. Ideally you’re looking for some kind of pubic commitment that makes the user feel she’s declared herself part of the community.

In his talk on Tuesday Tim Ash mentioned a classic experiment. The experimenters knocked on doors asking people to put a big traffic safety sign on their front lawn. 92% said no. Then they went to a different group, and asked them to sign a petition to “Keep America Beautiful.” Later they went back to the people who signed the petition, and more than half agreed to put the big sign on their lawn. So you want to get people to take that first, small, public action that makes them part of the community.

Wikipedia tried to lower the bar to entry by adding ratings boxes at the bottom of their pages. They used the Pringles metaphor to explain this. “Can’t stop at just one” is true for potato chips and for contributions to a site.

But the discussion pages on this feature are interesting. Some community veterans don’t like the feature and they demand it be removed. My favorite is the guy who tells one of the feature’s designers that he should recuse himself from the discussion because he worked on the feature. That’s where we’ve come to, some community members feel so empowered that they demand not only to be heard, but that no other groups be heard.

I don’t want to say “the inmates are running the asylum” because you can’t think that way. If you think “us” and “them” you’re on the wrong path. Some people think you should encourage your more experienced users to retire, to make room for the new generation. I disagree. You want your veterans to nurture the newbies. There should be enough room in a growing community for them all.

Last thing related to Wikipedia’s effort. Gizmodo had an article that said that ratings would ruin Wikipedia. These kinds of ratings are not going to ruin Wikipedia. But the article highlights another threat to quality content. Does your system encourage quick and sensationalist posts or thoughtful and nuanced posts. This isn’t just a UGC issue, or just a web issue. The term “yellow journalism” is more than a century old.
To sum up, you need to make sure that you and your senior community members are working towards the same goals, which should usually include welcoming and nurturing newcomers. Give your veterans lots of ownership, but make sure they’re helping, not hindering, your community’s growth and improvement.

Also in this series:

• In Search of UGC Excellence
• UGC: Social Context & Market Context
• UGC: Starting & Scaling

[This post is part of a 4 part series on the key tensions in growing a high quality community-generated content site. It was presented at PubCon, Las Vegas, 2011]

Dan Ariely tells the classic story of mixing social and market contexts. A man finishes Thanksgiving Dinner at his mother-in-law’s house and says “That was fantastic. What do I owe you? $300? No, $400!” In the extreme, market-context norms in a social context can turn a wonderful encounter into an exploitative nightmare.

Ariely also ran experiments demonstrating how people would sometimes happily do tasks for free. But pay them a little bit of money and you change the entire dynamic. Now they’ve gone from enthusiastic team members to low-paid wage earners, and they may become bitter and less efficient.

If it’s bad for volunteer work, it’s even worse for penalties. Freakonomics provides a story of a Haifa day care center that had a problem of a few parents sometimes coming late to pick up their kids. So they imposed a small fine. Completely backfired. Parents came late far more frequently. Coming late was no longer perceived of as being socially inconsiderate. Now it was simply a financial transaction where parents paid for extra service. The day care center removed the fines, but it was too late. They failed to re-establish the social norm that people needed to be considerate and arrive on time.

And yet, people are often motivated by personal rewards. Francois Gossieaux provides one nice solution, from the SAP developer community. As usual, success was born out of learning from failure. They had introduced a points system, which unfortunately changed the dynamic of the community to overly competitive, including many instances of bullying. Their solution? Instead of allowing the points to be exchanged for personal benefits, the points would trigger payments to a children’s charity. It solved the problem. The point system still served as incentive, but instead of encouraging users to sabotage and bully each other it encouraged users to help each other.

While you’re designing your site pay careful attention to the framing and the context. Yochai Benkler tells of a classic experiment where two different groups played two different “versions” of  Prisoner’s Dilemma. One was called the Wall Street game. The other was called the Community game. Otherwise the games were identical. Not surprisingly, twice as many people cooperated when it was called the Community game. I love that example because it reminds us of any obvious truth. People look for guidance into what behavior is desired. Tell them that they succeed by being great community members, and that’s often what they’ll be.

Social context still involves reciprocation. It’s just more complex than paying the amount on the price tag.

