Charlie's notebook

@RarelyCharlie

If you like to post something and get people's impressions on it, does that make you a post-impressionist?

Red pill

Towards the end of last year I noticed some posts in the forum that I thought revealed how very differently different people think about 7 Cups.

Finding old posts is so difficult I'm pretty sure one of them has been removed, but I kept a copy of the text. The other one was in a long thread and I just can't find it now. Both were by people explaining why they were leaving 7 Cups, although the one whose post was removed doesn't seem to have left after all.

7 Cups' red pill, it seems to me, is when people realize (to paraphrase the way one person put it) that the hugs aren't real. Making relationships in the special environment of 7 Cups doesn't provide you with relationships in the real world. If you're not careful, it can starve you of hugs in the real world.

Even when listening is done right (which seems relatively rare), and even when a chatroom is working well (which also seems relatively rare), 7 Cups insists on a barrier of make-believe between us all.

If make-believe is OK with you, for a virtual cuddle you can use my Cuddle Button and type the name anon as your 7 Cups user name. (Only one cuddle per person, please.) For a real cuddle...well...7 Cups doesn't allow that.

I think this is why 7 Cups can never really hope to address real-world issues like loneliness and "deaths of despair". There was a time when 7 Cups' was all about the world, but it seems that never really worked and 7 Cups has become all about this little bubble of 7 Cups' own community.

I hope that maybe one day we can have the confidence to make 7 Cups about the world again, and that, perhaps far in the future, we can find a way to make the hugs real. Other online communities do.

Charlie

Blue pill

7 Cups' blue pill, it seems to me, is when people start to think 7 Cups is more real than the real world.

This came as a surprise to me, learning that some members and listeners use 7 Cups to role-play virtual families, giving each other nicknames like "sis", "mom" and "grandma".

The announcement, or warning, about this a week or so ago was followed up within a couple of hours by a listener offering to be an "older sister" to any members who feel they need that service, despite their profile saying they are not available to chat to new members. I suppose that means they only do the older sister thing in the rooms.

This seems to me to be closely related to the denial and distraction that 7 Cups for the Searching Soul warns against (although the days when that was written seem long ago).

I hope that virtual families and similar role-playing at 7 Cups continue to be resisted.

Charlie

Chatroom access

Although I don't use chatrooms (not at 7 Cups, anyway) I find the recent changes slightly weird.

A new member who wants access to chat rooms has to do five things. I've estimated how long they might take:

Verify their e-mail address (5 minutes)
Take the member oath (5 minutes)
Find a listener who is willing to chat (up to 30 minutes)
Have a 30-message chat (30 minutes)
Review the listener (5 minutes)

Total: 1 hour, give or take 15 minutes or so

A troll who has done this before and who has their own fake listener account to "chat" to can probably create a fake member account and jump through all the hoops in under 30 minutes.

With four more fake listener accounts a troll can get into the topic rooms after four more 30-message chats—maybe 10 minutes each.

So we have a system that will strongly discourage troubled people who have other things on their mind, but is relatively easy for trolls. What could possibly go wrong?

A better system might be to randomly assign every new member to a verified listener, and after a 30-message chat allow the assigned listener to invite the member to join a specific and relevant room. Trolls would still be able to game this process, but at least they wouldn't have an advantage over people genuinely seeking help.

Charlie

Sunday morning doodle

1. On Sunday morning I was bored, and I doodled what a better dialog for members blocking or reporting a listener might look like. You might already have seen this in the discussion thread about it.

Then I had a cup of coffee and I was still bored, so I made the doodle into a working prototype: Draft block dialog. That is almost certainly as far as the idea will go.

2. On Monday, for listeners only, a new system for getting immediate support during a chat was announced. This involves a complex offsite form that, I assume, ends up sending an e-mail to someone. It seems to me this is unlikely to work well. For genuinely immediate support a system would have to be integrated into listeners' user interface and connect the listener to a supporter onsite and in real time.

3. Only a week or so ago someone reminded me that the little coloured blobs that show a listener's current status (offline, busy, online) are difficult to make out. The red offline and orange busy symbols are particularly difficult, and for anyone who has the most common form of colour blindness the green online symbol is not much better.

