Case Study: Adrian Segar – “Conferences that work”

Here’s an independent review of my conference design work, published as a case study in Chapter 25—Designing and Developing Content for Collaborative Business Events—of the book The Routledge Handbook of Business Events. (Tip: The hardback version is expensive, the ebook is a quarter of the hardback cost.) The chapter was written by Ruth Dowson, Chantal Dickson, and Simon Bell.

Image of the front cover of The Routledge Handbook of Business Events. This book, published in 2023, includes a case study of Adrian Segar's work.

Case Study: Adrian Segar – “Conferences that work”

For over 35 years, Adrian Segar has facilitated, presented at, and experienced hundreds of conferences and other business events. Originally from a scientific academic background, as an independent consultant in the United States, Segar attended traditional academic conferences and meetings, becoming fascinated by the outcomes (and lack of outcomes) when people were assembled together with the intention of teaching, connecting with, and learning from each other. As he worked with and for his clients within their organisational environments, to identify and deliver specified outcomes, Segar realised that the structures and events created by these organisations were not only failing to fulfill their intended results, but that there were additional issues, arising from dysfunctional relationships within their organisations, that were not being addressed by formal business event structures. People problems were at the root of the matter. By learning from the dilemmas that organisations faced, since 1992 Segar has advanced an approach to developing and delivering conferences and meetings that would address these important concerns, and this approach has become his theme: ‘Conferences that work’. Segar advocates an approach to support conference designers in making the greatest improvements to the outcomes of their business events. Segar suggests that such improvements are not achieved by providing exciting, trendy or healthy food and refreshments, or incorporating the latest audio-visual and technology components, or designing costly décor that can enhance a creative environment. Instead, he challenges the time-honoured processes by which conferences and other business events have been designed for hundreds of years.

Rather than have business event attendees listening passively to lectures, Segar’s processes aim to transform them into active participants, in events structured with opportunities to enable them to make significant connections, to influence and decide their own agendas and content, to contribute their own expertise, and to learn from each other. As a result, participants value the time and effort they supply to these engaging occasions, whilst the outcomes for organisers and clients are met more effectively. Segar suggests that “Participant-led and participation-rich conferences disrupt the age-old conference-design model by fulfilling 21st century audiences’ need to take control of learning environments and by capitalizing on their collective wisdom and experience.”

Segar reasons that, in theory, a conference provides useful content, an opportunity to acquire relevant knowledge, to enable learning from others, getting answers and solving problems. In between structured sessions, there are scheduled breaks to enable informal information gathering. A key component of a conference is networking, whereby attendees make informal contacts during breaks or social time, outside of the formal structure of the event. But Segar asserts that this approach to designing conferences and other business events is too haphazard: what if the content isn’t quite what is needed, or attendees don’t learn what will help them to solve the problems they face, or if they don’t manage to connect with the people who might help them? Meetings that involve connecting with peers could recognise the innate wisdom of other participants in enabling each other to develop solutions to common issues, building community and longer-lasting productive relationships in the process. When a business event is built around attendee interaction, empowering participants to shape the content through active involvement and engagement, the outcomes are more likely to be successful, and at the same time, stronger and more meaningful relationships will result.

In order to share this learning more widely, Segar has written event design books that provide formats, tools, and techniques for event producers and planners to design their own participative events. ‘Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love’ (2009) sets out a step-by-step approach to designing participant-driven events, transforming conferences and professional meetings into what participants want and need them to be. ‘The Power of Participation: Creating Conferences That Deliver Learning, Connection, Engagement, and Action’ (2015) details how to design individual conference sessions. Segar’s processes improve meetings and conference sessions, “by turning passive attendees into active participants, to maximise the learning, connection, engagement, community building and consequential action that takes place at sessions and meetings”.

Segar recognises that books and websites can only initiate limited levels of understanding and change, so in addition to the complimentary resources provided on his website and blog, he offers an experiential approach to learning about the processes for developing participant-led events, providing activities that explore the techniques and theoretical aspects of his work. These ‘POPWORKS’ workshops are hosted across North America and Europe as well as online.)