Mahalo provides a classic example of a failure to use market context to grow community. They tried a revenue share with their content creators. One of the problems that killed them is that the financial value to Mahalo of each individual contribution was so low that essentially they were telling their contributions, “thanks for your hour of work, here’s your nickle.” They tried to portray the reward structure as similar to tickets you used to get in skee-ball or children’s arcade games, that you could exchange for prizes. But it’s not the same. Getting a tiny prize doesn’t turn my skee-ball playing experience from harmless fun into a feeling that I was exploited and unappreciated in a low-paid job. But when I think I spent an hour contributing my heart and soul to a community and they leave a nickle on my nightstand, they’re (unintentionally) telling me what they think I’m worth.

Finally, remember to treat your volunteers like volunteers. AOL recently paid out a $15 million settlement to some of their “volunteers” after AOL repeatedly crossed the lines between what makes a volunteer and what makes an employee. Quick recap there: they demanded their “volunteers” fill out time sheets, get approval for vacation, and complete specific tasks in specific time frames. They let “volunteers” know that the hardest working “volunteers” would be best positioned to get paid positions when those opened up. They also gave the “volunteers” things like business cards and employee discounts. They crossed enough lines between Social & Market context that they earned not only the wrath of the people who used to be their biggest fans and contributors, but they found themselves on very shaky legal grounds regarding minimum-wage laws.

So what can you do?

If you’re building a community site that’s dependent on the goodwill and happiness of volunteers, keep your focus on the social context. Make your volunteers happy within the context of volunteering. Why did your best volunteers come to the site? To engage others? Maybe reciprocate by holding a conference and paying their expenses so they can meet other top volunteers face-to-face. Did they come trying to create something great? Reciprocate by making sure you’re (at least) equally committed to your site’s greatness.

Make their concerns your concerns, and pay attention to them. Are they putting in significant hours helping your site? Make sure your team is putting in significant hours to remove their greatest frustrations in working with your site. Is one of your top volunteers in a walkathon? Sponsor her.

There are a million ways to make your community members feel great or feel like you’re just using them. Find intelligent ways to treat them with the respect and admiration they deserve. And remember to do it within the social context.

[This post is part of a 4 part series on the key tensions in growing a high quality community-generated content site. It was presented at PubCon, Las Vegas, 2011]

I happened to pick up my (nearly) 30-year-old copy of In Search of Excellence while preparing my PubCon presentation on High Quality UGC.

A few points stood out:

• Commit to excellence. If your community is committed to excellence, and believes you are too, you’ll have a much greater chance of achieving high quality. Wikipedia and Stack Overflow have this. Most sites seem committed to just good enough. At best.
• There’s no “How To” manual for excellence. The authors point out that all they can do is provide success stories, insight, and inspiration. If you’re looking for “The 10 rules for creating excellence” look elsewhere (and good luck with that).
• Attract tiny contributions. They quote a study that 95% of people asked to put a big traffic safety sign on their front yards said no (unsurprisingly). But if they got them to put a small sign in their window, then half of those people later said yes to the big sign. I heard the same idea expressed at WikiMania. Contributing to Wikipedia is like a box of Pringles, they said, once you start you can’t stop. And ‘Edit’ was too high an initial barrier, so they instituted Article Ratings, mostly to get newcomers to make a tiny contribution that could lead them to larger ones later. (I hope it worked).
• Man is a social creature. Too many people believe the false dichotomy that you’re either a for-profit capitalist entity that focus solely on money, return on investment and the bottom or you’re a soft-hearted liberal who leans towards socialism. In Search of Excellence presented the case that free enterprise, for-profit companies thrive most when they focus on people (employees) serving people (customers). Community sites take this one step further with customers serving customers.
• I’ve recently read a slew of books (such as Predictably Irrational, Freakonomics and Drive) that cite the behavioral economics work that won Kahneman and Tversky a Nobel Prize in 2002. I was surprised to see that In Search of Excellence quoted Kahneman and Tversky 20 years before they were awarded the Nobel Prize. The main point is that if you start with the idea that man is a rational economic actor you’re going to have a very flawed idea of how to run a successful business.

