Feed: Building a Web of Support
The feed feature is now live! We are very excited about this! As part of its launch, I wanted to share some important thoughts on the value of this feature and how it can be used to build a stronger, more compassionate community experience for all of us.
I outlined some of our thinking on the feed here in this pain to path post, but am now realizing that it was too long. Here is the short version!
Many of us are in pain because we have people in our lives that can be negative. When we are trying to recover it can be really hard to make progress when people around us - intentionally or unintentionally - are negative.
7 Cups is a safe place where people are positive, kind, and accepting (that is what makes us so different). The challenge for many people is that they come to 7 cups, have a great conversation, feel better, and then sink back into their old relationships and start to struggle again.
Why does this happen?
This happens because, prior to the feed, we didn
I wish 7 cups of tea further sucess, the only thing this website needs is a music chatroom.
This will bring the community closer for sure! I'm so excited!
This is so great! So excited about this!
I just want to echo some of the concerns expressed earlier about the way information about following is available. I personally don't care how many followers i might or might not have, how many Facebook friends, etc. but a lot of people do, and especially here, a lot of people are going to be vulnerable to feeling unwanted if the numbers don't match some expectation they develop. Worse, it is inevitable that some will feel hurt when they see that someone they like isn't following them but is following someone else.
I think the number of followers someone has should not be "public" information (meaning viewable by other users of the site), nor should the names of the followers. My own experience (having made zero posts to my feed) was that I had a follower before I knew the feature launched and decided to follow some people I've known from group support chats. But I wasn't thorough about this, and I worry that other people might look at the list of people I'm following and wonder why they aren't on that list - people I would be happy to follow, in most cases! There was a nice convenience factor to seeing whom someone else was following - I checked whom my follower had followed, and since these were mostly other friends from the same chat it was a nice head start on populating my own list. But I know far too many people here with self-esteem problems, concerns about what others think of them, who are lonely, and who are fragile not to worry about the potential for the relatively public nature of the follower lists to hurt lots of people I care about here.
You are so right about this and I love your concern for everyone here who is in a vulnerable and low position concerning their self worth. I agree with you, I think the amount of people you follow/follow you should be hidden from view, and I hadn't even thought about hiding the names of the followers! I think this is a great suggestion, squib, thanks for your input!
You've done a good job of articulating the competing issues here. Just as you say, it's incredibly convenient to find people by perusing others' follow lists.
We did include an option to close your follower list, which both requires that you give permission before someone follows you and hides who you are following and who is following you, but then of course the tradeoff is that the ability do discover people is hampered.
It's great that you are compassionate enough to worry that others may feel excluded or like they are in a popularity contest when they don't want to be. I think it's important for all of us to strive to sustain a climate of supportiveness around here and to work to counter the idea that anybody's value or importance depends on a statistic.
With a closed follower list do people still see stats regarding how many followers one has and how many people one is following? Or does it just conceal the member lists?
it prevents people from seeing the names. the numbers appear on the profile regardless
But if we want sustain a climate of supportiveness and work to counter the idea that anybody's value or importance depends on a statistic, why keep the statistic public? Perhaps a good middle ground is that if you choose to make your followers/following private, you can choose to display your stats as well. I think you will find a LOT of people validate their self worth through meaningless things like statistics--otherwise people wouldn't constantly seek out new followers on other social medias. On a site like this, where we want to constantly validate someone's importance and value, I think it's better off left out.
I understand the argument, and there's certainly a fine line between things that trigger motivation and things that trigger more extreme experiences like feelings of competitive pressure or exclusion.
As Glen was discussing above, experience shows us that some degree of motivation is critical to help people gain more connections. It's important to us not to create a harmful climate in the community so we will make adjustments along the way when we see the need.
At this time, though, we have our hypotheses, and they are pretty well grounded in experience, and we need to give people a little time to explore the feature and demonstrate their own habits and cutoms and folkways before we go too far in trying to completely "engineer" the feature up front to nail one precise idea of how it must work.
Thanks for the clarification. getting the hang of a new feature takes time!
7 Cups of Facebook?
What's the plan for moderating bullies and hateful comments when the comment feature is integrated? There's already a lack of proficiency in that department in group support, I'd be interested in hearing how we'll manage group support and the feed.
Great question! One reason why we have not included comments yet is that we want to make sure that when we do add comments we do it right. We won't add the feature until we are sure we can make it fit our community.
@GlenM I really like this feature! Keep it up!! 
Firstly can i say thanks to all the people who put the feeds together inorder to expland the 7 cups experience. We will never know if it works unless we try.
Second, I would like to echo the comments above regarding the displaying of follower counts. I think a sensible solution would be to allow us and our followers to seee who we are following but not explicitly in reverse and certainly not by posting on a number on their feeds. That was there can be a downward flow through the web. Surely central the core ethos of this website/community is that everybody matters equally. By posting number of followers what you are effectively doing is creating a ranking system and in turn, for the more cautious in the community, newer members and others, obliterating any hope they might have that this will be the place they feel valued, important and heard.
