Update!
All,
Hope you are well! It has been a while since Ive been able to post with any regularity. Fortunately, I have more time - finally - to engage more on things. I wanted to take a minute to share some updates with you.
Startups are tough. Mental health startups are really tough. The thing that separates us is that we are a community of compassionate people dedicated to helping one another out. We are a small city of people aligned on this purpose. Our shared values make our startup considerably more meaningful and purposeful. Ultimately we are and always will be a place where people like you and I can volunteer to help another person by simply listening. That is something special.
One part of running a startup is paying the bills. When we first launched we had a very small team and we were running out of money. We figured out online therapy and that allowed us to keep the lights on. Universities and other organizations came on and that helped too. When we generate more revenue we are able to hire people to further build up our city (better street lights, teachers, firefighters etc.); when we have less revenue we need to let some of those people go in order to best support the city. These times are particularly challenging. More recently, we had to let some people go and this was very difficult for us and has meant less people to help in the city.
Some of you noticed the group room announcement. That is part of the scaling back. Not ideal I know, but we have limited resources at present so we have to be as smart as possible with what we do have. Everyone on the team is working hard to grow revenue so we can scale back up. We are pretty good at this, but things take time to unfold.
Ordinarily we like to give time for discussion and processing before we make a big change, but sometimes we need to act quickly. Ultimately our rooms require an adjustment to help keep them safe as possible. We understand that change can be incredibly hard when youve grown accustomed to certain features or expectations, especially sudden change. It is always your choice if you decide to stay with us and continue utilize the support our community offers. If you do stay, please remember that staff, ambassadors, and volunteer leaders are all human and all deserve to be treated kindly. Just as the rooms, forums, and messaging on 7 Cups should be used with integrity and for emotional support. This is why we do what we do. If you need emotional support and agree to follow our community guidelines we welcome you with open arms. If you would like a chatroom environment free of rules and moderation there are plenty of websites that offer that ability. We will always be here for you if you decide you prefer inclusive, moderated, and safer rooms that are support focused.
If this is where you want to be and you are open to our attempts to increase safety while also surviving the challenges of a startup, then we have each others backs and will steer into problems together solving them one at a time. It isnt always easy but it is always meaningful work and that is what ultimately matters. Thank you for supporting our community team and rallying. We are all in this together.
Onward!!!
[Jill added link]
(Edited by Forum Mentor @Emily619 to fix a typo)
@GlenM I don't have access to the group chats and have both the badges. I think this change was poorly planned/executed, there should have been more of a heads up first of all. Also, locking a chat behind badges, especially one requiring a user to talk to 5 listeners, I think that is kind of ridiculous. I personally have a lot of anxiety and am terrible in 1-1 personal chats but I can talk in group chat with less of a struggle. I honestly feel bad for anyone looking for help who deals with anxiety and isn't comfortable with 1-1 conversations, because I know if that was my only option(at least to start), I'd find somewhere else to go.
@FaTaLMercenery aye big guy! Nice to see a familiar face after the group chats Are gone 😩
What sucks the most is i was considering switching back to group because my one to ones has been kind bad lately like they would just stop responding five seconds in without a trace. @FaTaLMercenery
Hi @fairmindedSummer8911
Really sorry to read you've had poor one2one chats, that's not how it should be at all, in fact more and more listeners are requesting and receiving Quality Coaching, to ensure they can offer members the listening ear they need, but we can't force listeners to take up this offer. We can only hope more do so in the future.
Lucy2 
bet this thread gets deleted
Does this mean I'm not going to be abused anymore?
@GlenM well this is quite sad. I was away for 2 days and was excited to talk to the people in the depression support chatroom. I think we had our moments there. We played skribbl.io at some point and a lot of us really enjoyed it. Idk Im just really sad.
@GlenM I can't get into the 35 and over chat.
@fiddy
It'll only be open for discussions. In the meantime, you're free to always use the sub-community!
I enjoyed coming here for help and coming here to help others. Sharing the good and the bad. Yet the friendships I have made... I cant reach out to those people anymore and we aren't allowed to share personal info so if y'all did close the entire site there goes friendships.
I don't feel herd. I don't feel the support. I feel shut off. As if we weren't important anymore or to begin with. I am staying because I am hoping for the best. But I probably won't talk much.
Did they explain why they did what they did in the first place?@GryffindorMuggleBorn
@GryffindorMuggleBorn
I've lost contact with the only friend and support I have and now I have no reason to keep fighting.
@GryffindorMuggleBorn
I totally agree with you! 7 Cups was a pleasure to come to. Now it's like a ghost town.
@intellectualSea1208
Good luck to everyone. It was beneficial while it lasted
@GryffindorMuggleBorn
I really got benefit when 7 cups had a chat room, to my 35 and over folks much love stay positive and all the best
:(
You ran out of money, I can definitely understand that and be more accepting of the decisions. Startup life is a rough life and nothing, absolutely nothing, comes for free.
What comes to safety, Im affraid, there are unrealistic expectations. The site in general is voulnerable for people who take advantage of people with compromised guards. Further the site is vulnerable for all types of dysfunctional group behavior. This isnt specific to here, it happens online (and offline too), but the conditions surrounding this site do make the site and people here more vulnerable.