You can reject In Search of Excellence’s argument that most businesses should focus more on people and their need for meaning and excellence. But if you’re running a community site you should probably give their arguments your full attention. You can’t use monetary or authoritarian management techniques. If you’re running a community site, you need to focus on giving your people the non-monetary rewards they need, such as respect, appreciation, and the opportunities to help others and to pursue excellence.

Wikipedia set Neutral Point of View (NPOV) as the standard for user generated content a few years ago. Much of the Wikipedia community is ideologically opposed to self-interest in any form. While obviously not ideologically opposed to originality or creativity, Wikipedia makes it clear that its role is to summarize accepted wisdom, not to break new ground. Wikipedia is an ideologically collectivist organization built around creating reliable reference content. Capitalists like myself must tip our hats to them, because they’ve done a fantastic job creating a great resource that delivers great benefit to many people.

Twitter followers

But the social norms of the Web have changed, and Wikipedia is now the outlier. The Age of Anonymity has ended. Most people now log on to the Social Web with their real identities and build their real reputations.

The golden rule of the Social Web is Serve the Community, Then Serve Yourself.

The Web rewards originality, creativity, and individuality. The younger generations don’t seem to flinch from the ideas of self-interest, self-promotion, or profit. It just has to be done in good taste, and while serving others first. Wikipedia was about the collective. Social Media is about individuals being themselves and coming together.

The Social Web has moved past post Gordon Gecko (“Greed is good. Greed works!”) capitalism and collectivist visions. It’s developing more along the lines of what Adam Smith (the moralist often credited with being the father of capitalism) called enlightened self-interest. The Social Web has also largely moved past the dichotomy of Express Yourself vs. Conform. It’s about being the best version of yourself, respecting others’ individualities, and coming together.

This is good news for you if you’re trying to use the Social Web to grow your business and reputation. It’s good news if you’re trying to be your best self and to bond with others. I think it’s also good news for society.

No, this isn’t a spin on “Take my wife, please.”

Rena Reich

Today’s Answer of the Day informed me that it’s Ada Lovelace Day, the day to honor Ada Lovelace by pledging to post a tribute to a woman in technology today.

Ada, the daughter of Lord Byron, worked with computer pioneer Charles Babbage. Men had already figured out how such machines could be used for math. Ada’s insights were in ideas of how such machines could be programmed for other applications such as composing music and creating graphics.

So I’d like to recognize Rena Reich today. She taught herself programming, wrote functions to integrate dictionaries and encylopedias into Answers.com,  and eventually founded her own wiki company, starting with The Pet Wiki. Doing some programming herself and working with others she put together a great site, and she shares her experiences and learnings on her blog.

Ada Lovelace didn’t invent the Analytic Engine, she figured out clever ways to apply it to enhance the human experience. That’s been Rena’s goal. I wish her continued success, and I wish all of you, especially the women developing and applying technology, a happy Ada Lovelace day.

Wikimedia’s strategy memo is interesting for what it has and for what it’s missing.

Wikimedia Strategic Planning

Key Concerns:

• Editing community has flattened out.
• Have been very successful in the “Global North” but it will be much harder to grow in the “Global South.”
• Technological and financial infrastructure have not kept pace with growth in readership.

They will:

• Invest in their infrastructure: technological, organizational, and financial
• Reduce friction for new contributors
• Remain “free of commercialism”

They won’t:

• Go to China.
• Invest in developing content partnerships
• Invest in direct editorial interventions to increase quality, e.g. paying people for developing content or policies.

Most of their strategy sounds good. They need to build the infrastructure that can handle their site’s activity. They need to make changes to their culture and to their site to encourage new contributors. They should stay out of China. And their mission and vision requires that they expand to parts of the world that need them more, but where progress will be much harder to achieve.

The biggest problem IMO is their plan to increase spending without developing a viable revenue model. The only parts of the strategy document that discuss finances discuss the money that they’ll spend and the income possibilities that they reject.

