"About Patch"

... - specifically, and perhaps a bit simplistically, this line:

“Patch is run by professional editors and salespeople.”

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Like many here I’ve been struggling with the roll-out of Patch 3.0 - the latest, long promised incarnation of the “Patch Experience” (for lack of a better term) and the first while under the direct operation of Hale Global.

I could go on and on about the details of what I don’t like and why, and about how the roll-out of 3.0 has been and continues to be mishandled - badly. But the details are known by pretty much everyone by now and, frankly, it’s not the details themselves that I find most bothersome. Rather, it’s the lack of understanding on the part of just about every person within the Patch organization that I’ve encountered and interacted with, since the takeover, regarding what it is that drew people like me and others I know here to Patch in the first place.

I keep going back to that line, above, from the paragraph below and then to the cast of characters found behind the similarly-titled link just below that. And while I have no doubt that their credentials and qualifications are as stated, I also can’t help but note that there doesn’t seem to be one person who has any depth of experience operating within the “online community” environment.

If any single thing is sorely missing at this point, it’s that element. For all the criticism leveled at it for the way it ran Patch, that was one area in which AOL, and the folks who worked there, excelled. AOL pretty much invented the “online community” and their understanding of it resulted in many of the things now missing in 3.0 - which could probably be summarized as the links that connected those members of the Patch community sites to each other.

Even at it’s worst, you could go to AOL’s Patch site and, right from the main page, be aware of updates to conversations you had been involved in, the “actions” of other members of the community and, generally, any new, locally generated content. You didn’t have to navigate through layers of pages or categories. You didn’t have to remember counts on the numbers of comments. The amount of time and effort you had to put into searching out updates to the site generally involved nothing more than hitting the homepage. And while, throughout time, both content and these community facilitators had their ups and downs, both were pretty much given equal weight. Because AOL understood that if you can create a community, people will come back for that aspect, even when the content itself is uneven. And they’ll come back frequently if they sense it’s an active community. Which all the things missing now, such as the shout stream, the front page summarization of new “contributions”, the indicators of new comments and all the other signposts of activity indicated.

Not only don’t we have those things now, I don’t even sense any particular understanding of the importance of those things, aside from an occasional acknowledgement on the part of whomever I might be discussing them with that they “hear us” on them.

What I do hear about and do get a sense of are things that one might expect would be of importance to “professional editors and salespeople”. Quality of content, Google ratings, spam, “spammy posts”, etc. Clearly, what they think people want here more than anything is quality blogging and other content. And while there’s no doubt that people would prefer that to the alternative, what I see people missing and complaining about is the local community aspect of things. Things that tend not to be the priority of professional editors and sales people.

Which is why, to be honest, I don’t hold out much hope for this place. The commitments they’ve made to prepackaged functionalities and scalable overall architecture are not things they’re going to be willing to compromise in order to foster the kind of community long time users are missing now - and are anxious to have back.