Excellent points (and from the perspective of someone who has built communities as my job for a long time and also a person who has been a community member for even longer, I feel you). I’m first a Medium user and only recently a Medium employee — but I know there is bias in what I’ve read and what I know on the platform so while I already have a lot of the data you’re talking about, frankly, I don’t trust myself.

I’m a huge believer in qualitative feedback and data but I need quantitative data as well and with every assumption, hypothesis, or evidence I have, I always try and challenge what I see to ensure I’m coming to the right conclusions. Call me compulsive (I am) but that’s where I’m coming from.

Reading over the early surveys, I’m seeing a lot of what I thought I would see (which is good — that means I’m not out of my mind and already on the right track) but there are a few tidbits that I hadn’t considered before.

It’s going to take a while (give me a couple weeks, probably) to go through everything — but I want to present what you said and then address, as much as I can, what we’d like to do specifically through the Community team and also through Product to help. Some stuff is already in the works, of course — but my goal is to give you as much information as I can and tell you when I can’t or when we don’t yet know.

Essentially, I come at community building from the perspective of a user, and I know I’d be mighty pissed if a new person came in, claimed they were the head of community engagement, and decreed what folks want without explicitly asking — particularly if that person missed something I wanted. That is the worst way I could gain anyone’s trust or respect.