Citation

Dowson, R., Dickson, C., & Bell, S. (2023) ‘Designing and developing content for collaborative business events.’ In: Arcodia, C. (Ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Business Events. Abingdon: Routledge. Many thanks for Ruth Dowson’s permission to reproduce this case study. Ruth was a Senior Lecturer in Events Management at Leeds Becket University for many years and is currently writing a book about cultural risk assessments for events and, intriguingly, completing a Ph.D. on the eventization of faith.

Alternatives to eXTwitter

An illustration of the Twitter bird with an arrow through its heart. What are some of the alternatives to Twitter?Since Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter on October 27, 2022, its status as a stable social media platform seems to be rapidly imploding. Reportedly, Twitter has restored thousands of accounts that were previously banned by the company’s own moderation teams, and half of Twitter’s top advertisers have left the platform. In response to these developments, I’ve been looking into alternatives to Twitter.

I joined Twitter in 2009 and have had ~8,600 followers for the last few years. Twitter has already transformed once, becoming more about breaking news than engagement as I describe in my post: Why 2017 was a tipping point for Twitter. ~150 of my followers have left the platform since Musk’s purchase five weeks ago.

Click the image for my post: “Why 2017 was a tipping point for Twitter”

Time will tell whether the exodus will become a rout, which could happen if Twitter becomes too toxic or unreliable.

Alternatives to Twitter

[Update: Post News shut down in July, 2024]

Alternatives to Twitter include Mastodon, Discord, Post News, Counter Social, Hive Social, and many more. Each platform offers a different experience due to often subtle design decisions.

In this post, I’ll share my findings and thoughts. This is not an exhaustive review (which would at this point need to be book-length). And it’s biased toward platforms I like. Regardless, I hope this summary will be a useful introduction. I’ve included references to helpful resources for you to learn more.

Before we dive into detail about individual platforms, it’s important to understand a few important structural factors that impact user experience and the long-term evolution of these services.

Ownership, openness, and profit

Most social media companies are for-profit corporations, whether publicly or privately owned. Twitter was a public company until Musk bought it. Meta (formerly Facebook) is a public corporation but Mark Zuckerberg controls over half the corporate votes. An anonymous individual, describing himself as an “American patriot” owns Counter Social. Post News, launched a few weeks ago, is funded by venture capitalists Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Scott Galloway, and others. Several large venture capital companies own DiscordHive Social is owned by its founder, Raluca Pop, and an angel investor.

Of the above platforms, Counter Social is (probably) the only one that owners who’d like to make money don’t control. Meta’s and Twitter’s main income source is advertising, though both services also make money selling the data they collect to third parties. Since going public in 2013, Twitter has only occasionally turned a profit, and one has to wonder if the recent significant pause in advertising by its major customers bodes well for its financial future.

Why should you care? Ernie Smith explains why ownership and openness matter when choosing a social network alternative to Twitter.

Of course, the distinctive thing about all of these networks is that each ultimately is centralized, rather than being built on an open protocol. And that means that they are built to generate value for their founders. They are built for onboarding, not for long-term growth, which means that they lead with cool features, not with promises of sustainability.

And that’s where commercial networks often falter. The financial incentive has created problems over time that have helped to complicate the shape of social media. The immense value of any given social network has ultimately been in data, rather than by offering services to the creator. And that has meant leaning hard on data-mining or advertising-driven business models—and companies that don’t do that ultimately find themselves out of the conversation entirely.
—Ernie Smith, Don’t Fall Into The Well

This brings us to Mastodon, which is different.

Mastodon is not owned by anyone; it’s free, open-source software written by Eugen Rochko and released in 2016. I’ll share more about Mastodon below.

As Ernie puts it:

[Mastodon] has a great lead feature that none of its competitors have yet replicated—its adherence to the open web. Unfortunately, alternative networks can throw marketing money at all sorts of other features trying to convince you that those features matter more. But the only feature that truly matters at this moment, even more than how “hip” a network is, is if it talks to every other network. If it’s open, even better.

Whether Mastodon survives and thrives remains to be seen. But its open network plus community ownership is a strong plus in my book.

Size

Size isn’t everything, but the network effect has its advantages. Ideally, we want our social media platforms to include our tribes. All other things being equal, a larger network is more likely to have folks we want to communicate with on it. Here are current estimates of various platforms’ active users. Take these numbers as a guide rather than a selection criterion, because a smaller niche network may fit you better. (For example, Discord’s members are mostly gamers.)

