We’re thrilled to see the early adoption for Hedgehog! It validates our belief that what people need is an online community, free of the bots and trolls, where they can interact with each other in a positive and productive way and discuss their likes, loves, hopes, dreams, favorite dinners, and news of the day.
One thing that will guarantee the success of that community is new people. As much fun as we’ve all had together already, the only thing better than a new friend is a lot of new friends!
So we’re going to take some steps to encourage that community to flourish. The first, which you’ll see right away, is a move to give all new accounts Member status.
Recall that Hedgehog typically has three tiers of access – Viewer, Member and Contributor.
As we expand, we need more people to more actively participate in the dialogue, and that means fewer folks watching the proceedings and more taking part. Letting all the new folks go straight to Member status, whether invited by an existing Member or not, will help achieve that. (Invites aren’t going anywhere, and will actually be more important than ever. More on that in a second.)
Now don’t worry, we’re not changing anything really fundamental about Hedgehog – it’s early days, we want to welcome people in, but we also want to be mindful of the difference between growing for the sake of growth and growing for the sake of the community.
There will probably come a time that we want to go back to the three-tier system and slow our growth down a bit — and the good news is, for us that’s the literally flip of a switch.
Rest assured, our #1 goal is to build a healthy, productive and welcoming online community. This is the first step in a series of improvements we’re going to make in coming weeks to draw more folks in, draw them closer together and build something really special.
The invite process is still important too – people coming in off the street is one thing, but if someone’s specifically invited by you, you both get the benefits of that association, including sharing Respect points and accessing followers. In the next few weeks we’ll have more new features tied to invites, which will help you really focus on your interests and make it more important than ever to bring people into your network.
It’s good to join, it’s even better to bring others along. We’re glad you’re here with us. Let’s welcome in some more people too!