92. How to get people to be nice to each other on your platform

business strategy innovation platforms product management Mar 30, 2022

On Airbnb, people stay at strangers' homes. On Twitter, people get trolled. Both are global tech platforms, but why do people treat strangers well on one, and badly on the other?

The answer lies in platform governance: the rules you make to encourage good interactions and punish the bad stuff. Learn how to set up platforms where people are nice to strangers with this week's podcast episode.

Learning notes from this episode.

  • Platform governance touches product development, engineering and marketing. It isn't just a corporate mission statement nobody reads.
  • The logic we apply to creating good offline environments also apply to platforms, but just on a bigger scale. Ask yourself: how do I want people to feel when they get here? What do I want them to do?
  • The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters by Priya Parker is an excellent book on how to create offline environments. You can apply these lessons to the online world you are creating. 
  • Community leaders and opinion formers are key to good platform governance. If the most popular people at a party are friendly, everyone else will be friendly too. If they are mean, everyone else will take their cue from that. This is the same in your online platform. 
  • To create positive platform governance, begin defining what good interactions and bad interactions are for your users, not for you. If users have good interactions, they will keep coming back. 

Get the full notes for this platform mini series here: https://www.techfornontechies.co/platform–notes

You will get the definitions, book and podcast recommendations Sophia shared in the last three episodes.

 

 

Listen here on Apple Podcasts

Listen here on Spotify.

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There are 2 ways to apply this work to your unique challenges:

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(Photo by Naassom Azevedo on Unsplash)

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