They discuss their revenue possibilities in a separate document and you can read the notes from their financing task meeting. Ideas include seeking government funding, selling user data, premium subscriptions, more aggressive fundraising, pursuing an endowment, and displaying advertising. The only mention their strategy memo makes of these ideas is to reject some of them. The ones that aren’t rejected may be either unrealistic or worse than the ones that were rejected.

I think Wikipedia does a lot of good. But I think the same of Microsoft and Google. And those companies’ revenues have been (or will be, I expect) used to contribute billions of dollars in taxes and charity. I wish Wikimedia luck in figuring out how to cover their expenses, and I hope their moral compass doesn’t lead them to try to finance through taxpayer money in order to live up to their values of “free of commercialism.”

Some Kings Live Forever

Recent reports of quality content’s death have been greatly exaggerated. The importance of quality content is going to increase, not decrease. If Answers.com (where I work) and Demand Media succeed, it will be because we succeeded in following Wikipedia’s model and creating high quality content that matches what users are looking for. What content does well in search engines? Content that generates incoming links, and that addresses the questions that users want answered.

The importance of becoming an authority site was my top conclusion from PubCon. Google values sites that other trusted sites link to. Google’s moves into personalized and social search are going to increase the social cues Google uses in determining what content users value.

The quality eulogies were kicked off by Michael Arrington, whose The End of Hand Crafted Content provocatively claimed that “Hand crafted content is dead. Long live fast food content.”

Great linkbait, made all the greater by how far off it is. Here are some points:

High Quality = High User Value

The best of the recent articles is Martin Bryant’s Audiences aren’t stupid, Quality’s not dead, which ends with this point:

“There’s an uncomfortable truth that ‘quality’ content producers need to bear in mind too. Sometimes content farms with their hyper-targeted approach provide exactly what an audience needs. Even if it’s cheap and rushed, an article telling you “How to make a breakfast nook out of a church pew” (for example) answers a specific question – one that people most quality outlets wouldn’t bother to answer in isolation.

Sometimes it’s the ‘low-quality’ content that fulfills an audience’s need. In that case, is it really low quality?”

Bryant’s point also answers the Forbes editor who warned students about Demand Media:

“They’re paying seasoned journalists five cents a word for their stories. They’re paying very skilled video photographers $2 per video. You’re not going to learn anything about a secret drone attack in Afghanistan on this site. You’re going to find stories like: What’s the best way to donate a coat in Saratoga Springs?

Forbes is a business & financial magazine. Are most of their stories about “a secret drone attack in Afghanistan?” And if readers are more interested in “What’s the best way to donate a coat in Saratoga Springs?” then which story provides more value to the user? It seems like Demand Media is doing exactly what Forbes is trying to do, provide quality content of interest to a commercial audience. But Demand Media may be doing it better.

At PubCon Google’s Matt Cutts encouraged web publishers to do keyword research to see what users are looking for, so that the publishers  can meet the demand. This is a good thing.

Quality: The Wikipedia Model

User generated content sites’ long term success is dependent on becoming a trusted authority. Back in 2004 I was asked to add Wikipedia’s content into Answers.com (then GuruNet). I resisted because Wikipedia was lower quality than the professionally published sources we were licensing. Studies now show Wikipedia quality to be on par with Britannica. When Chris Whitten approached us to purchase WikiAnswers I had a similar hesitation, because it was often lower quality than our licensed content. But like Wikipedia (though a few years behind), WikiAnswers quality improves every year. I’ll put a stake in the ground and say that within 12 months it will be considered the authority site for answers.

Quality Unique Voices Will Find Audiences

Ross Dawson and Doc Searls have also provided clarity in this debate.

Searls writes:

“I’ve been hand-crafting (actually just typing) my “content” for about twenty years now, and I haven’t been destroyed by a damn thing. I kinda don’t think Fast Food Content is going to shut down serious writers (no matter where and how they write) any more than McDonald’s killed the market for serious chefs.”

Searls later writes “what matters most is what each of us does better than anybody or anything else.”

Dawson expects “the rise of effective content reputation systems, that allow you to assess the likely quality of articles before you read them or even find them.” One way or another, I’m sure Google will figure something out here.

