Takeaways from the First Meetings of the Community Advisory Turntable

Discogs is thrilled to share takeaways from our recent conversations with the first-ever Community Advisory Turntable. This group – comprised of real Discogs , record collectors, independent sellers, and music archivists – has been meeting regularly with our leadership team and fellow advisors to discuss the evolution of the platform. With their help, Discogs has strengthened its dedication to increased community engagement and communication. Here’s what we’ve learned so far. 

Our Commitments, Goals, and Priorities

• Discogs is committed to transparency and collaboration with the community
• We are focused on leveraging community to continually enhance the experience.
• We are prioritizing site stability and fixing critical bugs.
• We will share relevant changes for input from the community

Key Takeaways

Our first few Community Advisory Turntable meetings were productive and enlightening. 

This team is built on the power of relationships. The guidance from these sessions has set a clear direction for more proactive, casual, and transparent communication surrounding our product releases and significantly improving customer care metrics.

The Community Advisory Board developed a strong context by engaging in robust discussions around recent industry challenges and emerging opportunities. This shared understanding of the landscape ensured alignment and enabled more strategic conversations.

We also uncovered key friction points. A cathartic writing exercise proved invaluable in surfacing major friction points impacting board and their communities. We asked the to share challenges and delights on the platform and provide examples of experiences that make them either angry or happy. This activity allowed for open and honest reflection, revealing critical insights that informed targeted solutions and future strategies.

To directly address core friction points, we are prioritizing site stability and fixing critical bugs that impact our customers and community daily. This focus on enhancing the experience will occur in tandem with crucial platform modernization efforts. Additionally, we tackled subjects such as:

• Media grading clarity
• Site speed and stability
• Page load errors
• Navigation and search
• Seller tools

Recent Developments

Discogs also made significant progress to further the Community Advisory Turntable efforts.

First, we spun out an additional discography-focused Community Advisory Turntable led by Brent Greissle, our Principal of Discography Affairs. Topics in this group will align with policy and best practices regarding our discography database and contribution tools. We are thrilled to announce the inaugural board , who are dedicated, ionate contributors and music archivists.

We are also building our teams to better your needs. One of our biggest highlights is the appointment of Dennis Marshall to Vice President of Product, who comes to Discogs from Reverb/Etsy, eBay, and Adobe. We are also bringing on a community manager to help shape our strategic direction and approach here. Stay tuned for the official job opening, which will be a call for record collectors with a love for the Discogs community and an aptitude for communication.

We are reevaluating how to effectively and consistently engage with our s when it counts the most, and our investment in a new community manager is a reflection of that effort. Even before the hire, we will be more active in the Forums. Additionally, we will be quicker with our official updates with a continued focus on and platform improvements.

Next Topics

While we will continue to build our product development roap in the new year, we identified a few areas that require a closer look in conjunction with our partners on the Community Advisory Turntable, including: 

• Increased engagement with our overall community.
• Addressing site performance and order status issues.
• Continued improvement of our fraud mitigation tools.
• Educating and addressing grading with the goal of reducing overall disputes.

We Are Here for You

As a reminder, the entire community has a direct line to the Advisory Turntable at [email protected].