Charlie's notebook

Last comment, promise: Or they keep him busy running after those business goals, insted of doing his best to build a strong community.

@RarelyCharlie

This is a good conversation - hope it gains some traction with people that can make it happen.

One more thing - wondering why we even have two categories "Listeners" and "Verified Listeners"? Why aren't ALL our listeners vetted and verified? Are we telling our visitors who are already deeply distressed that on one side we have proven, good listeners, but you are taking your chances with these other listeners?

We should make it as easy as we can for the visitor to connect with a good listener without having to sort through a lot of ambiguous choices.

Also, one shouldn't have to sort by availability. One should see immediately, once one is admitted through the "front desk" and chatted with a human receptionist (troll and emergencies filter) and created their account, be able to see a button front and center to CHAT NOW with Verified Listeners (availability is assumed because these would be the only ones you would see) or Therapists. Group chats (as much as I like them) and Forums are secondary, and should be seen further down the page.

Don't you think?

@quietCloud22 Yes, I see your point that people who are currently called Verified Listeners should just be called Listeners. But we would still need something like Trainee Listeners for people who are inexperienced and unproven as listeners.

The general request queue is inside-out, or upside-down, or something, as I think I remarked somewhere else. When I began typing this there were 13 chat requests in the queue but 93 listeners online. So it's the listeners who should be in a queue. Members should not have to wait at all under these circumstances.

The maximum wait right now is 10 minutes. That's absurd, with 93 listeners available!

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie

Maybe we could collaborate on a draft of a website that might work better for 7cups? We could share screenshots here and get feedback from your other followers as we go? I'm a graphic designer and I have a little time now between jobs - only if you think it would be fun and not stressful. NO UNHEALTHY STRESS OR PRESSURE *she said in all caps bold.* No sandwiches allowed either.

@RarelyCharlie

@quietCloud22 Yes, maybe we could, in principle, but personally I don't think I would feel happy working on something that would very likely never be implemented.

A website that might work better for 7 Cups is an interesting thought, though. If it were implemented, I suppose it would be a competitor

So the next thought is: who would use it instead of 7 Cups? If we knew of a bunch of people whose experience has been that 7 Cups does not meet their needs, and if they wanted to create a website that works in a different way, that could perhaps be fun and not stressful. Perhaps. Unhealthy stress, pressure and s*ndwiches are a risk with any project, I think.

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie

The bunch of people that I personally know and know of that have left 7cups for greener pastures on other servers (now close to 80 on the server I am familiar with, and I hear that there are many more on other servers) are dealing with serious personal issues. I think it really speaks for the supportive bonds that they've developed in group chats on 7cups, which when dissolved here, they regrouped elsewhere. Whether these people could be enlisted to advise on a new website, I don't know. I think they may have enough challenges as is.

But I'm game to throw some restructural ideas on the table, Charlie. I like to put things in order, fix things and make things work - makes me feel constructive and useful. [insert 10 duck emoticons in a row]

@quietCloud22

I think the question for those 80 people, and the others, is: what are the challenges they face? Unless that's the starting point, a new website would just be a solution looking for a problem.

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie Oh no, there's a bug in the duck generator

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie

@quietCloud22 Would that be Discord? It seems like an obvious place for group chat to go, but I'm not familiar with it.

My main social network is Dreamwidth, a member-supported blogging community (forked from Livejournal, which went rapidly downhill after it went commercial, and was subsequently sold to a Russian company). Vaguely similar to 7c's forums, in roughly the way a Tesla is similar to a scooter. Mostly I find blogging much closer to the way l want to communicate than chat.

Old-timers may remember the alt.callahans newsgroup on Usenet -- that was the earliest online support groups that I know of, predating the web, and I miss it. There are spin-off communities on Dreamwidth and elsewhere.

@stressBear Yes, it's Discord.

Dreamwidth sounds interesting. In my personal life I have my own website where I do blog on and off when I have stories to tell or fabricate, but sometimes I just like to hang with people and not say much, which is where the new 35+ location is handy. Interesting that some people just like to be there sometimes and not chat (like they used to here), just feel the connection with other humans when they feel stressed or lonely.

@quietCloud22 Dreamwidth is free, with no ads -- you can pay if you want more user icons and a few other things that you don't need in order to participate. You have a reading list -- people you're following -- and an access list -- people who can read your non-public posts; you can apply filters to both. All you need to set up an account is an email address, and it isn't public unless you want it to be. You can browse without an account, just like you can here, and some users accept anonymous comments.

