Competitiveness in Community

[WillM]

I saw a tweet by @jamielaird today (link) that brought up what I think is a really interesting point. He mentioned that it can feel like some in the Alteryx community are competitively chasing likes and solutions, and that incentivizing quantity of solutions can potentially have a detrimental impact on the quality of posts being shared.

I'd love to hear your feedback and experience as members. If you agree with Jamie's point of view, how do you think we could remedy the situation? If you don't, I'd love to hear why (and also know if you think there are still improvements to be made). There are no wrong answers here, and I expect that we'll hear from a lot of people from both sides. My main goals here are to open up the conversation with everyone and identify opportunities to improve your shared experience both now and in the future.

Looking forward to the dialogue around this aspect of the community, and how we might be able to refine things to better serve everyone!

[jamielaird]

Thanks so much for picking this up @WillM. I certainly didn't expect my tweet to take off like it did (21 likes counts as viral in my world).

With the benefit of extra space, I wanted to expand on my thoughts a bit, and provide some of the context and nuance that isn't really possible to fit in a tweet.

Firstly, and most importantly, I want to preface this by saying that I *love* this community. I've been a member since I first started using Alteryx in 2016, and it's helped me to expand my skills and connections so far beyond what I would have thought possible. It's helped me keep my skills sharp, pick up certifications, opened up career opportunities and introduced me to some amazing people. One of the best decisions of my professional life was to talk my boss into paying for a Designer license so I could wrangle some messy survey data.

Over the last couple of years, I've been a little less active on here, but I decided recently that I wanted to try to become more involved. One of the most rewarding things about becoming "good" at something is being able to help other people, and I truly believe that that's the motivation behind the overwhelming majority of contributions in the solutions forums. I have huge respect for everyone who puts in the time to contribute solutions and posts.

As I've dipped my toes back into the solutions forums over the last couple of weeks I've noticed a few things that left me feeling that the vibe could sometimes be more competitive than collaborative. My (very subjective and completely unscientific) impression is that there's a fair bit more "here's a workflow that solves your problem for you" type posts and fewer "let me explain how you can solve this problem" type posts than there were in the past.

There's nothing wrong with a quick solution that helps a user solve their problem, but when that becomes the norm it can sometimes feel a bit like everyone is piling in at once, trying to get their solution in first, and I wonder if that's genuinely helpful for the people posting their problems. This got me thinking about whether some of the incentive mechanisms in the community - likes, solutions accepted, leaderboards - and the way these play into wider Alteryx community initiatives are rewarding quantity over quality and crowding out slower or more thoughtful responses.

The engagement I've had with my tweet shows me this has resonated with at least some people, and although having opinions in public is slightly uncomfortable for me, I'm really pleased that this has sparked a discussion and I'm looking forward to seeing where it leads.

[MinaGO3]

Hi Will,
I do agree with Jamie's commentary about the forums and this topic has actually cropped up in a few conversations over recent months.

As to how we could improve it, I write a bit about incentives at the bottom of this post, but for the issue I am about to mention below I think just some guidelines and light moderation, which is not an uncommon practice in most forums. 

I am sure a lot of people are going to talk about solutions and likes so I wanted to talk on a different but similar line; one that was important for me as it was my main engagement with the forums: Alteryx Challenge Solutions. 

I definitely would like to see a guideline of no company branding on Alteryx Challenge solutions. The challenges always felt like such a fun community event and coming back after a few months and seeing all the partner company branding (to the extent it was occupying more space than the actual solutions) felt like it was becoming a ploy for partners to advertise themselves over it being a community project.

I think there should be clearly defined guidelines of where and how partners can market themselves on the forums as opposed to completely free reign. Without these guidelines, I cannot fault them too much for trying to use this space to competitively market their firms, even if it, at least in my opinion, is a detriment to the community experience. 

Like Jamie, I have been using and engaged with the Alteryx forums for many years now and I am very fond of it (and also get a little of that awkwardness in expressing my complaints in the grand scheme of things), but I also do think some issues have cropped up over the past few months in terms of the user experience and sense of community that I think some could be fixed with really minor adjustments.