Quality and LinkBait

The Arrington post was classic linkbait, content that’s hand-crafted to maximize reaction and incoming links. While writing that post Arrington couldn’t possibly have believed the article’s premise, that hand crafted content is dead. The piece was a masterstroke of hand crafted content. BTW, it currently ranks 3rd (of 21 million) in Google for “hand crafted,” showing what good hand crafted content can do for you.

Linkbait has similar problems as TV news shows that interview extremists from both sides because that makes better television than interviewing moderates as they explain nuanced views.

A second theme ran through Arrington’s piece, that writers need to figure out a new disruptive way to win. Arrington wrote that daring innovators will thrive, and that we need to learn to deal with the changing models. But a thorough and intelligent exposition of that idea wouldn’t have generated much passion in the blogosphere. So Arrington went with the linkbait theme of “The End of Hand Crafted Content.”

If one were really worried about ways that people try to game the system to get poor quality content to rank, he’d focus more on this kind of Linkbait and less on Demand Media.

Conclusion: Quality Remains King

Quality content is more critical than ever to a content web site’s long term success, and the sites that want to be here for the long run are going to be paying more and more attention to it. They’ll become high quality, or die trying.

Oracle Rapid Rise

Fantastic post today by Joel Spolsky Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

I could feel Joel’s pain. Essentially he was jettisoning the basic premises that had guided him for a decade. Joel came to the painful conclusion that there was only room for one big company in his market, and that if he continued only growing by a responsible and impressive 50% annually, his competitor would take the market.

For the longest time, I smugly thought: We’re profitable, our sales are rising, we make terrific products, and our customers love us. So what do we have to worry about?

Then I came across a quote from Geoffrey Moore …  in Inside the Tornado, Moore writes about the great battle between Oracle and Ingres in the early 1980s. The winner of that battle is well known: Oracle now has a market cap of more than $100 billion, and I’ll bet you’ve never heard of Ingres.

“What set Oracle apart from Ingres,” Moore writes, “was that [CEO] Larry Ellison drove for 100 percent growth while Ingres ‘accepted’ 50 percent growth.” Executives at Ingres meant well. According to Moore, they felt that the company “simply cannot grow any faster than 50 percent and still adequately serve our customers. No one can. Look at Oracle. They are promising anything and everything and shipping little or nothing. Everybody knows it. Their customers hate them. They are going to hit the wall.”

Of course, Oracle overcame those concerns and eclipsed its rival. And this got me worried. Were we Ingres?

Not every market rewards the fastest company to critical mass. And sometimes the company that reaches critical mass first (Geocities, MySpace) can’t hold it. And I think Spolsky is panicking a bit and reaching some uncharacteristically (for him) mediocre conclusions.

In the post Spolsky was talking about his excellent FogBugz software, which we use and enjoy (as much as one can enjoy bug tracking software). But I wonder how this point applies to his niche Q&A sites like Stack Overflow. Will there be a winner in the Q&A space? Will the Oracle (and I’d say Wikipedia) model hold there? That is, do you achieve critical mass with high quantity and keep working feverishly to get the quality to catch up? Or do you grow slowly with high quality working in tight knit communities? Will the Q&A space always live according to Spolsky’s “Google is our site’s homepage” rule, and if so, does that make it easier for many players to co-exist?

Spolsky’s post is provocative. If it’s true, the winning move in the Q&A space is to continue growing as fast as we can, while killing ourselves to keep increasing the quality.

What do you think?

If you’re a Twit, somebody who spends a lot of time on Twitter, you need not apply because:

1. Some issues involve more than 140 characters.
2. Hello? You’re supposed to working.
3. It offends me that you think people care what you had for breakfast.
4. Not all spelling and grammar rules are optional.
5. Because Twitter is so 2008.
6. I’m ADD enough for the whole company.

BTW, I don’t actually believe any of the things I wrote above. But it was fun to write, I was wondering if I could get a reaction, and I just finished reading 6 Things Derek Powazek taught us about linkbait. I’m pretty sure this paragraph broke his rule #1.

Being a good citizen of the Twitterverse is actually a plus. If you’re also a NY-based Director of Community or a Jerusalem based Product Manager, Engineer, or QA Engineer, please see our Jobs page.