Network Active users
Twitter ~240M
Discord ~140M
Counter Social ~160K
Mastodon ~8M
Hive Social ~2M
Post News ~140K

User experience

All social media platforms have their own web interfaces and apps that mediate their users’ experience. Platforms continually upgrade user interfaces, functionality, and features, generally (but not always) for the better. Most platforms aim to be as easy to use as possible.

However, there are four specific factors that affect a social media platform’s experience:

  • the prevalence of advertising;
  • content moderation policies and effectiveness;
  • how platform feeds display and prioritize posts; and
  • the platform’s search capabilities.
Advertising

Twitter (and Meta and Instagram) depend primarily on advertising. The other platforms mentioned in this post are blessedly free from ads.

Content moderation

Content moderation policies and their effectiveness on these platforms are huge and controversial topics. With Musk’s purchase of Twitter, reports indicate that content moderation has been gutted, with the firing of many Twitter employees and outsourced contractors. Musk has said that such work can be automated, but there’s widespread skepticism that this is possible. Meanwhile, the EU has warned Musk that Twitter faces a ban unless he abides by its strict rules on content moderation.

All social media platforms face this problem, and there are no easy answers. As we’ve seen with Twitter and Meta, what is acceptable to post is a moving target, one that’s intertwined with changing political, social, and cultural norms. As platforms like Mastodon, Counter Social, and Hive Social grow rapidly, they will also have to evolve and scale how they perform content moderation if they are going to meet their founders’ goals as a safe-enough space for conversation.

What you see on the platform

How much control a user has over what they see on the platform is an important aspect of the user experience. You have probably had the experience of seeing content (and ads) on Meta that you have no interest in, nor any simple way of banishing from your feed. Conversely, I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a post in my Meta feed but couldn’t find it later, or had to hunt for posts I’m interested in.

Twitter’s feed also has similar problems, though there are workarounds. The other platforms I’ve mentioned can provide chronological unfiltered feeds, so you don’t have to worry about missing stuff. And each platform has its own way of allowing you to focus on specific content, or block content you want to skip.

Search capabilities

Finally, search capability is one area where the monolithic platforms currently have an advantage. It’s easy to globally search for a word, phrase, or hashtag on them. Mastodon, a federated service, makes some compromises about search. If you search for plain text, you’ll get posts you’ve written, favorited, or been mentioned in, as well as matching usernames, display names, and hashtags. So, it’s harder to find things on Mastodon unless (as the help recommends) members use appropriate hashtags extensively.

Reliability

In the early days of Twitter, the famous “Fail Whale”, indicating that the service was down, was a common sight. For the last few years, the platform has been very reliable, with only a few glitches per year. Whether this will continue after Musk’s firing of a majority of the company’s employees is an open question.

In my limited experience, rapidly growing platforms Mastodon, Counter Social, and Post News have been doing pretty well coping with their explosive growth. (Post News is currently limiting new signups from its waitlist to handle the increased traffic.) But all three services can be slow at times, though I don’t see much difference in responsiveness between them and Twitter.

Right now, Hive Social is currently offline due to security concerns. With only three employees and a sudden jump in new registrations, that’s perhaps not surprising.

The Platforms

OK, maybe you skipped the above to see what I think about individual platforms. Remember, this is based on my experience to date, and everything in this space is evolving fast. I’ve listed the platforms in my most-to-least favorite order. Here goes!

Mastodon

Mastodon has been around since 2016. Unlike the other platforms mentioned in this post, anyone with a certain amount of technical expertise can set up a Mastodon server. Currently, there are thousands around the world. Though there are some servers with large general memberships (such as mastodon.social which I’m currently on), most focus on specific communities or interests, such as tech, gaming, LGBTQ, region, activism, art, music, journalism, etc. Mastodon is a federated social network of these servers (which are also called nodes or instances). This allows users on different servers to interact with each other. (Here’s a good explanation of how Mastodon’s federation works.)

Joining Mastodon

You have to choose a Mastodon server. Many popular articles about Mastodon describe this as a barrier to joining the platform. Actually, it’s not something that you need to really worry about unless you’re especially interested in immediately finding a server that reflects a community about which you feel strongly. That’s because you can change the server you’re on at a later date, bringing your followers with you.