@RarelyCharlie

@RarelyCharlie

Just added a book to my Listeners' Reading List, a book about politics, oddly. More explanation in my brief review in the main thread. It now seems more relevant than when I started reading it, in the light of the current discussions about the future of this community.

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie

Here are my random, ancillary thoughts:

I found this podcast of an interview with the author of The Fractured Republic on NPR.

These are the good ole days: Anticipation by Carly Simon

Anti-nostalgic attempts to present history fairly and accurately. Ken Burns' The West and The Roosevelts, and also World War II in Colour. (We saw these on Netflix. More Ken Burns that we haven't seen also here on PBS)

Love this TED talk by a former "hate church" member, Megan Phelps Roper. (Did I see this somewhere in 7cups' self-help guides? Can't remember.)

Hope this isn't too much (AGAIN) :0

@quietCloud22 No, no, that's an impressive collection of related material!

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie

Oh, good. I do try to be helpful and keep the conversation going

And on a more personal note, the hippie movement died out just as I was trying to find my revolutionary wings, and suddenly all the good music was gone and all one heard on the radio night and day was disco. That was such a violent cultural switch, I don't think I ever recovered from it!

@quietCloud22 You have to stick with the good music

Charlie

@quietCloud22 Fortunately folk never really went away.

My responses to the 7 Cups Strengths and Weaknesses Community Assessment.

What are the top 3 strengths of 7 Cups?

• The basic idea of active listening by volunteers is well established (since 1953) and it works well. For example, a member can come to 7 Cups, and (if they are lucky) have a chat with a listener that transforms the way they feel about the challenges they face in life.
• The basic idea of an online community is also well established (since?) and it works well. For example, a member can come to 7 Cups, ask a question or post an idea, and (if they are lucky) receive friendly and supportive replies that can lead to extensive contact with other members and listeners.
• The 7 Cups brand is well known and respected in some circles. For example, 7 Cups is in the list of resources Tumblr displays when someone searches for any keyword that could indicate they need help.

What are the top 3 weaknesses of 7 Cups?

• Over-reliance on the OKR approach to management. For example, OKR can lead to misprioritizing things that happen to be easy to measure, and to meaningless proxy targets when things happen to be difficult to measure. A very obvious specific example is over-attachment to the "320,000 listeners" number. See also: Goodhart's Law
• Over-reliance on the discredited "shit sandwich" approach to communication. For example, this can lead to resources being misallocated to things that are OK, while resources are denied for things that need urgent attention, which, either buried in a sandwich or not sandwiched at all, get little traction. There have been many specific examples in the forum, although @7CupsCommunity (after a difficult start) has recently demonstrated a more rational approach in the community.
• Severe chronic failure of the tech and community factions within 7 Cups to collaborate effectively. For example, the recent feed fiasco.

If you could wave a magic wand...

Redefine 7 Cups as a dedicated emotional wellbeing organization and outsource the technology platform. If someone else does some aspect of emotional wellbeing better than we do, we should get out of their way and actively support them. If someone else does some aspect of emotional wellbeing badly, we should make it our business to outperform them.

What is the thing that you are most proud of about on your work on 7 Cups?

I'm most proud that as a listener I've been able to help some people.

How has that personally impacted you?

The impact on me personally has been mixed—7 Cups is partly a place of good vibes and satisfaction, but partly a place of unhealthy conflict and stress.

Additional information

Are our community's periodic bouts of alienation a bug (denying support to some of those who most need it) or a feature (rightly purging people who have damaging negative attitudes)? This needs some thought.

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie Me again. Well said! You can't make a shit sandwich taste like paté, even when it's made with the finest brioche, and if customers are complaining about the cuisine, it's time to make a change. But I am concerned that you say that the impact on you personally is that 7cups is "partly a place of unhealthy conflict and stress." I hope that you look after yourself and walk away for awhile when it starts to get to you.

I've been on the lookout for books about psychotherapy, and it's been difficult to find good ones to include in my reading list. So it was interesting to come across this review of therapy books in general, posted yesterday by a well known psychiatrist: Book Review: All Therapy Books

Each of [the books] on their own can be convincing. But they should be taken in the context of All Therapy Books, which as a category are pretty worrying.

The comments thread is also good. (I do not appear there )

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie

Thanks for the link to Slate Star Codex. I started off reading the review and then got sidetracked by the hyperlinks to various other articles on the site, so it might be awhile before I get through it. I really like this website!