Edit: Additional to Jamie's comment about the solution incentives:
It's challenging to come up with an incentive system since they will always have flaws but I think if maybe there was more of a sort based on likes for solutions or something similar to stackoverflow where a quality solution would eventually garner more likes and be more prioritised it might somewhat improve the behaviour of trying to be the first accepted solution as opposed to the most comprehensive solution.

Also just another comparison to stackoverflow they try to enforce that if a question is completely redundant then they try to funnel them to an existing post. This has a few consequences but one is that it makes quality solutions in threads more important. This is not obviously always possible (as there are many case-specific questions) but if there was some way to make this more relevant/incentivized I could see this potentially helping.

[hanykowska]

Agree with what @jamielaird and @MinaGO3 already mentioned, and thanks @WillM for opening up the conversation!

First of all, let's think about why quantity over quality is not a good idea. The users with a problem will get a quick response - good. But if the answers give only the workflow that solves the problem with little to no explanation, then learning from each other becomes much more difficult and activity on the forum can become driven by getting likes rather than sharing knowledge - bad. Also coming from a point of view that if you don't understand how something works, you will need help every step of the way: the approach of quantity over quality will work against building a community of users that can solve new problems on their own.

I have used a number of solutions people posted in the past to solve problems only slightly related to the originally posted question - if the answer was well explained I often managed to figure out the mechanisms and solve my own problems.

Given that @WillM said there are no wrong answers, I think one simple improvement could be changing requirements for becoming an ACE so they are not so plainly written out. At the moment they are (https://community.alteryx.com/t5/ACE-Program/bd-p/ace-program) :

Must be a customer or partner

Be an active Community member for at least one year

Minimum activity within last 365 days:

- 250 Posts

- 100 Likes

- 50 Accepted Solutions

Alteryx Designer Advanced Certification

---

Putting emphasis on the quality of solutions rather than number could help with taking the competitiveness down, I would hope at least.

[BenMoss]

As everyone has said @WillM thank you for opening this post, I feel the issue has been bubbling away for a while based on the different Alteryx user circles I'm within.

I do have a slightly different opinion to those that have shared there's already, primarily because I am someone who is a) competitive, and b) partly motivated by rewards, we all are, however I am certainly on the extreme end competitiveness wise). 

Though nowadays I don't contribute to the community as much as I have done in the past, I was certainly someone who chased solutions, I hope I did it in the right way, by adding a bit of a description to the solution I provided (I think this seems to be what people mean when they are referring to a "quality" solution, because otherwise it will be nigh-on impossible for the Alteryx community team to actively acknowledge what it and isn't a quality post), I can safely say that probably wasn't always the case.

I chased solutions because I'm motivated differently, and I think everyone needs to accept that it's okay for people to be motivated in this way.

We must also remember that people whom provide answers to peoples post on the community are largely doing it on their own time, taking the time to then add a description about the exact workings is not always going to work.

Something we also need to think about is the kind of people contributing to this discussion. From what I have seen, they aren't the people whom are using the community to ask questions, we are largely in the 'question answerers' persona. In my opinion, having worked with hundreds of new Alteryx this year, something to account for is the fact that a lot of them just don't care as much as we do about learning the platform. I'd be interested to know just how many are perfectly satisfied with a solution being provided, without the 'quality description' (again, if someone could take the time to highlight what they mean by quality, that may help this conversation), I imagine it's a majority, based on my experience (and again that's just my opinion).

TL;DR I agree that in an ideal world, solutions with a bit of a description around it are what we should be aiming for. However, for various reasons I do think we need to be more accepting of those that don't do this, and essentially just come up with a way, as @MinaGO3 says, of elevating these posts so they are the ones visible when people come searching the community for problems which they know have already been resolved.

I do not think we should be discrediting those whom contribute in a more 'brute force' way though.

Regards the point made by @hanykowska around the ACE criteria. I'm not sure Alteryx can win this battle, they didn't use to have a set criteria, but then a significant number of people complained about this to the extent that they had to come up with this 'minimum requirements' list.

[T_Willins]

I also agree with the posts on this thread.  In the last few months, it seems like answering questions on the Discussions pages has become a competition instead of really trying to answer questions to help other users and make the Alteryx Community stronger. I wonder how many responses this thread will get as getting an ‘accepted solution’ to it will be difficult. 