If you do want to pick a community right away you can use the tool Mastodon Instances. Or, the official JoinMastodon page lists available servers, categorized in various ways, and shows you which ones are currently open to join.

To find out more about a mastodon server from the server itself, go to its “about” page at https://[server name]/about/more, e.g., https://mastodon.social/about/more. This page includes rules of conduct for the server, additional services provided, and other useful information.

Still worried about this step? Here is an invite from me to the largest mastodon server: mastodon.social. Even if this server is currently closed to new accounts, this invite will get you in!

Once you’ve picked a server to join, getting started is like any other social media platform. You create an account on the server and set up a profile. On Mastodon, profiles contain up to 500-character bios and you can add a display name, avatar, header image, and up to four links to relevant websites.

Things I like about Mastodon compared to Twitter

No one owns Mastodon, it’s free, open-source software

This is a huge plus in my book. The beauty of federated social media platforms is that they are loosely-joined collections of communities that are responsive to users’ wants and needs, rather than the dictate to make money, or the whims of an erratic billionaire. Mastodon servers run mainly on volunteer time, with infrastructure funding coming from donations. (I support my server, mastodon.social, via Patreon.)

Federated servers allow you to choose a community that fits you, while still allowing connection across all servers

I summarized how this works above. For more information, these Mastodon introductions, listed easiest first –> most comprehensive, (1, 2, 3) should be helpful.

No ads!

Currently, I avoid seeing Twitter ads on the web by using Tweetdeck. (Mastodon’s “advanced web interface” looks like Tweetdeck; turn it on!) But the mobile Twitter app is filled with ads, which I don’t appreciate.

(Don’t get me started on Facebook ads. They are only tolerable on the web because I’ve installed F.B. Purity, a labor of love that I recommend.)

500 vs 280 character limit

Twitter started with a 140-character tweet limit which was raised to 280 characters in 2017. It’s often still not long enough for me. Mastodon’s 500-character limit is refreshing.

Editable posts!

Twitter, which has become much more a site for breaking news than a place to converse has always, understandably, been concerned that people would edit tweets post-publication to change what they originally said if it later became foolish or embarrassing. Given that people can still delete their tweets, this doesn’t work very well.

Mastodon allows you to edit published posts. I like this a lot! This feature lets me fix typos, add better hashtags and images, etc. There’s one other advantage for me right now. Currently, I crosspost my tweets to Mastodon using the Moa Bridge service. Mastodon’s editable posts allow me to tweak tweets into Mastodon posts that are more “Mastodon-like”, which typically means adding and adjusting hashtags.

Tweetdeck-like “advanced web interface” that allows you to follow #hashtags and lists

Tweetdeck is my favorite way to access Twitter. Mastodon’s “advanced web interface” provides something very similar.

Content warnings when needed

I like this feature. It speaks to Mastodon’s commitment to providing functionality that supports creating safer spaces for users.

One feature that Mastodon provides…is the option to attach a content warning to your posts. When a content warning is included, the status content will be collapsed by default, and only the CW will be shown, similarly to an email subject line or a “read more” break. This can be used to add a summary or subject for your post, to collapse long posts, or to otherwise provide context or setup for the body of the post.

When media is attached, a checkbox appears to allow you to “mark media as sensitive”. This hides the full media behind a blurred thumbnail by default. Adding a CW to a post automatically marks the media as sensitive as well.
Mastodon documentation

Favoriting and boosting (aka retweeting or reposting) are two clearly different actions

On Twitter, you can “like” or retweet a post. Twitter displays publicly a count of a post’s likes, which makes the platform a place where many users try to get their posts liked a lot. You can also quote tweets, allowing you to add a comment to another’s tweet. This is often used on Twitter to publicly dump on a tweet you don’t like, perhaps boosting your standing with your followers.

On Mastodon, you can “favorite” or repost (aka “boost”) someone’s post. The favorites count doesn’t appear on post timelines, so it’s not a status symbol of how popular what you say is. The only people who know you’ve favorited a post are you and the poster. Favorited posts are thus a way for you to remember posts you like. They are searchable.

If you want to promote someone else’s Mastodon post, you repost it. There’s no equivalent of tweet quoting.

Mastodon’s design distinction between favorite and repost discourages the self-promotion that sometimes runs rampant on Twitter.

