| Admittedly, I only concentrated on the bad stuff in my post. Both communities were focused on everyday problems, one dealt with parenting and the other was about cooking (recipes). I wouldn't have stayed for over 10 years with the former if there were never any positive things. It always felt a bit like I was doing something for the greater good (I don't want to sound arrogant here). Seeing how women finally got pregnant after many frustrating months (or even years) with the help of one of our tools (a period tracker) was very rewarding. There were people supporting each other when one of them lost child after child during pregnancy for whatever reasons. Most of the users that kept complaining about everything were long-time users. Many didn't have anything to do with the main topics of the platform. They just stayed because they liked the community and discussed politics or whatever in one of the sub-forums. In the end, the company was bought by a large publisher, all the staff (12 people or so) was basically let go (after 10+ years) and nowadays it's an almost unusable user-interface mess with ads in every corner. Oh, and that one specific sub-forum the users used to complain about stuff? Yeah, that was shut down completely to just shut everybody up. What a simple and effective solution for a pesky "problem" ... To be honest, I never liked the idea of being heavily dependent on advertisement to finance the platform, but sadly that's just the way the Internet works. After I became a father of two, my priorities shifted towards my family and I'm now more interested in doing something good for and especially WITH my kids instead of working a stressful job. |