Third, following on from this i think it would be if a random sample of recent feed posts was displayed on each of our dashboars and refreshed every few minutes. In that way we are again saying that every individual is of equal importance here. This also allows us all to come close by making new connections. Reading new ideas is never going to be a bad idea for any of us. By offering everyone equal exposure of posts it will me that we should all have access to ore links through the web if we like what we read.
OK. Mini rant over. I was and am excited about the introduction of the feed and was inspired to give it a try. I am not trashing the new feature, I hope this is taken as well meaning constructive criticism. Just as I hope some people who read this will give me some constructive criticism on my feed. I have decided to reflect upon experiences of giving support on this site as well as life in general, revovery and hope. We will see how it is recieved!!
i think you make some good points and I think i understand your concerns.
i like the idea of random posts in your feed, although there may be a higher risk then of spamming and trolling.
as a shortcut to that we expect to be able to repost from the 7 Cups feed everyone is subscribed to, which will give us a way just as you suggested to expose people to new folks.
So lovely listeners..we now have this feed feature and well some of you aren't happy some of you are excited! I just wanted to say, @GlenM and many others have spent so much time to make this feature work for us! I personally don't agree with it myself..I mean 7Cups is a support site we shouldn't be bringing a Twitter-like feature into it. I mean some members..that's what they come here to 7Cups to escape from. Social media. Cyberbullying etc.. Do they really wanna come across this kinda stuff? I gotta say though even though I'm against this whole idea I've had the chance to experiment with it, y'know I've reposted a few things, posted some gifs or so and it's kind of sweet. But I'm not sure how this is supposed to help members? @GlenM if you could please clarify in one of @Heather's posts it states (prepare for a long para): "What the feed allows us to do is build a number of positive connections so that that person has a web of supportive people around them that can help pull them forward. Seeing small posts, seeing your images hearted, getting love, connecting with people - all of these things add up and create real change in the persons life." Are you sure about that though?
• "Seeing images hearted" - that could just make the member upset "why do I not have enough followers?"
• "Getting love" - again the same thought "why do I not have enough followers?" and it could make them feel left out as everyone else would be on the feeds and they'd feel excluded!
This is not connecting this is putting our member's down..I have had a repeat member coming to me saying that they have been insulted for not wanting to join in with the following feature! Is this what 7Cups is really turning into? Twitter? Where's the main listening part gone? And why is my repeat member coming to me feeling insulted because others are putting them down for not using this feature, for not supporting it..I'm disappointed actually and several times I have thought of deactivating but I've still stayed because 7Cups is changing..a lot..and the way it's changing others are not agreeing. I feel like I should just stay in PM's now..I'm not trying to stick my nose into where I'm not wanted or anything but truly I care about this matter and before you make a change to the website, why don't you let the users of the site have a say? We use this site everyday and to now see this being turned into a social media like site..I'm not happy at all.Also..Another thing we have learned is that many people are very intimidated by chat. Weve surveyed a number of folks on this and it is not uncommon for people to say that they dont hit connect now because it causes them too much anxiety. This provides another way to make it easier for people to get support.
Due to this. 7Cups hear that some members are intimidated by chat but without the feed those members still have somewhere to go..some members prefer the group support rooms or the forums for support. Couldnt we have stuck to that? Why did the feed feature have to be the alternative? This feed feature is intimidating some members too - just not some listeners, as I mentioned before, so what now? We're getting members here that are wanting to deactivate and leave.
who insulted a member for not wanting to use a feature on the site? what was the context of such an exchange?
@KrinkTheMellowUnicorn, member told me it was happening to them in the community room on the teens side (she's a teen member of mine that I still talk to) and everytime the member goes in there she is insulted because she displayed her opinion/views of not wanting to use the feature. That's not correct at all. Because of this I'm the only person she trusts on here fully now to talk to otherwise she just wants to leave 7Cups :/
well, that's just terrible.
Are there no teen mentors or mods in those chat rooms to prevent that bullying.
That is really unacceptable behavior for this site!
No, that is a big issue. Unmoderated chat rooms. I have been saying this is a problem for quite some time, not enough mods for the amount of chatrooms and suggest d no chatrooms be open without a moderator. But a decision has been made.
i don't think it's quite so black/white. there are ongoing decisions being made, discussed, considered, explored. the site and the way we build it is a process.
with @iara working now on the teen side, for example, perhaps we can revisit this problem and how to address it.