You can migrate your account to a different server

As far as I know, there are no social media platforms that allow you to export or import your posts and followers to or from another platform. But Mastodon makes it pretty easy to move all your account data from one Mastodon server to another. You might want to do this if you discover a server that better fits your requirements (for example, one for users who speak your native language and post mainly in that language) or because your server doesn’t have as many members as you would like.

You can have accounts on multiple servers, so it’s easy to try a new server and compare your experience there before choosing to change servers.

Mastodon conclusions

Mastodon is my favorite alternative to Twitter, and I’m spending more and more time on it. It feels like the early days of Twitter: a fresh, relatively uncrowded, environment where I’m continually meeting new interesting folks. I’ve had many more personal interactions on Mastodon than any of the other alternatives I’ve tried. If the future of Twitter worries you, I think Mastodon is the place to go.

Counter Social

I joined Counter Social—founded in November 2017—in April 2022 after the news that Musk might acquire Twitter became public. I like the platform a lot, though Mastodon has stolen my attention recently. There was some initial concern that Counter Social’s sole(!) anonymous(!) owner “The Jester” espoused right-wing politics and had a history of hacking targets that he felt threatened America in the past. However, unlike Musk’s recent brazen moves, I haven’t seen any sign of a political thumb on the posts I’ve seen flowing past on Counter Social’s “Community Firehose” stream.

Counter Social is free to join. It receives some income from $4.99/month optional “PRO” accounts but otherwise it seems that The Jester funds it himself.

Things I like about Counter Social

Counter Social members are darn nice!

This sounds silly and may change, but the Counter Social community currently comes across as the nicest large bunch of community folks I’ve seen on a social media platform. Now of course, what I call nice (a mixture of charmingly personal posts, eclectic artwork, restrained mainly left-wing statements, favorite music and movies) may not be what you think of as “nice”. New users are welcome. Browsing my feeds is…soothing. Can you say that about any other large social network?

Excellent interface

Like Mastodon, Counter Social uses a similar but more attractive “Tweetdeck-like” interface. Posts (aka “toots”) can be up to 500 characters, though you can’t edit them after you’ve posted them. You can’t see who has favorited or reposted a post until you click into it, and reply counts are shown as 0, 1, or 1+ which discourages people from writing posts solely designed to get lots of interaction.

Like Mastodon, searching is only on hashtags and usernames. There’s no plain text searching of posts like Twitter does. You get columns for friends’ posts and notifications and can create additional columns based on hashtag searches.

Counter Social has added to the interface a few features which you may like, such as a CNN ticker tape news feed and eight other news channel video feeds.

No ads and content warnings

Like Mastodon, as described above.

Praiseworthy, innovative approaches to reduce bad actors and disinformation

Counter Social has deployed a number of sometimes controversial anti-disinformation methods. The platform bans IP addresses from Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Pakistan (that’s the controversial bit), as well as a proprietary list of “over 100K VPN endpoints and Tor exit nodes that are known to be used by nefarious actors”. Counter Social has also teamed up with Bot Sentinel to reduce disinformation. And users can mute and block other users and flag posts for review.

I don’t know how Counter Social does it or whether my experience is typical, but the platform seems to do a great job keeping nasty stuff off my feed.

Concerns about Counter Social

Reliability

No one really knows if “The Jester” is actually one person. Even if he has a small team to help, the platform has been remarkably responsive, except when the service had to handle half a million new user signups in a few days in May 2022. Today it chugs along, though I wonder how many of its millions of registered users are actually active on it currently. Presumably, The Jester (or a hacker) could abruptly shut down Counter Social. What happens if The Jester has a heart attack or loses interest in supporting the platform? Such concerns have made me hesitant to invest significant time in Counter Social.

Safety

Reading The Jester’s Wikipedia entry does not give me a reassuring feeling about the guy. Given that an anonymous individual (assuming that’s true) controls Counter Social raises obvious questions. Is the site secure from hackers stealing users’ personal information, login credentials, or private messages? Can we trust The Jester’s statement that the platform only collects IP and email addresses, and does not “collect information that identifies, relates to, describes, references, is reasonably capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked, directly or indirectly, with a particular consumer, household, or device (‘personal information’)“?

