Tesla has closed it's forums!

[chowbenter]

They have made their forums Read only & launched a new social platform What do you make of that? Tesla has closed its forums to launch a social platform and fans are not happy - Today News Post

 

[Stuart Wright]

They have made their forums Read only & launched a new social platform What do you make of that? Tesla has closed its forums to launch a social platform and fans are not happy - Today News Post

I'm not surprised at all.

• It's a bad idea for any commercial organisation selling or providing any service (like a retailer or manufacturer) to create a forum. Happy customers are not motivated to post their feedback, whereas unhappy customers are. Hence forums often (usually) contain way more posts which reflect negatively on the organisation than positively.
• Customers post questions with an expectation that they will get a response quickly since this is the official forum of the organisation. This means the organisation has the burden of providing staff to reply to these questions.
• Staff are also required to moderate the forums, and this is a significant job which gets more significant as the forum grows. The bigger the forum, the greater the need for staff. It will be expensive.
• Despite needing staff, the forum won't generate direct income. In fact, since it has net negative comments, it's less likely to generate income from more sales. Therefore it is costly.
• Moderators are more likely to be accused of biased moderation if they delete posts or ban people (which is necessary in any popular forum). If someone, for example, makes a complaint about the organisation in a way which is unacceptable (bad language etc.) and their post gets deleted, they are going to accuse the staff of the forum, and therefore the organisation itself of silencing critics. And they will do it on other places on the internet.
• And in this case specifically, there are already many, many Tesla owners' forums and Facebook communities who share information, tips and tricks so that Tesla itself doesn't really need to have a forum.

And lastly, that forum looks horrible. If I were advising them, after advising them not to have a forum, I would advise them to use Xenforo software (like us) which, being the market leader, means that people are more likely to be familiar with how it works (from using other forums) and it has all the tools needed for the public to use and the staff to manage the forums.

There are more issues, but these are the ones which come immediately to mind.