Tesla has closed its forums to launch a social platform and fans are not happy | Hacker News Reader

Tesla has closed its forums to launch a social platform and fans are not happy

techcrunch.com

122 points_Microft86 comments

> In the replies of a March 2 Tesla forum post announcing the 13-day countdown until the platform’s demise, one commenter with supposed “inside info” alleged that the forums were closing because Tesla couldn’t afford to hire multiple full-time moderators to keep up with the barrage of spam and trolls that would frequent the threads.

Truly amazed at the number of companies that set up social platforms like this and then refuse to actually moderate them in any way. While it's obvious Tesla "could afford" to moderate it, it's also probably the kind of line-item no one actually considered being part of running a forum. I'm sure they think of a forum's overhead as just being hosting and maintenance, without considering the human cost of moderation until they were forced to, at which point they said "eh, fuck it."

We all talk about the moderation problem a lot with massive platforms like Facebook, but the number of people who just think "let's just throw up a small little forum/Reddit clone/Discord channel for people to talk to each other on" and then don't consider that, maybe, there might be some bad actors on there, is... I dunno, the majority, it seems.

Maybe it's because I grew up posting on forums like Something Awful that were famed for strong moderation, and IRC channels with as many ops as lurkers, but it almost seems like this was a weird forgotten aspect of building social platforms. I kinda blame the proliferation of upvotes and downvotes, which people seem to think is a replacement for moderation.

I assume they decided the ROI of the forum was negative for the company.

Even if expenses could be zero, official forums aren't a great look for a large company. Customers can be confused as to whether the forum is a good source of support or not. Some disgruntled customers have unlimited free time to throw shade at the company via forum posts.

If Tesla employees weren't participating on a level that could keep up with the discussion, it's probably better hosted on some other community forum anyway.

Ever search for an issue with an Apple product, landed in the Apple forums, see hundreds of people with the same issue, and Apple ignoring it? Can't say it instills confidence. Without the forums, especially with a fanboy brand, you're more likely to assume you're "holding the phone wrong."

Ever search for an issue with Microsoft product, found every answer leading to MS tech support forums, where countless "certified MS MVP professional supporters" ask ridiculously clueless questions "for clarification", and never deliver anything even approaching a problem analysis, much less an actual answer? Personally, I no longer click on links going to answers.microsoft.com or technet.microsoft.com. It's a complete waste of time.

Oh yes, those sites are infuriating. Every first answer is a copied and pasted generic response asking to run "sfc /scannow" or some other borderline useless incantation.

I also skip right past it and usually find better results on Serverfault, Spiceworks, or even Reddit. The gold standard seems to be blog posts by some random dude where they actually spend a couple of paragraphs describing how the fault occurs, and how the fix works, instead of just providing a command prompt one-liner and sending you on your way.

I skip them too and Microsoft forums are particularly infuriating. If you so get past the insane dipshits asking you to reinstall, you get pointed to a feedback form where you can report the bug and upvote it. And the posts are years old.

What’s worse is that there are frequently problems that have solutions but the moderators aren’t aware of them.

One of the reasons I don’t like using Microsoft products (looking at you PowerBI) is because there’s not as active a developer community to help answer my questions.

It really makes me appreciate stack overflow and how it is so much better than the alternatives.

Yeah, and there's always some apologist acting like it's the average consumer's responsibility to have relatively obscure technical knowledge, e.g. that diamond-like carbon coatings are harder than sapphire and will readily scratch it.

It would be funny if it wasn't so depressing.

For every useful reddit post that helps users get a shitty product working despite its useless official documentation (recently for me, this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/WeMo/comments/k2gem9/easiest_wemo_h... ) there are hundreds of dumb forum posts from clueless users that are not helpful to anyone.

Also, the quote wasn’t “you’re holding it wrong” - but “just avoid holding it that way” which makes a lot more sense/is a pragmatic answer when people are tightly wrapping their hands around the bottom of the phone for the purpose of intentionally degrading signal.

The question that a company need to answer is if its better that the primary forum is hosted by themselves or by a third party which they have zero control over. There are distinct benefits and drawbacks. Tesla has a much harder time to do damage control and manage special circomstances if the platform moderation is out of their control.

I would hazard a guess that both Microsoft forums and Apple forums exist because of that reason.

I was really impressed with the way Bitcoin project disowned the official forums. They were moved to a separate domain and declared inofficial. But accounts and posts and everything was retained on the new domain. Went smoothly and without any drama or hard feelings.

My understanding is that only reason Tesla makes money is by selling carbon offsets. Basically, everything is negative ROI for them.

A better way to think of this is because Tesla makes so much selling carbon offsets, they can afford to plow more of their profits into expansion.

