Joined a bunch of FB groups recently across various interests (gardening & seed swap, herp groups, rodent feeder breeders, plant ID requests, local garage sales etc) and yesterday an admin (not mod) started a thread - in a plant chatter group, of all places - stating that next week they’re cleaning the member list out, and to type “agree” if you want to stay in the group.
Is this common? It makes sense on an amateur level I guess, but this seems (seemed?) like a well-organized group and I have never encountered this requirement before. It’s a large group so for their idea to even work, you’d have to manually cross reference a few hundred profiles.
Would you want to be part of a FB group that randomly threw this out there?
Bonus Q: moderators are higher in the hierarchy than admins right?
tip-tapping away by phone, but why would you care?
For your second Q, no, admins are usually higher than mods. They have access to more functions, such as creating forums and performing board maintenance, adding new features, and they appoint the mods.
They may feel that they’ve got a lot of dead wood (heh) on the member list, and want to clean it up. Typing “agree” means you’re a real person and that you’re active enough to have seen the note. It’s not unreasonable. You sometimes see similar things on email newsletter lists.
I suppose that, as a strategy for clearing out bots, and potentially reducing opportunities for real users (whether diligent or diffident) to get spammed into disinterest, it can be an effective way of distinguishing real Facebookers from AIs.
Choosing “Type AGREE” as the code phrase for keeping oneself subscribed might not be the smartest approach, though. I imagine there are more than a few people, who, when they see that phrase, reflexively scroll past the entire entry. The only WORSE code phrase I can think of is “Type AMEN.”
And it strikes me (intuitively, at least) that the larger groups would find such a weeding-out tool to be more useful and necessary. In my limited experience, the smaller ones tend to be invitation-only, and less likely to accumulate a significant number of bots. A larger, join-at-will group can be rejoined if you get booted off the rolls, right?
When I first saw this thread I thought it was about arguments that sometimes happen one-on-one between FB page admins and members. This happened to me when I got into a political argument with the admin of a Facebook page which had nothing to do with politics. Well maybe in the most tangential sense, because everything does sooner or later. My point is that this argument was off-page, just between us as two individual FB users, but she still banned me from her page. Banned me good and hard, so not only could I not post, but I couldn’t even find or read the page anymore. And I had been quite active on it.
Given that facebook controls who even sees given posts via algorithm, this is probably a dumb idea implemented by someone who doesn’t understand how facebook works.
They’re going to end up pruning people who never saw the post at all.
“Agree” seems like weird word to use. It makes me think they are going to edit the note to say something like “Bob’s Motorcycles is the best motorcycle dealership in Nebraska!” and then try to sell the group to Bob’s Motorcycles
Why aren’t they just deleting actual spammers whenever they post spam? Sounds like getting kicked out is a good thing and good riddance. There’s no shortage of decent facebook groups that don’t randomly and arbitrarily delete members.
Yes, I belong to one limited-space Facebook group where they do a roll call once or twice a year. They try to keep membership to 100 people, so as people drop off or don’t participate regularly, new people get added in. This may not apply to your situation with a large group that has open membership, but it’s not an unusual practice, in my experience. In my group, it’s not to clear out bots and spammers – there are none – it’s to weed out inactive users to make space for more participatory ones.
It’s the internet. There’s an infinite amount of space. I’ve never understood these kinds of arguments.
Same with Wikipedia. Why shouldn’t there be a wiki page about that big tree down the block that everyone in the neighborhood grew up climbing and swinging on? Screw “notability”. People who aren’t interested in that topic will never see it, and it isn’t like it’s taking up more than a few bytes of what is essentially an infinite amount of storage in a data center somewhere.
Why shouldn’t your facebook group have more than 100 people? If they aren’t participating, it’s not like they’re clogging up the feed or anything. They’re completely inert. And if they decide to participate more later, well, then they’re active again. I just don’t see any downside to inclusion.
We have plenty of lurkers here on the Dope. Sometimes they go years between posts. If they never become spammers or abusive jerks, none of us even know they’re there. And maybe one day they’ll become active posters again. We’d be poorer as a community if we just deleted these people for inactivity at random.
What is the practical functional difference between a group limited to 100 users who’re occasionally curated to make sure they’re mostly all active, versus a group with unlimited membership with no curation where there’s ahundred-ish active members and X hundred or thousand inactive users?
If a group essentially means a page or group of pages they all contribute to, then inactive members don’t add any burden to anyone. They never post and you never know or care whether they read.
So what’s the point of curation here? This member culling would make perfect sense in the Verrye Olden Dayes of photocopied and snail-mailed group newsletters. It hardly made sense in the old days of email cc: groups. It sure doesn’t make any sense (to me) for 2017.
In our case, we are a close-knit, referral based collection of independent Chicago photographers, so it’s a lot nicer for use to have a small, tight-knit community that we can depend on than a large community. It works for me, and I belong to other organizations which I wish were more tightly vetted. I really don’t want any jackass who calls themselves a photographer in the group. I want somebody who shares our level of quality and professional, is an independent full-time professional, and is reasonably invested in the group through regular input.
And as for why it matters for me–in this particularly instance, which is partly professional, I prefer a tighter, smaller group with active participants to a large group. It gives me a better sense of the true paricipatory group size when I know it has 100 people that are actively involved and personally vetted vs a group of 1000 people whom I don’t know and have no idea how active they are. It’s easier for me, at least, to forge professional relationships in this sort of environment vs a loose “hey, everyone can join” type of environment.
It’s the same amount of time, no matter how many recipients are on the list.