Yes it is totally unacceptable behaviour I agree! When I was a member here for a while on 7Cups (this was before I became a listener) I found that when moderators used to leave the chatrooms, then all hell went loose. I found that members were sharing social media at times, insulting each other, sharing horrible pictures and expressing actively suicidal thoughts. That is a huge problem here that we need to address - not enough mods to cover every room, I'm not sure if that's what it's like on the adult's side of things because I have not yet had the chance to check out the support rooms but if it is then this needs to be addressed soon - but how do we get more mods on the job? I find that some listeners tend to shy away from that role - they don't want to be one due to these particular reasons: triggering topics, triggering behaviours etc. etc.. the list goes on. If we had enough mods to cover the support rooms this unacceptable behaviour would not be taking place and well, maybe I wouldn't have brought this wall of text up but I'm very concerned about the fact that my member is coming to me feeling bullied on 7Cups because she is not using the new feed feature! This is a support site and a member is feeling bullied? This is not right at all..?
@KrinkTheMellowUnicorn, @Pickle68
yes, we collectively need to enforce a zero-tolerance policy on bullying.
being am moderator is a hard job and probably a thankless one. I'm grateful for everyone who does it now.
It sounds like we need to step up recruiting or training of mods. I'll ask the community team what they're thinking on this.
Have people ever experienced similar pressure to post in forums or participate in group chats, etc.?
Yes.
to me that is equally unacceptable. nobody ought to be brow-beaten to participate in things they do not want to.
we all have to look out for each other on this.
if you see something, say something! speak up for the right of others to disagree, to have doubts, to be reluctant.
I'd just like to say that seeing how many followers/following other people have has been incredibly useful to me, to reach out to people I may not have spoken to before. Without it, contact would be minimal and it could result in this feature being very cliquey.
I feel the issues of insecurity and self-esteem is not the fault of the follow feature, because the likelihood is that those who are made to feel insecure by this feature, will have felt previously insecure and with low-self esteem to some extent.
In my opinion, it's a bit like a Vegan attending a restaurant and the restaurant serves them a meat-based dish. The restaurant must provide service for the interest of all, but must provide alternatives for those who do not eat meat. I feel that the same is with the Follow Feature. It's a wonderful idea, and many love it, however we must cater for those who do not wish to utilise it.
I think it needs to be emphasised that this is an optional feature because there is a concern that those who don't use it will be targeted for being 'negative', or for not providing a personal impression on their profile. Some people prefer to have solely a professional function of 7 Cups, and prefer not to venture into the Community side of the website. I think something needs to be done so that those who feel more comfortable not using it don't feel in any way inadequate.
this is a really wise observation!
nobody should be made to feel "less than" for not going into group support chat or forums or for not posting to a feed or following others.
7 Cups offers many facets, all with the goal of helping people grow and progress on their path to health and well being. We may design it so it works best in combination but this is not a one-size-fits-all deal and part of the beauty of it is that you can find your own niche or approach in the larger whole.
Exactly @KrinkTheMellowUnicorn! Everybody has a unique way of making a positive impact here :)
"I feel the issues of insecurity and self-esteem is not the fault of the follow feature, because the likelihood is that those who are made to feel insecure by this feature, will have felt previously insecure and with low-self esteem to some extent."
I'm sorry but I really tried so hard to think of a positive point implied in this part of your post, and I failed. In an earlier post here, I had to take one step back to remind us with the underlying goals and values of the new feature, but now I think I have to take so many steps back to remind us with the values of 7 cups of tea.
I am going to assume that this huge generalization here is accurate and acceptable, for me it is not, but let's say it is the truth. when did we -here, in 7 cups of tea- started avoiding the responsibility for users' well-being, and blaming it on the hurt ones themselves? or are we expecting all users to have high-self esteem and strong confidence? aren't ALL members here because they have mental/social/emotional issues?
I'm confused, I truly support and love the follow feature, my only comment about it is the visibility of who's followed/following on profiles, I even see very valid points in the remaining part of your post, and while it's fine and even healthy to have different opinion about how to apply and serve the values of 7 cups of tea, I'm afraid that this specific part questions these values in the first place. I hope I'm wrong.
@LukaSilver86, I feel you have gravely misunderstood the content of my message, and feel that by virtue of enabling such a cathexis on one sentence without elucidating the context has incredibly misleading effects.
I have not sought to place blame on those who feel less secure, after all this is a support site. My wish was to discuss this with a level head as opposed to writing solely rhapsodically. The message I wanted to bring is that the Follow Feature brings light to some previous elements of people's experience within 7 Cups, whether personal challenges, or objective challenges they face navigating the facilities and working with others. I then having elicited such a point, and provoked thought with that comment, made clear that the service ought to be inclusive to all, whether this is those who feel they have 0 self esteem, or those who feel very secure with themselves.
If you're unsure of anything I'm trying to say, please PM me or simply ask, as I do feel you have in this instance misinterpreted my post.
I am open to seeing how following someone works, but once I am following someone or someone is following me, what do I do?
Is there an faq about how to use following? I may have missed something. If so a link might be adequate.
Thank you.
all it means is that you will now see their posts automatically on your feed screen and you can heart or repost them in your own feed from there if you like.
we are exploring how to add the best approach to commenting for us soon.