Look at Apple's forums, it's a complete morass with some moderation removing comments hostile to Apple, but without any solution or interaction from any Apple personnel. It's notoriously bad.

A few years ago my friend dropped their Macbook with mission-critical info on it, and they took to the Apple forums to see if there was a way to retrieve the data on it. A few hours passed and a couple community members echoed the "no, it's impossible" sentiment. The next day, I woke up to check the thread and found it was deleted. According to my friend, someone outlined the exact process of recovering data from a Macbook SSD in the replies, prompting the whole thread to get removed an hour later. I heard horror stories of things like that in the past, but I never knew it was that bad.

Did your friend save the thread before it was deleted?

you can't automate good content moderation, and it's just not worthwhile to provide this service if you can't keep up with the duties. Another link to Masnick's Impossibility Theorem:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191111/23032743367/masni...

They can't fob off that work on the numerous Tesla die-hards out there?

It's often not a good idea to have the die-hards do the moderation.

You'll end up a stack overflow situation haha

SO has strict moderation. That's a very different scenario.

I've moderated forums and tend to generally agree with SO's approach. Not sure I'd leave it to users; we had dedicated moderators do everything. I've seen loosely or unmoderated programming forums, and it quickly goes to shit.

Handing moderation over to fans is a different issue. It leads to strict and horribly biased moderation.

You guys realize that if SO community/mods weren't like they are, then you'd end up with tons of garbage in search results?

This reminds me of Wikipedia. The hardcore contributors/maintainers cop a whole lot of criticism, and I'm sure some of it is justified (though some is clearly just nerd-shaming), but people rarely acknowledge how amazing it is that the project is basically a success, and how quickly it could degenerate if the most dedicated 'loosened up' or lost interest.

That's an interesting opinion. My impression is that the overwhelming majority of good content on SO is grandfathered from when moderation was much less strict.

That's up to the point that finding good answers to problems with new software is hard nowadays.

I find the majority of SO questions in search results have been wrongly closed as duplicates

Yep, I generally remove SO from my searches because of how many useless closed as duplicates questions find their way into search results.

If they want to moderate like that fine, just delete the dupe questions.

Dupes have their uses - they do a pretty good job of ensuring a wider variety of Google searches lead to the answer. Basically, a built in “this paragraph is a synonym for this other one”.

That’s really not been my experience. I find the non duplicate question is normally somewhat related but not actually useful, being subtly different or quite old etc.

That said while SO has been effectively useless to me for years, if you find it’s helpful then more power to you.

The most useful answers I find on SO tend to be marked "closed; off-topic." Thank goodness for the off-topics and the dupes.

I'm sorry, but isn't that what we've ended up with?

Whenever I see SO in search results, it's a sign that I have a question someone else had years ago that wasn't answered.

It won't scale.

Why can't ai?

When we get actual AI, that question may make sense.

can an AI make the right decision 100% of the time?

Can humans make the right decision at a rate better or worse than AI? If AI makes the wrong decision, is a human empowered to step in and overrule that decision?

To Tesla's credit, their forum has been around a long time. Before, it was probably small enough to not need much attention. But between growth, the financial incentives (shorts), Elon's antics, etc I'm sure it turned into something they stopped wanting to deal with.

Can we stop using shorts as the bogeyman? Tesla shorts have lost billions and true believers have made billions. Short sellers have an important function in the market of both rooting out fraud and as buyers when the stock price starts to decline. Short sellers were blowing the whistle on Wirecard for years, and have been the voice of reason on Nikola, MiMedx, GSX, Valeant, and countless others. Not everyone with a bearish opinion on a stock is going to maliciously sabotage it.

You've gotten a lot of replies all negative to company forums, and I feel compelled to gently push back. While for certain companies it can clearly be a problem, I'm not sure this applies in the same way to more technical/niche areas and community forums can be immensely valuable resources for a company and support. One example that instantly comes to mind is Ubiquiti, despite them trashing their good old forums in favor of a shitty new in-house "modern" thing. They have no bug tracker or a lot of other basic stuff too, one of a long series of examples of corporate decay over the last 3-4 years.

Even so, their forums and community are still an extremely valuable source of useful advice, and actually pretty critical to use of their platform given how bad their official support is and how they've allowed their documentation to decay in many areas as well. While it's gone downhill from before and there is increased noise from upset people, it's still important, and the decline isn't due to moderation or any sort of spam/trolling.

Again, I can see this being easier for forums that are pretty focused. Tesla, or Apple, cover a vastly broader range of the general population and inspire stronger feelings both ways. But forums can be very positive. Yet even so I know there was valuable information on the Tesla forums and people coming together, fans and tinkerers and such. Throwing out that baby with the bathwater does seem so unnecessary...