It would be interesting to reach out to the current Top Accepted Solutions Authors and find out what is driving them to answer so many questions – Lots of free time due to COVID, desire to become an Ace, marketing oneself as an Alteryx Partner, etc.  For me answering questions isn’t about any of these and more about the desire to ‘solve a puzzle’ and help someone at the same time.  That being said after I come up with a solution to a post on one of the Discussions pages, I always refresh the post to verify no one else has already posted a solution.  If a valid response has already been posted, I usually don’t post my response unless I have something to add even if I have a completed response.  I have often seen, however, when I have posted a solution that even hours later someone will post another similar solution to the same question.  My Psychology undergrad degree has me looking for the motivation around these posts after a valid solution has been given. 

To that end I think the badges are fine as you only see them on the Profile page, but removing or minimizing the Top Solution Authors section would be good as I think it does incentivize posting fast and copious solutions as opposed to quality solutions.  Taking away the Weekly Challenge Leaderboard however…

I don’t know if I have a good solution to this at 3am, but I would like to see more “teaching how to fish” solutions than “here is your fish” solutions.

(And yes, my undergraduate degree is in Psychology and Early Childhood Education).

[OllieClarke]

Throwing my hat into this ring. I don't think we should get too hung up on people's motivations, and whether they are correct as they're ultimately unknowable and arguably irrelevant. If there is a problem with quality of solution/response then that's where we should focus. 

@jamielaird posted the stackoverflow guide to responding which is a great place to start, but maybe we could have our own Alteryx Community version (in the same way the weekly challenges have a 'how to respond to a weekly challenge' article - although this seems to have disappeared). I've seen some level of self-moderation from the community (such as calling out duplicate solutions posted much later), but we also can promote 'good' solutions by liking them. It would be nice if the order of responses could be influenced by likes (although this could be the amount of time I spend on reddit leaking over) like @MinaGO3 said. 

I also think that the distinction between "solution that teaches and solves"=good and "solution that just solves"=bad is wrong. In my opinion it's "solution that just solves"=good and "solution that teaches and solves"=better...

Basically I agree with @BenMoss 

[joshuaburkhow]

Hey @AngelosPachis 

I am still not convinced that this is truly a "problem" that needs to be solved. Although I agree with the sentiment I am more with @BenMoss on this and not sure we should be the ones to dictate how chasing solutions and likes goes, to each their own 😉 Would I like people posting questions to receive more thought out answers and different options instead of just the workflow with it handed on a silver plate? of course.

I am also with @estherb47, @DavidP  and @cgoodman3 where we need to place more emphasis on ourselves to be the example, be welcoming, and make that permeate the community so that those that come after us have a good example to follow.

Just a thought 😉 Like you put perfectly. Every opinion is valuable.    

[PhilipMannering]

I'm just posting my reply now to save my place. I'll come back with a solution later.

[atcodedog05]

I pretty much want to respond, have few things on my mind to say. Really piled with work. 

I will come tomorrow(weekend) to respond.

Just few liners what i would like to say

I honestly wouldn't want to turn down a person who is asking for help. If i can i will do it. 

And whenever someone asks me for a solution simple or complex i dont want to throw multiple videos/interactive links at them

If its simple ones by seeing our workflow they usually tend to learn like the formula issues thats faced. Complex one, trust me it will be too complex for them to understand and too complex for us to us explain. And the best regex trust me links can never help much you need someone to teach and lot of them are too complex to understand

And i definitely dont want to be rude, there are things everyone struggle with, I dont want to say to a person it was soo easy why didnt you think of it.

I would always prefer to be a friendly person who can help you solve things easily.

Besides the Alteryx Community tag line is "Together we solve"

I personally i have learnt from a lot of people and i constantly do appreciate when someone post a helpful easy to follow solution

With or without leaderboard, with or without likes or marks

But I will definitely help people for a simple thanks 🙂

Likes and marks just adds a little booster to it

Man i spoke a lot, i donno what i am gonna text later😅

These are just my thought, nonway meant to be against anyone

And i have bunch of people to thanks on the community 🙂

Happy to help 🙂

Cheers and Happy Analyzing 😀

Feel free to reach out if you face any issues 🙂