We don’t know the answer to these questions. On the other hand, what assurance do we have that Musk is not now rummaging through the vast hoard of data that Twitter has acquired over the years? Ultimately, you’re going to need to decide whether you trust using this service. My approach is that I don’t post anything that would embarrass me if (fat chance) it was widely publicized. And I don’t use private messaging on any service for vital information.

Counter Social conclusions

In one sentence: Counter Social is a really nice place to visit but I’m not sure I want to live there.

Discord

Discord is primarily an audio chat and instant messaging platform that became wildly popular with social gamers. So why am I including it here as an alternative to Twitter? Because Discord now makes it easy for communities to get together. In 2020, Discord shifted its focus away from video gaming toward creating and managing all-purpose public and private online forums for posting and chat. And in September 2022, the company introduced Forum Channels which support organized discussions, stored posts, and message threads: everything you need for an online community.

I joined Discord in July 2021, and currently use it in two ways. First, as a place for occasionally staying in touch with a small group of event production professionals, via a forum set up with four text channels. And second, as an interface for a Midjourney Discord server, which I use to create illustrations for some of my blog posts.

Discord is free to use for forums. Many gamer members spring for “boost” [$4.99/month] or “Nitro” subscriptions [$9.99/month], and Discord receives a 10% commission on games sold through game developers’ servers.

What I like about Discord

The Discord forum channel interface is easy to use. It provides a simple and attractive way to display and organize asynchronous conversations into threads. I like how a forum can have owner-created channels to cover broad categories of conversations relevant to the community. For example, the forum I mentioned above has channels for messages from the owner, requests for help, job opportunities, and general posts. My Midjourney public server has over a hundred channels that cover announcements, service status, rules, FAQs, getting started, polls, support for trial and paid users, various chats about the service, image showcase channels, and many channels where Midjourney images are constantly being requested and generated.

Concerns about Discord

As you might expect, Discord has been and can be used for nefarious purposes, such as cyberbullying, private use by extremists, and pornography and sexual exploitation. All social media platforms with private forums have these problems, which is why content moderation policies and the effectiveness of their implementation are so important.

In June 2022, Discord introduced an automated service to help forum moderators deal with inappropriate content. Discord also provides resources for administrators in its Moderation Academy. Otherwise, Discord relies on user reports to catch service violations.

Discord conclusions

It’s hard to beat Discord for a free, fully-featured, easy-to-use community messaging service of any size. Given its robust funding by gamers, I doubt that the service will fall out of favor any time soon. And because gamers who desire fast response time use Discord, the owners are likely to maintain reliable service.

Post News [Update: Post News shut down in July, 2024]

The youngest social media platform in this roundup is Post News. It’s so new there isn’t even a Wikipedia entry for it yet. Launched hurriedly last month (November 2022), the platform currently has 400K users on the waitlist and 140K who have been invited in and activated their accounts. I joined Post News a couple of weeks ago and have been checking it out.

The “Chief Poster”, Noah Bardin, was the CEO of Waze for 12 years and the company is financed by well-known venture capitalists. The platform ultimately aims to be a place where big names, especially journalists and “publishers” will congregate and opine on issues of the day.

“Post News is trying to capitalize on the ‘virtual watercooler for journalists’ side of Twitter. The platform describes itself as a place to access ‘premium news content without subscriptions or ads.’ News publishers and independent writers are encouraged to share their articles on Post News under a paywall. The idea is that this would allow users to pay for individual articles from a variety of news sources. It’s an alternative, or a supplement, to paying for individual subscriptions to specific news sources.”
Amanda Silberling, Post News, a Twitter alternative, gets funding from a16z

Only a rudimentary payment system using points is available to date. Time will tell if subscribers are willing to pay for individual articles in sufficient quantities to sustain the service.

Concerns about Post News

Unfortunately, I have many more concerns about Post News than things I like. Pitched as a “fun” place that “introduce[s] you to big ideas and cool people” Post News is, so far, underwhelming. It has a bare-bones web interface that pales in comparison to Mastodon, Counter Social, and Discord. Perhaps that makes it easier to use, but I’ve found even the simple interface glitchy with minor annoyances that Post News will probably fix soon.