...particularly in the context of you mentioning SA which I also once used a lot. That brings up that there are a lot of tools that for whatever reason don't get used that can make it much, much easier to deal with moderation, ie:

>"While it's obvious Tesla "could afford" to moderate it, it's also probably the kind of line-item no one actually considered being part of running a forum."

I wonder why so many places are allergic to just plain charging money. Posting in a first party forum isn't a right. Just make it $10 or whatever, must repay if banned. That'll gate spam/trolls pretty hard. Moderation is fundamentally an economic equation: the time/resources it takes to moderate a rule breaking post VS the time/resources it takes to violate/evade moderation. Yet for some reason everyone always acts as if only the first part can be changed. Not so. There are plenty of ways to shift the second part too that almost never get used. Adding money, or even time cost (make someone perform an hour/day/week of computational work to earn a level 1/2/3 token etc), then changes the balance with no additional cost on the moderation side by making evasion more costly.

As other examples, the Glowforge forums are positive in tone, members are mutually supportive, and the company is reasonably tolerant of criticism and of discussion of dangerous experiments, and despite selling materials themselves does not interfere with members discussing alternate sources of materials.

I also remember the Sphero forums as quite useful, although I haven't visited for a while.

I remember around a decade ago, when metacritc shut down their forums. Also citing an inability to keep up with moderation duties. I suppose in their defense we were posting a lot of download links at the time.

Do you have stairs in your house?

I think the cost of moderation grows at a rate higher than revenue that can be earned in most cases.

Are there any Reddit clones aside from HN? Tree style threaded forum software are awfully rare.

lemmy: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

They are under AGPL. Self hosting is next to impossible.

I'm sorry, I don't have a good understanding of license minutia like this. What makes AGPL problematic for self-hosting?

I own a Tesla. But I nearly didn't buy one, and it is the "fans" that put me off. They are, to describe them lightly, rabid.

Normally I would say that a company can only dream of the kind of free advertising such a dedicated fanbase would give them, but Tesla fans can be intensely offputting.

They're not interested in promoting a future for other EVs, or green energy, or reducing emissions. They only want you to see how awesome Tesla is, and if you don't, you're a valid target for a good old fashioned social media flaming. In the eyes of the fanbase, Tesla can do no wrong, even when they obviously do.

I genuinely like my Tesla, but I fear that owning one will make others assume I am one of "them".

Tesla needs to work really hard to ensure this doesn't get out of control, but given Elon's position as twitter-troll-in-chief, it seems unlikely.

I won't buy a Tesla because of it's UI/UX. Someone should tell Elon that his taste in design sucks, putting touch panels in cars (and in the space X dragon capsule) is outrageous. In general, Elon should be in charge of engineering and nothing else. He is a brilliant engineer and should double down on it.

In these forums, people rave about how amazing touch screens are simply because Tesla, their fav brand, has them.

You say that, but look at the alternatives. Here's the brand new Ford Mach-E: https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1368320371544428555?... (Scroll down through subsequent tweets for thread.)

Major car manufacturers see the software as an afterthought, and the result is a disaster. This is one thing that Tesla really gets right. Well designed software, frequent updates.

You should test drive one. I felt the same way as you, initially. I hate fiddling around with menus for things that should be tactile controls. What people don't realize, until they actually try one out, is that Teslas do have physical controls for everything you need. Everything on the touch screen is set-and-forget. If you're fiddling with the touch screen while you're driving, you're doing it wrong.

It's really unfortunate that you have to buy the worst car to get the best car.

The electric drivetrain really is a wonder. It is so completely phenomenally better than gasoline cars.

Yet Tesla's UI direction is throwing out the baby, the bathwater and now the customer too.

Personally I think they should add a dashboard to the 3/y/truck, even as an option. same for a round steering wheel.

I think they should add more - not less - direct tactile controls for critical driving functions.

For what it's worth, a round steering wheel will be an option.

Whew. Now I just have to come up with $160,000... :)

I've had a model 3 for couple of years and like the touchscreen way better than the analog controls of my previous ICE car. The reason is I know where to find every control. In my previous car there were switches in the center console, under the steering wheel, a bunch on the gear shifter I didn't know how to work, some to the left of the wheel on the panel, some up top near the rear view mirror, etc. I literally did not realize I had a snow mode feature until year 3 of owning the car because I never realized where the button was hiding. I think it's a matter of personal preference.

> and in the space X dragon capsule) is outrageous

What is so outrageous about that?

There's a good reason airplane cockpits don't use touch screens, and that's because feedback is minimal and you can't use it in low visibility/panic scenarios, which can occur. Having a good old fashioned flip switch in a precise location that can be used with the eyes closed based on muscle memory can literally be the difference between life and death.