How to fix this, well, I dont see any perfect solutions. People are fundamentally different and wired differently. The best effort to find as safe as possible ways to run peer support based services is to trust in self governance of the groups. This isnt really the case currently. We can mute and report, thats all. On 1-on-1 we can block too which is the power. Im pretty sure, unfortunately, that community mods forcing unity in a robotic manner will result in erosion of culture. Its going to fix the problem by having the culture suitable only for very narrow group of people.
A suggestion, if I may. Team up with one of the big(ish) AI/ML houses. They know data and most of them know how to build web services. Let your team focus on things you actually know and understand. Let the online behavioral and service providers focus on what they do.
I really hope 7cups pulls through this. Ultimately it means I hope you, glen, will pull through this. You have my sympathies for the rocky road of startup rollercoaster. It is one to be respected no matter how things turn out. And the beauty in this sad moment is, that while letting go is the hardest thing to do, it is required for staying alive as a startup. I get that and I respect that.
good luck, much love
@lilmango these are imho opinion good points. The idea of AI/ML is a good one, and because I'm in that sector, I've thought many times about how it could operate in practise. It's a toughy though. The amount of contextual awareness necessary to try to interpret the nature of a comment is huge. Exactly the same sentence, in different contexts, could be extremely supportive, or horrendously judgemental and damaging.
One other point on that is scale. Scaling is also a real challenge, and the one factor that makes it difficult to scale in the digital domain is the need for human intervention. Once humans have to be involved, the capacity for scaling is much reduced. I think this is reflected in the reduction in non moderated chat rooms. You really do need moderation, sadly, so unless you have the resources/volunteers to police them, they need to be reduced. Yes, you could have hundreds, but there would be no moderation, some people would get burned, and 7cups stops being a place of emotional support and becomes any old chat site. I think Glen recognised this in his OP, saying there are plenty of places people can go to for that general unmoderated chatting.
@MikeMadrid please don't make a vulnerable community a playground for artificial intelligence and machine learning.
We've seen FB and other social networks doing enough damage with their ai/ml.
IMHO that's not a good thing for such communities.
@kindSoul10 I do agree with you. My point is that using AI/ML is incredibly difficult to get right for something like 7 cups. The problem is I believe that in the interactions between two or more people, who decides if the input that one person is giving is a legitimate and constructive contribution, or an attempt to damage and trigger another ? It may seem obvious to you, or to me, or to a consensus of people, but for a machine, it's very difficult indeed to get it right.
Ideally, we would police ourselves, but I guess the recent decision has shown that this is just not practical. A chat room with vulnerable people needs full time moderation and I believe that currently, only a human being can do that. Current AI technology just cannot get the contextual sensitivity anywhere near correct, and the censoring of the wrong people can have very very negative effects indeed.
@MikeMadrid sorry, I misunderstood then. Thanks for explaining. :)
@MikeMadrid It seems to me it's the other way around. Once humans can be involved, the capacity for scaling is much enhanced. Look at how Tumblr will moderate its group chats, announced yesterday. Every user will be a moderator, in effect. It's the same way we game the search engines with our crowdsourced Questions & Answers section.
The difficulty is when there's a perceived need for top-down control. Once that's embedded in the culture it's challenging to scale anything.
Charlie
@RarelyCharlie
fully agree there Charlie and that was my point too. AI/ML is then handy to spot the ones who try to rig the system. And to make the gathered data useful in a safe manner to protect privacy.
@RarelyCharlie I see your point, and it's a fair one. If you have all the people in the chat acting as moderators, then you can multiply as much as you like. I think the difference is that 7cups is necessarily a safe place, so there has to be some kind of responsibility there for what happens when someone enters a 7cups chat room and starts to experience hostility. I've seen it myself on here, just observing what's going on in a chat room, where someone opens up about a vulnerability and another member will start to mock or abuse them, and no one else pitches in. If that happens on tumblr, fine. But it should not happen on here. Sadly, the community is too easy to join, and difficult to control, to be able to demand responsible behaviour at all times.
My point though is a practical one, not a principle one. In principle I totally agree that human moderation is wonderfully scalable, and that AI can in principle do great things. It's in practice on here where I think it fails, and it explains why, I think, they have had to make the decisions they have made.
@glenm Thanks for adding more clarity to the decision. Start ups are unimaginably tough to manage, and I know that people that don't have experience of it can find it quite difficult to understand how hard it really is. Toughest part is letting people go, knowing that others too will suffer as a result.
I've thought, often, long and hard about what makes it special here. When I talk to other people about it, many are truly shocked about the nature of the service. It literally sounds too good to be true. It's like free money. The notion that a volunteer will put themselves forward to listen to other people's problems and not judge them is of such immense value that it's hard to believe it can be done, and on such a scale.
But of course, it can be done, and it is being done.
The fundamental "value proposition" is that : people can get emotional support by talking anonymously and confidentially to a volunteer whose only interest is to help. And that must be preserved. All of the variations and additional activities that are great, really do add value, but are not sustainable with current funding, must necessarily be suspended so as to not risk the survival of the core activity.
just when you thought 7cups couldn't get any creepier. now before you get to talk amongst each other in a group setting ypu must endure 1 on 1 at least 5 conversationd with at least 5 cult members. extreme vetting or a poor attempt at brainwashing? i'll let you be the judge
@reliableSpring6321 lmao roy you're taking it really hard there buddy.
@ElectrolytesSmell this latest step in the 7cups agenda happens to coincide with my society's amped up attempts at removing the first amendment, so yeah, i'm a little bent