@RarelyCharlie That article is weird... The claims the author makes are totally opposite to my experiences. I haven't read in a single place that 'My type of therapy is the only one and the best one' - the serious people all know that what matters most is the relationship. Also, I have nowhere seen that anyone is to be expected to have a sudden, complete turnaround healing experience, as the author claims those books state. But maybe, I've been looking only at the 'right' books, or at least at a different set of books and videos from the ones the author had looked at. I'm not into 'hype' stuff, but tend to sort through things thoroughly before I read them. If they sound too 'advertising', I'm going to be careful about the contents.

@cloudySummer

But a lot of it does seem true.

As I often like to say it, "We do not have a reliable link between con-science and hard science".(or say between psychology and neurology). Basically every therapy has tried to insinuate that. Most have not been as successful as they would have liked to. Truth be told, we are not evn 100% sure of what is and isn't mental illness at this point. Their characterisation and pathologisation is often affected by the societal standards of what being mentally il is. Is today's depression yesteryear's hysteria? Why do I believe the DSM when it says that being lgbtq+ is not a mental disorder when the dsm itself is riddles with controversy by psychologists and psychaitrists over what is and isn't a mental illness diagnosis? (Read up on the dsm 5 controversy jut in case. Also I am not lgbtq+ phobic in ay way, I just used it as an example).

To be honest our active listening at 7Cups is no exception to all of this. I have personally seen people who genuinely don't benifit from it. The only thing I like about our kind of talking cure is that we let the client do the talking, and support them just like they wuld expect a good friend to. But sometimes even actual friends aren't enough.

@IntrovertedDreamer73409

@IntrovertedDreamer73409

@IntrovertedDreamer73409

The only t0hings I guess we know for sure are that suffering of some kind exists that sometimes can be helpd with our "therapies".

Just added another book to my Listeners' Reading List, a book about play therapy this time. But what goes on in the play therapy is really active listening by an expert psychologist who gets it almost perfect. The couple of times she makes mistakes reveal just how good at it she is the rest of the time.

More in my brief review in the main thread.

A delight in every way, I thought, although it's an old book that makes some people very angry these days.

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie I read that book many years ago and remember thinking that it was wonderful. Made me think of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden which I read around the same time - you might enjoy this article I just ran across about the author of that book, Joanne Greenberg. Her's is another recovery story.

...and it should be "Hers" not "Her's", sorry.

https://writingexplained.org/hers-or-hers

@quietCloud22 I have started reading I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. Thank you for the suggestion

Yes, "hers" never has an apostrophe. But the linked explanation doesn't explain anything. You could have written "Deborah's is another recovery story" and that would have needed an apostrophe. Apparently "her's" had an apostrophe long ago, according to The Grammarphobia Blog.

I think it would be a good idea to allow everyone to edit their own posts in the forum, as long as no one has replied yet. (Editing a post that someone has replied to could invalidate the reply.)

Maybe I'll try this again:

Charlie

Now that's just ducky!

While we are on the subject, Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes (has a "Charly" in it!) and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Birthmark are all about messing around with people that might be okay just as they are. They are both short, pithy stories you could breeze through that you might remember forever, like I do.

@RarelyCharlie

@quietCloud22 Too much to read But thank you! They are now on my list

Charlie

I enjoyed reading I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. Fascinating and thought-provoking. I was kind of disappointed when it suddenly ended, almost like all that had happened was simply switched off.

Now I'm reading The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Muller, which relates to Goodhart's Law and so on that I mentioned earlier.

Charlie

The above comment is in regard to my previous comment, "Her's is another recovery story." The proper possessive use of "her" should be "hers".

At The New York Times yesterday an opinion piece tried to look into the future: A Better Social Media World Is Waiting for Us I was unconvinced, on the whole, but some of the ideas are interesting:

Social media is broken. It has poisoned the way we communicate with each other and undermined the democratic process. Many of us just want to get away from it, but we cant imagine a world without it.

Some of it has been well known for a long time, but the article presents it as novel:

Slow, human-curated media would be a better reflection of how in-person communication works in a functioning democratic society.

This is just describing one of the main differences between a chatroom and a forum.

Youre going to see people saying, ‘I met so-and-so, and that becomes your street cred, [an author] explained.

People who arent willing to meet up in person, no matter how persuasive their online personas, simply wont be trusted.

That would be revolutionary at 7 Cups where we get to trust people online but are encouraged to fear meeting them in person. Even so, it's kind of true of the 7 Cups' spinoff groups that you can only join if you know someone who knows someone.

Maybe one day there will be apps that manage trust by understanding how people are connected with other people both online and in real life. This already happens to a limited extent when you log in to one app or website using your credentials for a different app or website. I can vaguely imagine this sort of thing extending inside the app in order to filter who can communicate with you, keeping out trolls and spammers, and introducing you to people you might like.

Charlie