If I am not mistaken that capsule still has physical buttons and switches as a backup.

This will just push people towards independently operated forums (Tesla Motors Club) and Reddit, which is already the norm for other car subcultures.

Most discussion already happens on enthusiast run platforms dedicated to one manufacturer or even specific models/years.

That could be their goal: they get all the advantages of having a forum, but with none of the moderation expense or guilt-by-association-with-trolls risk to their reputation that come with having an official forum.

Yeah, the teslamotorsclub.com forums have been the dominant forum for Tesla owners for at least the last 5+ years anyway.

It always makes me sad when a company decides to pursue a walled garden approach, because it means nothing inside the new "engage" site will be indexed by search engines, nor available to non-registered users.

The neat part about forum software itself is that it allows companies to have that slice of control (insofar as the forum itself is under control of the company), but allows for free and open discussion of the niche subject.

Smart move by Tesla, instead of letting their customers and enthusiasts discuss general forum topics, pivot them to social goals which also benefit Tesla. Weaponize forum members to help achieve Tesla goals (The first item in "engage.tesla.com" is asking people to send letters to Nebraska Senators).

How dare they exercise their 1st amendment right to petition the government.

There's nothing wrong with that. However, when a for profit company asks you to exercise your rights for them, it's at least a bit dubious.

Outline: https://outline.com/V8LGp7

I wonder what Aldous Hurley would say about a bunch of people fans of a big T, coming from a car manufacturing company :) No hard feelings against Tesla, on the contrary. Just thought about the curious parallel.

Huxley.

I expect this story to hit Twitter and Elon will interject and restore faith in customers. In the end, nothing will be lost, PR game will end and Tesla will garner free goodwill through Elon as a proxy from this manufactured saga. It's hard to not be cynical.

They should have just linked to the teslamotors subreddit...

> Those trolls are likely to migrate to Twitter now, as the Tesla Engagement Platform will be moderated.

Says a lot about what Twitter has become.

> I genuinely like my Tesla, but I fear that owning one will make others assume I am one of "them".

You seem a bit superficial...

> one commenter with supposed “inside info” alleged that the forums were closing because Tesla couldn’t afford to hire multiple full-time moderators to keep up with the barrage of spam and trolls that would frequent the threads.

They can afford putting 1.5b aside to buy bitcoins, but not spend the money to hire actual people ?

Because having bitcoins preserves value, you might see it as spending but it is actually saving. They can still choose to spend it on hiring people if they wanted.

Just wait for the next dip, I'm gonna laugh my ass off...

Their BTC bet is already profitable to the tune of 1bln. Yeah BTC will crash at some point but still those who either manage to sell at good enough levels or have long enough time preference to hold til the next rally will make some serious profit.

And the market agrees with you! Spending $1.5 billion on Bitcoin during the middle of a massive speculative bubble is just the sort of responsible leadership investors want to see in these uncertain times. That's why Tesla's stock has been as rock-solid as Bitcoin since they announced their purchase.

The day when Satoshi left Bitcoin Project is going downhill. Bitcoin without Satoshi is like Apple without Steve Jobs. Without good leadership it is hard for anything to survive.

The price has gone up by several orders of magnitude, and Satoshi hardly provided much leadership beyond the original paper.

>Satoshi hardly provided much leadership beyond the original paper

Except he designed and coded the whole thing and provided every day support for 2 years.

>The price has gone up by several orders of magnitude

Price of the Bitcoin doesn't mean anything if it is not used as cash as Satoshi intended. You don't receive your salary in Bitcoin and you don't shop with Bitcoin. Speaking of price even regulated assets like stocks are prone to hype and excessive speculation see Dot-com bubble [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble

Social creations not always go like the creator wanted, that's how it works. Bitcoin is a whole movement that goes way beyond the btc protocol.

Is the price going up good?

It's the only thing it really has going for it.

Tesla has resources for hundreds of engineers but not a few community managers (which they do employ, btw)? Obviously that commenter is bullshitting.

Charging a one time fee of $1 per account on credit card feels like it would keep most of the trolls out and reduce moderation costs. I miss MetaFilter.

Metafilter still exists.

Google arguably killed MetaFilter as collateral damage from search algorithm changes mean to combat spam.

MetaFilter did a lot of damage to itself by overmoderating. It was my online home for years but eventually there was so much meta-meta handwringing that the sense of community was lost, for me at least.

Can you elaborate on this? I thought Metafilter was alive and doing just fine - in fact I still visit it regularly

They might these days, but here are some articles about what happened.

https://searchengineland.com/metafilter-penalized-google-192...

https://www.fastcompany.com/3030848/what-google-search-algor...

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