Long ago, early 2016, I think, but now lost in the dim unsearchable mists of the forum, I actually coded a real solution to this, not just a doodle, and posted the code in a thread where it had been discussed. But it was never adopted by 7 Cups. The user interface was later redesigned behind the scenes at least twice without any solution to the status colours being implemented. Later there was a survey about a further redesign that never happened, and that still wouldn't have addressed the colour problem.

4. And now, today, a listener asked what the buttons at the top of a chat do. That's easy to answer, because they have labels (titles, technically) telling you what they do But on a mobile device you have to know that one tap just displays the label, and a second tap "presses" the button.

However, one of the buttons has no label. One tap "presses" it. I reported this in October 2016, and I got an acknowledgement, but no label was ever added.

Some structural problem deep within 7 Cups prevents it being responsive to the needs of its users, while changes that no one ever seems to have asked for get implemented. I feel this can only be a very bad sign for the long term.

Charlie

Write for the community

I was inspired, one might say, based on some things I have noticed recently, to set out some ideas about writing for the 7 Cups community: Write for the community

I am pessimistic about whether these kinds of things do much good, because they tend to be read only by the kind of people who don't need to read them, and vice versa.

Charlie

Get Together

In the January 2020 Community Update, Glen mentioned the book Get Together so I've been reading it. I'm only half way through at the time of writing. A lot of materials relating to the book can be found on its website: Get Together Book

The book is a sort of extended advertisement for a consultancy called People & Company, a small team that works with organizations to help them build communities. I've been finding the book clearly written and very positive, with plenty of examples. Too positive, really, because it gives the impression that no community ever has any serious problems.

Superficially, the book seems to be a good match for 7 Cups, but I've been noticing some things that don't match at all. I've come to the conclusion that it's difficult to see how the ideas in this book will apply at 7 Cups.

One big mismatch is that in the communities the book is concerned with there's some one thing that everyone actively does. Maybe it's playing basketball, singing, running, cooking or translating—there's some one activity that binds everyone in the community.

These communities are what have been known since the 1990's as communities of practice:

Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.

But 7 Cups doesn't seem to have that one activity that binds the community. People at 7 Cups are here for many different reasons, doing different things. Even listeners are here for different reasons, doing different things.

Another big mismatch is what People & Company calls its manifesto:

Build your community with people, not for them

But 7 Cups has a tradition of hierarchical leadership roles, a listener/member split, and an admin/everyone-else split. So it seems to me that applying the ideas in this book to 7 Cups will be challenging.

I can imagine one of two things happening. Either this book will cause a radical and perhaps disruptive change in the way we think about what a community is and how it works at 7 Cups, or we'll ignore the core ideas in the book and just use it to suggest some lightweight tinkering.

Charlie

@rarelycharlie

Hey charlie, glad to see that you are utilizing the diary feature of the forum. Just going to ask that we are mindful of the community guidelines and forum guidelines in the links that we are posting. Hope you are having a good day. I have edited a few posts to make it so that it meets site guidelines.

@heather225

@Karrot

Hi Karrot. I really like that you are being such an attentive forum mentor. You really do a lot for this community.

I do think you may have made a slight error editing my former post here. I am not meaning to be rude, but we are allowed to discuss medication names in the forum. Forum Guidelines Expanded, specifically Forum Guideline 6

It's totally okay though, we all can forget some of those forum rules sometimes. It can be helpful to say in edits which rule it is, so the member/listener is aware of why edit has been made. I really do like you as a forum mentor, and hope I have not upset you in anyway with this message.

@Mediclife @RarelyCharlie @Karrot

Hi @Mediclife, I do get the feeling I have offened you there, it was not intended and I am sorry for that. You are right there, I don't know what is going on for anyone here in the community. I tried to maintain a respectful tone, but some words may not as come across as kind. It's great to see the teen community participating in these threads, and to grow to be such competent leaders. I do hope to see you here, or around in the forum somewhere again.

No harm wasn intended, and I am sorry if I offended yourself or @Karrot there.

Thanks @RarelyCharlie for alerting me to the fact that @Karrot is taking some self care. I had not been aware or that as had not checked their profile.