🍳The New York Times Cooking Facebook Group Fiasco

When tight-knit communities of, uhh, 75k+ users become more trouble than they're worth: The Neal Ungerleider Newsletter #87

Man, man, man… LOL… This whole New York Times Cooking Facebook Group thing. It’s just… damn.

Here’s the recap: Over the past couple of years, The New York Times Company (that is, the publicly traded corporation that owns and operates the New York Times newspaper — not the New York Times’ actual newsroom) has made a ton of money from their deep archive of crossword puzzles and cooking recipes. The New York Times has a standalone paid recipe archive that you can either subscribe to on its own or in a bundle with the newspaper.

As part of their marketing efforts around the recipe archive, they created a wildly popular Facebook group that now has over 75,000 members—the population of a small town. As the Times Cooking Facebook group got larger, it ended up becoming a venue for conversation over politics, race and other topics that stray far from food.

Last week, the New York Times announced that they’re essentially washing their hands of the group, removing their branding from the group name in the near future, and handing over control from the New York Times’ four paid moderators to a group of 10-20 volunteer moderators.

Anyway, read Erin Biba’s Twitter thread on it for background.

Erin Biba @erinbiba

I mean I don't know where the fuck the NYTimes ever thought it could get away with having 77,000 people in a group with only four moderators who only checked in during their off hours while also working full time at the Times but this disaster was basically inevitable.

Complicated! But a perfect example of one of my guiding principles for my clients: Online communities are not like real life communities.

And Facebook groups, when they’re run by companies promoting for-profit products (like New York Times recipe subscriptions!) are all about a slow-drip where you utilize crowded internet social forums to get members to buy upsells (virtual events, live events, printed books, purchases of affiliated third-party products/services, etc.) or get their friends/relatives to join and, in turn, purchase memberships of their own. It’s a high-maintenance, slow-burn method of growing your customer base with generally effective results in the real world.

Facebook Groups scale exponentially, but community moderation scales linear.

As of press time, the New York Times Cooking Facebook group has over 76,000 users. That’s the population of a small city, give or take.

Facebook groups, meanwhile, tend to attract a specific demographic: Skewing a little less tech savvy, a little older, a little more casual in internet use. These aren’t ironclad rules, but every platform is used differently and attracts a different audience—Facebook isn’t Reddit isn’t Discord isn’t Clubhouse, no matter how they may interact.

And just to complicate things, the numbers aren’t what you might think: Not every group member is actively engaged. People might sign up and forget their memberships; others might be very infrequent Facebook users; others might stop in for a peek every week or so but then go on to other parts of the Zuckerplex.

But the larger your community grows, the more frequent posters and lurkers you attract. This presents a challenge.

I’m gonna surprise absolutely noone by saying that very active Facebook groups attract a disproportionate number of trolls, thread-sitters (people who will sit in the replies either arguing every point or regurgitating their argument), attention addicts, argument enthusiasts, spammers and other assorted bad actors.

I mean, shit… I belong to a large, public Facebook group that’s roughly the size of the NYT Cooking group. It’s about one of my hobbies and by any rational measure, moderating it wouldn’t be any big deal. But the group has more than 60,000 members! And Facebook’s algorithm actively rewards disagreements, anger and arguments! Being an unpaid moderator for a group like that is a lonely, thankless task.

Especially because people—especially people on Facebook and especially during a pandemic where large portions of daily life have been profoundly altered—are lonely, looking for community, and looking for vicarious drama, belonging, excitement… your FB groups members are going to comment about stuff that’s far from group topics and bring larger issues of politics, culture wars and collective identities into daily community discourse. Them’s the breaks.

Roughly speaking, for every 5000 members your very active Facebook group has, you want a part-time community manager. I’d argue further that every 10,000 members require a full-time community manager. However, employees are expensive and noone wants to actually pay those costs. Human beings are expensive to pay and algorithms are cheap. Especially when group membership scales exponentially and human content moderation scales linear.

