Hi Carla,
I appreciate that. Except that these replies are sent to the thread that is closed to replies, therefore closing any potential discussions between members. So we can “read” other people’s replies (and it’s becoming quite disorganized as multiple threads are centralized in 1 main closed one) but can’t reply to them, cutting off any kind of possible interactions between us. Sure we can heart and applaud, or even laugh, …as long as we stay silent.
I do appreciate the work all moderators do and how uncomfortable that must feel at times, especially for this specific “sensitive” subject. But I also think you are able to understand multiple member’s frustration on your end, (there is more that 1150 replies to this closed thread, data wise, it’s huge) and can understand why we keep bringing it up, as we should do, since we are paying customers and we are unsatisfied with the changes. If THS was a free service, it’d be a totally different ball game, but it’s not and it should be ok to voice discontent.
As a paying member, being silenced this way feels quite sad, because it makes me miss the “good old days” when I first discovered THS 8 years ago, and it felt like a little family was managing it, a group of friends, in a basement, not a big startup that looks at metrics, KPIs and data all day and listens only to its investors. And I understand the need for profitability but I also think we can certainly meet each other half way, and have a discussion about how we could meet each other half way. Some members have suggested BRILLIANT ideas (let the HO decide how many it wants to accept before closing, opting in and out of the 5 pause, etc.), but I suspect they will be ignored because in order to implement these changes, it would cost more in tech salaries, among other things, so it won’t happen. Also, it might end up showing how many HO actually wanted this 5 rule, which could potentially be slightly lower that THS would like us to believe. And then it would lead to us questioning why it was implemented in the first place when so many members voiced their discontent.
THS is trying to get its users to live on the platform so that we can see sits as soon as they appear, like Instagram, so might as well use Instagram style tools to take the pulse of the community: polls would be really great in this situation.
You said the tech team reads them, that’s one of the reason why you centralize them in the same thread? I’d love to talk to the UX, back end, front end, and full stack developers of the company, so they can explain why we still can’t filter on “sitter needs a car” for example. Because it’s been years, that these were requested and I’m not sure I ever understood why we can filter on “use of car included” but not its little sister “sitter needs a car”. Or why the “family friendly” filter and not “couple” or “single” filter?
We have issues with the system, the filters and the actual user experience, so let’s open up a thread where the tech team interacts with us and we can understand how filters and how much tweaking it would take to get the website to where it actually becomes enjoyable to spend all day on it (rejecting old adds we keep seeing that we can’t get to, bulk deleting messages in our inbox, filtering on sitters profiles we correspond to, among other ideas.)
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