Hi all, we’ve been developing a policy and plan document for Haiku’s social media accounts and want your feedback on the draft document.
The document does specifically mention Twitter, but this policy can be applied to all of Haiku’s social media accounts on various platforms.
To view the document and leave comments through Google Docs, please use this link: Social Media Policies and Plan - Google Documenten
Thanks!
25 posts were split to a new topic: Collaborative docs, what tools and where to host
I´m not a marketing person at all so I´m going to stay out of this discussion as much as I can.
But 2 quick things:
As others have mentioned: Google Docs is very inconvenient. Couldn´t even read the document in Google Chrome on my android phone, had to use the app. Why didn´t you just write an article here on the website?
I took a quick look at the twitter page for the Tenacity audio editor (because I check out every audio editor I can get my hands on 
), which was mentioned as a positive example. No offence intended, but to me it reads more like a personal self help blog (which in itself is not a bad thing of course) than one of a software project. Please don´t do this for Haiku, stick to the technical stuff.
The goal was to collect feedback on this. Then it will be a somewhat “internal” document for the marketing team to decide what to do with the social media accounts.
The people currently in charge of the social accounts were not comfortable with handing them over to the marketing team without such a policy in place. You know, just in case the marketing team decides to use the account to promote cryptocurrencies, send annoying sponsored tweets or interjecting with no reason into unrelated conversations, or do other aggressive marketing tactics we’d rather avoid.
I think the choice of example projects may not have been the best, and reflects more the interests of the person who wrote this document, rather than well-established and recognized open source projects. Also, things in some of the selected projects evolve very fast, and maybe the current state of the linked pages is not what was meant as an example at the time?
I like the draft, I also believe that disputes or loud disagreements between developers or other parts of the team and around that have nothing to do with the public. We are people and people do not always agree that there is an exchange and sometimes different opinions is quite normal. The user should feel that they are dealing with professionals and not small children.
In general, thinking should go more towards the user. Far too much is still being done, talked and judged from the developer’s point of view. The user, i.e. the generally called dao (dumbest user to be assumed) should always be included in the thinking. This applies to all areas: programs, descriptions, announcements, guides, forum, news …
LibreOffice has an established marketing presence on Twitter and on their website. It serves as a good example on how do to proper marketing.
Selected projects on the document are not good indeed. Tenacity already looks like a dead project, and the Twitter account is not handled professionally. Andreas’ account is a personal account with lots of self-improvement crap (no offence to the Serenity project). Krita’s is okay, but too much external promotion (I’d definitely turn retweets off).
Yes that could very much be so. In retrospect I could have worded my post a bit more carefully, I didn’t want to put down anybody’s work. What I really wanted to say is that I hope that Haiku’s social media accounts stay close to the technical developments of our operating system that we’re all here for.
Thanks for the explanation, point taken. 
That part of the document which includes the example accounts was written by @n0toose, so it would probably be better for them to respond to that feedback.
I’m surprised by the fact that people hate Google Docs, I think we’ve done something similar with Google Docs and I don’t think anyone said anything. Anyhow, now I know that people really don’t like it, so I will use an alternative platform for next time.
As to whether we could do a post on the website, the feedback and editing process would be through a pull request on GitHub, and that means that fewer people see it because not everyone on the forums uses GitHub (or wants to use GitHub).
We also recognized that our audiences between Twitter and Mastodon, and produced different material for both platforms, instead of treating both of them as an RSS feed. We kept the technical explanations to Mastodon. I think that the toots on Mastodon look much more professional and representative of something that I would absolutely stand behind. I was the person mostly responsible for that account, although multiple team members managed both accounts:
The audience of Haiku on Twitter is mostly technical, so I agree that “it should stick with the technical stuff”.
It’s true, the document is outdated and I would delete that part if I still had the ability to do so, but I don’t see how the project being dead changes anything. We regularly interacted with people, reposted what other people say about the project, and shared a lot of contributor perspectives. Excuse me if the memes that were tweeted during the first two days as a result of attempting to increase engagement as a result of me trying to take advantage of the fact that everyone was talking about the project (since a Twitter account that tweets relevant material that drive engagement would get recommended to other people) left a toxic aftertaste, and, as a result of that experience, I think I can confidently also agree that this should not be repeated.
