As of late, Reddit has been my favorite online community. It has a similar feeling to the forums I frequented in the late 90’s and early 00’s. Which having contributed more than 20,000 posts as both community member and moderator of music, tech and gaming boards growing up — I have a soft spot for.
Anyway there was a thread recently that caught my eye: a Q&A between Microsoft IE 9 developers and the Reddit community. Naturally that would spike drama so I do offer kudos to Microsoft for being willing to open themselves up to Reddit. But their product team took a bashing not so much for the product as much as their responses.
As Reddit community member mrmojorisingi pointed out:
…the whole IE9 affair was pretty ridiculous…on Microsoft’s part. They came to an unabashedly geeky, techier-than-average site, and when asked technical questions they replied with marketing BS. What did they expect?
Edit: For those who missed the thread, it’s here. This is the particular answer I was thinking of:
Redditor:
Would it have killed you to have included a built-in spellchecker?
IE9 Team:
Appreciate the feedback. We will continue to listen to feedback from users and developers like you to deliver on the most important scenarios. For IE9 we really focused on what customers, partners and developers told us mattered most, their sites. Developers wanted the ability to create richer and more immersive experiences on the web, and so we invested in fully HW accelerating HTML5 through Windows. Check out the WebVizBench site on beautyoftheweb to get a sense for what’s now possible with GPU powered HTML5 enabled by IE9. Web sites partners and their users wanted their experiences to feel more like native apps in Windows, so we focused on how we could make those sites shine and seamlessly integrate into your Windows 7 experience. Pinning, Jump List, snap, clean new UI are all reflects of that focus. There are “n” number of browser features to do, but at the end of the day it’s the sites you use that matter most and that is where we put our focus.
In terms of extensibility developers can build add-ons to fill gaps that they are passionate about. A quick search on http://www.ieaddons.com/en/search/?search=spell turns-up a couple of options for spell-checking.
Reddit, collectively:
You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.
Indeed. As user phathiker pointed out in the original thread:
is there a tl;dr version? there is WAY too much fluff in there and I can’t be bothered with getting the actual answers to the questions.
To which user ironchefpython replied with a tl;dr version (with answers to all of the questions, but here is summary of just the spellcheck question):
Redditor
Would it have killed you to have included a built-in spellchecker?
IE 9 Team
We don’t feel that spell check is an important feature.
Communications pros – don’t do this. If you bring your marketing speak to any social channels and try to provide a response which includes everything simply to cya, you are disrespecting that community and their time.
Either chat with them honestly or don’t at all. To do anything else makes you seem like a jerk and that you don’t care even if that’s not the case.
Finally: why not simplify your message so this doesn’t happen to you. Longer form content is still highly relevant, but it has to be done strategically and you have to build permission for it.