[PragmaticPulp]

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.

[dehrmann]

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."

[TeMPOraL]

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.

[SturgeonsLaw]

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.

[prepend]

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.

[caconym_]

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.

[gonehome]

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.

[belorn]

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.

[im3w1l]

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.

[drivingmenuts]

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

[Zanni]

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.