We were quite new to this and we were trying to figure out how this could possibly work. Me and others were trying to balance our very good knowledge of the platform and humor, with our highs and lows. You should scroll down further, around tweets in August-September. The direction of the account changed from spreading the word and progress screenshots to dedicating 10 tweets as to what happened, particularly because of misinformation that similar projects, such as Glimpse, were also met with and I think that these comments are missing quite some nuance here.
I think that failing should be considered as acceptable in our situation, particularly as we were under huge amounts of pressure and because our project reached 4k stars before we even got to write a single line of code. We ultimately burned out as a result.
Here are a couple of positive examples made by myself, which were the ones I meant in the document and, according to my opinion, should be reproduced, back around that time when the document was authored:
All the posts that I provided are examples of what I would actually like to see Haiku do – an actively developed, diverse project that has sustained through two decades – specifically, and those were the examples that I had in the back of my head when I wrote the document. I think that bringing up this example without explaining the context or providing some insight into the mistakes that should have probably been avoided was a mistake, but I completely forgot about this document until now. I’d like to emphasize on not treating social media as a one-way RSS feed – even if our attempt was flawed, it absolutely brought results of 1.2k followers, both the right (at least 766 on Mastodon, more “professional”, even if we did attempt to use tongue-in-cheek humor but ultimately ended up avoiding it) and the wrong way.
I think the document should be modified with those examples specifically and mention the mistakes that the three of us brought up, because Tenacity wasn’t Haiku – and this is evident by the signs of adolescent identity experiments, the fact that it attempted to indulge itself in meme culture in order to counter the fact that it was turned into a “victim” of it, and the fact that we put forward a facade of getting along with people over the integrity of the way we looked. I think that we were still taken seriously by the people that actually followed our work. Either way, I definitely believe that I’ve learned and grown as a result of these missteps.
Not to mention that Tenacity was hampered by a meme fork of Audacity whose community was actively hostile towards other forks. Haiku doesn’t have that problem either.
That’s all fine and fun, but it is a bit strange that we would use that as a reference for what to do in Haiku, don’t you think? Not as a personal attack on the work that was done there, but I have two problems with it:
So, it is probably better to have a look at social media accounts of well-established projects instead, I think? And also have a few examples of “here is what to do” and “here is what to avoid” would really help. I don’t think the doc has any example of the latter. And if the policy is based on existing examples, it should use something reliable in the long term. This can’t be the case if you link to just a Twitter account, because overtime, the account will change. So you need to link to specific tweets/posts/toots, or at least a date range (and probably a good idea to keep copies of the things directly in the document).
I think this is a misrepresentation. I did open up with saying, directly, in the first sentence, “Conflict of interest, I ran this account”. I am not sure what else could be needed from me.
That happened after the document was authored as an example of “I personally tried partially imitating what I wanted to do here, I know how this works!”. Bad idea, in retrospect. However, I’d very much be for including the following accounts, as also mentioned in the form of an annotation in the document:
I absolutely agree with this. Specifically the pitfall part, because, as I documented in my previous document, the lack of limits/basic standards to set is a bad thing.
Hi,
Sorry, I did not mean this as an attack on you and indeed you had already mentionned the conflict of interest.
Indeed a lot of the problems couldn’t have been anticipated when the document was written. That’s OK, now let’s improve the document and pick a selection of different accounts and be a bit more specific (link to specific social media interactions, that will remain there even if the account changes hands/policy later).
Hello there!
Regarding this topic, the twitter account @haikunauts as well as the website (haikunauts.home.blog) are available to be used too for social media.
Actually, the past months I have been busy with a big change in life and haven’t had much time to do anything related to Haikunauts, therefore, any help would be appreciated. And, if this account and blog can serve the purposes of promoting Haiku, I’d be glad to help. Just my free time has been cut shorter leaving less space to add contents.
Be happy!
Anyone using profiles on Fediverse to promote Haiku?
Maybe it makes sense to do official account on #FOSSTODON?
https://hub.fosstodon.org/longevity-and-fosstodon/
We already have an official Mastodon account (not on the Fosstodon instance though): Haiku (@haiku@mastodon.xyz) - Mastodon