In other LI group I manage, I was looking for a specific discussion thread. I knew the discussion title (and body) contained “charter”. Search as I may, LI discussion search could not find the discussion. But wait, as *I* started the discussion, so I scanned through “Discussions I’ve Started”. No luck. But wait, I remember marking the discussion as “Managers Choice”. No luck. All the discussions I marked as “Manager Choice” no longer showed up under the “Managers Choice” view.

As luck should have it, outside of LI, I sent an email to the active members of the group (it’s a small group) including a short URLs to the pertinent discussion threads which I marked as “Managers Choice”. All the links worked and found the discussion. Frustrating that I can’t rely on LI to find a discussion thread. What use are discussions if they’re easily lost?

I suspect this is done to economize on screen real-estate, but substantially detracts from the value of the discussion if you cannot read all the comments.

Please rest assured that we are reading all of this feedback. We hear from a lot of people, some in more public venues than others. We definitely appreciate your comments, and we use customer feedback as an important driver in our product development process.

I continue to have high hopes that Ian and others at Linkedin will listen to our constructive criticism. Although, I don’t believe anyone from Linkedin has actually read this post. If they have, maybe they can leave a comment below and I’ll correct this assumption.

In the real world, “moderating” a discussion means emphasizing one point over another, perhaps steering it in a particular direction, maybe even silencing ignorant loudmouths. All for the benefit of the listeners.

That’s exactly what I used to be able to do with my group but no longer. On the discussion page an algorithm now is supposed to recognize that a three month-old discussion has not had a comment in a month. That the conversation is over. I did that; it doesn’t.

The only moderation now goes on in Manager’s Choice. LinkedIn says everybody goes there, but I doubt it, despite being at the top of the page. It’s not the home page anymore. Instead, it seems like a small ghetto that can’t accommodate many people.

I can understand that lightly moderated groups might prefer the new version run by software, but those of us who tried hard to anticipate the needs of our members are now completely frustrated.

Hi Chris,

Thanks for reaching out to Patrick (Chris-he’s the VP of Marketing at Linkedin) and we’ve certainly read your blog post and value your feedback. We also appreciate the opportunity to provide our perspective, which we hope can be answered below. We realize a drastic change such as this can be painful at the onset. However, user participation metrics have been very positive since the changes, but we are still taking actionable feedback and incorporating them into upcoming releases. Please feel free to let Ian and me know if you have any additional questions, and we hope some of the new features in the coming weeks will help address the issues you’ve been facing.

Best regards,
Crystal

Q:Why did LinkedIn launch such a drastic change in the groups user interface?
A: We designed the changes to make it easier for professionals to participate in valuable conversations with each other. We hadn’t changed the discussion system on a fundamental level in a year and a half, so there was a lot of learning from our users that got incorporated all at once. We will continue to iterate the product based on feedback from our users – especially on the need for additional tools to maintain quality even as the conversations become more lively across the vast majority of our groups. Participation is way up, with professionals joining and starting conversations in their groups every day, so we’re very pleased with the initial response to the first set of changes to LinkedIn groups.

Q: Why are discussions and news now together?
A: So many valuable professional conversations are sparked by shared links, and these conversations were partitioned off from the main conversation in the previous interface. Managers could not even feature a thriving discussion around a shared link or an RSS item. Now, content is just content. For those groups that had treated the News area as nothing more than a bucket for little-discussed promotional links, we will be providing more targeted solutions than a return to the partition between types of discussions based only on what started them, not on their quality.

Q: Why has the “most popular discussions” view replaced sort by most comments or sort by recent activity?
A: We rolled all previous categories up into the simpler view of what is actually most popular with the group right now and the list of all new items available for discussion. We also provided the option to scroll through new items – whose value to the group has not yet been decided by its membership – within the group homepage’s carousel or to see them in a list view instead.

Q: Why are manager’s choice no longer featured prominently?
A: There are several reasons behind our changes to Manager’s Choice (and even that name change was driven by the need to clarify for our millions of members that the management of the group, not LinkedIn, was doing featuring the specific discussions). A key set of reasons involves putting this content-programming tool where the most members will see it. That’s why we put the top Manager’s Choice on every discussion detail page for the first time – this is by far the most popular page across the group system. That’s also why we’ll be including a Manager’s Choice area in the digest email. It was also important to free the group homepage up for what the group itself is discussing – too many group homepages were unchanging lists of items featured long ago by group managers. In addition, based on clear feedback from many managers, we will be providing a separate Group Rules area to free up the Manager’s Choice for content programming.

Q: What kind of spam controls will be introduced?
A: In addition to the many quality control tools already available to managers – including the ability to delete any thread or comment, the ability to appoint content moderators, the ability to delete a member and all her content from the group with one click on her activity page, the ability to delete any new post or comment with one click right from email alerts about each new post or each new comment on a followed discussion – we will next week be rolling out the ability for members to flag threads or comments into a moderation queue for manager review and the option for managers to enable a custom level of member flags to delete threads or comments directly.
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