Adding to this is the fact that—and I’ll attest to this personally—Facebook’s group moderation tools are difficult to use on a routine basis. Ernie Smith has a good take on this, and specifically about the process of joining a private FB group:

Managing the process of letting people into the group? That’s a whole different story. I’ve set up a system for approvals, to ensure that folks coming into the group are not going to spam it. I set up rules, and have a set of membership questions that I expect people signing up to fill out. […]

Despite putting in multiple places that answering these questions are required, barely anyone does it! This would be fine if it was on Twitter, where I could send these members an at-message, or via email, where I could at least put something in their inbox. But my only way of contacting most of these people is Facebook Messenger, and Facebook Messenger has a convoluted system of message requests that ensure that few people actually see your simple requests that they answer your questions. About 80 percent of the time, I might as well be shouting into the void.

So my options are these: Don’t let in 80 percent of the people who sign up, or letting everyone in and letting the quality of the group decline, face spammers and trolls, and generally get off-topic.

The New York Times Company and corporate DNA.

I’m a big believer in the metaphor of Corporate DNA—the idea that large organizations share a set of procedures, structures, priorities and work styles that make them well suited for some things and badly suited for other things.

For the New York Times Company, I’ll argue their corporate DNA makes them really good at certain things like:

1. Running one of the world’s most prestigious and best-known news organizations.

2. Turning legacy products like their decades of crossword puzzles and cooking recipes into standalone revenue generators.

3. Building a popular, best-in-class podcast operation around their newsroom and opinion section personalities (though it hasn’t been without its headaches!)

Their cultural DNA also makes them really bad at other things… like running Facebook groups that are high-maintenance and delayed-gratification. I love Gita Jackson’s take on what happened:

Finding evidence of past conflicts in the group is not difficult; vague tweets refer to something called "the McRib controversy;” others mention an argument about a maid who scratched a baking sheet. The New York Times Cooking Community even earned itself an extremely similarly named offshoot group, created in December 2019, called The NYT Cooking Community for People With Compassion. A Facebook user who goes by Jennifer, who asked to be quoted without her last name because she was worried about harassment, told Motherboard that she made the group because of the rampant bullying in the Times's group. Since the announcement, Jennifer said that they've had an influx of new members.

"We had roughly 750 members that accumulated from December 2019 through mid March 2021," Jennifer said. "In the past 4-5 days we've had roughly 150 new members and probably 175-200 requests."

Moderating Facebook groups is a time suck that also requires employees with a keen sense of human psychology, crowd dynamics, current events and crisis public relations. Juggling this skill set is difficult enough for young startups who don’t have decades of work processes, corporate hierarchy and marketing concerns dominating every decision like the Times Company does.

Also, just judging from what I understand of the group and its demographics, membership primarily appears to be upper-middle-class American women. I’m genuinely curious if either conscious or unconscious sexism played a part in their decision to part ways with the group, and if the Times would have done the same with a male-dominated group where conversation had gone off the rails.

But expect the Times Company to keep investing more money in monetizing their non-news assets because it’s hard to get people to pay for news when they’ve been trained to see it for free online from outlets that aren’t as good as the Times! That’s why the Times Company just hired Jonathan Knight, a highly-regarded casual game developer best known for his work at Zynga.

Further Reading:

• The New York Times Is Abandoning Its Cooking Community Facebook Group - Lauren Strapagiel @ BuzzFeed

• Erin Biba’s Twitter thread: “They're allowing group members to submit themselves to become moderators and then they're gonna just hand the entire group over to these randoms and peace out. I just. I can't stop laughing at the ineptitude.“

• I Hate Facebook Groups - Ernie Smith @ Midrange

• Not Even the NYT Wants to Be a Part of Its Cooking Facebook Group Anymore - Gita Jackson @ Motherboard/Vice

• The New York Times is so done with its 77,000-member Facebook cooking group. What happens now? - Laura Hazard Owen/NiemanLab

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Things I’ve Enjoyed Lately:

• The Economist on the future of shopping.

• Marc Ambinder on living with rosacea and health misinformation on social media.

• Adrian Miller on the history and marketing of soul food.

• Side Hustle Stack’s free directory of platform-based work opportunities.

• Rokhl Kafrissen on Jewish folk magic.

• Kevin Roose speaks with Nilay Patel about why white collar jobs are next to be automated away and how to layoff-proof your skill set.

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About This Newsletter: Neal Ungerleider is a strategic communications consultant who works with clients on white papers, magazine columns, videos and other marketing-y things. Check out his bio, his portfolio, and current projects.

Connect on Twitter or LinkedIn and learn more @ nealungerleider.com.