How 7 Cups of Tea (YC S13) Accidentally Grew a Community of 17,000 Listeners
cmxhub.com
cmxhub.com
From what I make of it, it's apparent that the business model is that of "professional listeners" i.e. a few listeners charge for their service and essentially become an online version of therapists without being therapists. (although a few do appear to be trained as such and they charge their usual rates, most of the people on the roster don't appear to be professional psychologists)
This all fine and good, but the problem within the model though is that there's a tension between the positive side vs. the revenue side: we volunteer and help people who need a listener, but we try to nudge people towards paying for these sessions. This manifests itself through these constant popup windows while the listener is engaged in a heavy emotional conversation. Imagine you're pouring your heart out to someone and things are at an emotional juncture, and a sickly cheerful popup comes up on the screen cajoling you to sign up or rate the listener. It feels horridly out of context and it takes away the experience of the person within that moment. And this has happened to me 4 times so far in around 25 minutes.
Of course, the thing is that 7 Cups of Tea needs to convert its users and it needs to make that happen relentlessly, but the key over here is subtlety and I feel that this design iteration, sadly, misses that. However - from an outside perspective - it doesn't have to be this way. You see, anyone who visits this website and connects emotionally with a listener experiences the purest form of engagement - emotional engagement and a genuine empathic bond with someone. If the person or the bond is strong, then there is no reason why they won't sign up, after all the product has touched the very core of their being. Of course they will sign up, if there isn't any friction! They're hooked and they want to maintain that bond. They want to connect with this person again and they want to feel that sense of connectedness again and again. They want to feel okay again and again. So really the best thing 7 Cups of Tea could possibly do is get out of the way and let people connect with one another and let things flow from there.
In other words, this can be so much more. It has the ingredients of being so much more. It just needs the right touch. A light touch.
Have we become so isolated in our tech-centered world that we no longer have friends/family/neighbors that we can talk to?
Does everything have to be done on the internet, where we can happily pull the plug if we just don't feel like continuing?
I'm speaking as an American, and don't pretend to know much about other cultures, so keep that context in mind. But it seems to me that over the past 20 years especially there has been a drastic increase in the isolation most Americans have from the outside world. Many of us could not even tell you the names of our next-door neighbors -- many not even the last names of the families.
Now, I'm a technical guy, and have been pretty much my whole life. Like most people who read Hacker News (I would presume) I make my living working with computers, and spend a great deal of my free time doing things with computers also. I was the first in my family to even know about the internet, and I'm the first one they call when they need help with anything computer-related.
I'm not saying that computers are bad. I'm also not saying that "7 Cups of Tea" is necessarily bad. I just think that a lot of us who spend so much of our time using these remarkable tools (computers and the internet) should take care to make sure we don't overuse them. Many things in life should be done in person. The internet provides a filter to many experiences which can be very useful, but I think in many cases it can also be a barrier to real interaction.
I'd be happy to hear what others think about the subject.
Talking to a random stranger is sometimes a first step in talking to other people.
Also, professional psychiatric help (which often simply involves this active listening) is incredibly expensive. Everyone deserves access to that help.
But, YES, I think we do need to make a concerted effort to connect with family, friends, and neighbors in person. The internet can facilitate these things and facilitate connections with people we previously never had access to. Any product that facilitates human interaction offline, to me, is a gift.
But I had associated the Internet with better connectedness as a result. I wasn't raised in an active neighborhood community, it was just the place I lived. And so I live today; I don't really know who my direct neighbors are, because my social life is smeared out so much farther. While I am cordial and pleasant, there's not a lot of social depth left of me to share. Which likely comes across as aloof.
I've heard this argument referred to as the "Bowling Alone Hypothesis" [1]. Basically the idea that first radio, then television, and now the internet, etc. are socially isolating us from one another and we're stuck "Amusing Ourselves to Death" [2]. There is also likely an anthropological / evolutionary biology argument to be made about the development of small group communication.
Some simply dismiss these arguments as ludditism, but I think a much more nuanced response casts the internet as a great medium for communication [3], social engagement [4], and activism [5].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death [3] http://bigideas.tvo.org/episode/141052/clay-shirky-on-cognit... [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPAO-lZ4_hU [5] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1086939
Most people I've talked to are quite young like high schoolers to peeps in their late 20's with quarter-life crisis. People mostly have girl/boy/parents problems or general existential crisis revolving around career/romance/existential meaning.
I think the appeal of the site is to relate to strangers and letting your guard down. I think there's a lot of appeal of listening to someone as it makes you relate to your own problems and step outside of yourself to realize that it's not a "me" world; and that everyone is kinda of grotesque like in that short story collection, "Winesburg, Ohio".
I used to feel that way with HN and reddit /r/all, but both sites have grown so big and evolved into more commercialized niche for startup's and meme's; that they feel like high school with people putting on their in-group faces lol. I think that's the appeal of subreddits for people to go into smaller communities. Same thing with one-on-one online anonymous chats. It's the not same as talking with friends, friends may be unavailable because they're busy or with someone else or you don't want to share some details with them. It helps frame your problem from your original context in your social and family clique to try to explain it to a stranger.
You still remember the world pre-internet. When you can go outside, meet people, and when you connect you block the use of a phone line.
That's not how we live anymore. Now you're connected from the day you are born.
And kids, just watch kids interact. They're using the internet to make the kind of connections you and I just don't understand.
They're seeking levels of comfort and intimacy and it can be given to them from around the world.
If you're transgendered and the struggles or problems you face can't be related to your neighbor. If you're dealing with issues that your family doesn't understand or don't want to tolerate, where do you turn?
Another person half way around the world to someone who aches for connection is more real than the crowd of people he's in.
So when people latch on to this idea that technology isolates us, I say you don't think big enough.
You're physically in a body but your mind's free with the internet. And that's just amazing.
The word "volunteer" appears in the first two paragraphs but not elsewhere, but I don't think it's the right word: most people in Internet communities don't think of themselves as "volunteers" per se.
In the context of nonprofit and public agencies, which is orthogonal to the main article but still important, many don't actually want volunteers—they want money: http://blog.seliger.com/2014/04/20/volunteers-nonprofits-rea... .
She knows how to dissect and grow what your community needs. Definitely a resource people interested in this subject should follow and tap into.
For an article about conversations with people you never see a person without a face doesn't seem to weird.
But I think I would have chosen another picture as well.
In that case it is a good choice.