Accessibility features that are standard on Mastodon and Counter Social, like alt text image descriptions and content warnings, are missing. Post News is US, English only, has no app, and you can’t add a video or animated gif to a post. Like Twitter, you can’t edit a post once you’ve posted it. The interface only supports a single feed of everyone’s posts. Post News allows you to flag perceived trolls but is still working on muting posts and blocking individuals.

The platform vibe

Post News has a broadcast-style feel to it. The platform seems to be attempting to create a hierarchy of news producers and news consumers, and that’s probably a deliberate choice. But what I find depressing is that the platform’s consequent vibe is a curious mixture of the trivial and pompous/promotional. It feels like a place where people are mostly trying to impress others. You can comment on posts, but comments are rare and there’s little evidence of conversations.

Post News is like a party where the guests are awkwardly posing instead of just having a good time.

The future of Post News

It’s very early days. Post News may well eventually become a viable marketplace for folks with great interesting ideas and the capability to express them well to grow an audience and make some money in the process.

However, I’m skeptical that this will turn out well for folks who put their significant content on the platform. Because, as I wrote in 2017, posting your original content exclusively on someone else’s platform puts you at their mercy. Third-party platforms change their feed policies (Meta, Twitter, LinkedIn) all the time, and if they go out of business (e.g., Geocities, Vine, MySpace, Friendster, Orkut, Google+) your content vanishes from the internet. I still strongly recommend you maintain control over your content by posting it on a website you own. That’s my two cents.

Things I like about Post News

The two things that I like about Post News are that posts can be of any length and that it supports plain text search. That’s about it.

Post News conclusions

I am clearly not a fan of Post News in its current state. But it still has plenty of time to improve. To be fair, I will be checking back on how it develops, especially to see if it can attract significant numbers of interesting and influential thinkers and writers who chose to post exclusive content there.

Hive Social

I was going to explore Hive Social before I wrote this review, but it’s been down for a week for security updates. So, I’ll summarize here what I like and dislike about this platform based on what I’ve read rather than from direct experience.

Many users describe Hive Social as a mixture of Twitter and Instagram apps. It’s been downloaded about two million times, though the current week-long outage may reduce future growth. Like Twitter and Counter Social, the service allows NSFW posts as long as posters categorize them with a content warning.

What I like about Hive Social

Like Post News, Hive Social has no ads and no character limit on posts. I’m a fan of “neutral” feeds on social media platforms, and Hive Social only offers a chronological timeline. Like most social media platforms apart from Meta, you can follow another user without them having to “friend” you back. The owner says the platform has “zero tolerance for bigotry and hate”, though, like Post News, moderation is currently restricted to reporting by other users.

Concerns about Hive Social

Hive Social’s sole owner with a minuscule staff raises similar concerns to Counter Social; what if the service is shut down or its data misused? Perhaps due to the service’s rapid growth, there are reports that the app crashes and service can be slow at times. Hive Social has no web interface, which is annoying to old fogeys like me. Finally, you have to wonder about the problems that are bound to arise if Hive Social continues to grow, given it currently has no moderators, no security team, and no staff focused on regulatory compliance.

Hive Social conclusions

Hive Social (when it’s back up and running) is probably a nice place to hang out if you’re young and aren’t especially interested in maintaining a long-term history of your social media interactions.

Conclusions

Some parts of this review of alternatives to Twitter will be out of date in a month, while some will stand the test of time. (Now if I could only know which parts were which!) And there are likely to be still more entrants in the Twitter-competitor space, such as Spoutible which is due to go live in February 2023.

Currently, Twitter continues to be a useful place for sharing my content and connecting with meeting industry peers. But its future is uncertain, and having taken some time to explore alternative platforms I thought I’d share my findings with you.

I hope this summary review is helpful and welcome your thoughts, comments, and experiences with these alternatives and any new platforms that appear. Please share in the comments below!

Review of Butter, a smooth meeting platform for facilitators

A screenshot of Cheska (from Butter) and Adrian Segar reviewing the Butter online meeting facilitation platformCompanies bombard me with offers to check out online meeting platforms. Sadly, I simply don’t have time to explore most of them. But every once in a while I hear about a platform that intrigues me enough to schedule a demo. Butter is an online meeting platform that is designed to support the facilitation of great interactive meetings. The demo impressed me enough to delve into the platform, and I liked what I found. So here’s my review of Butter, a meeting platform for facilitators to shine.

In this review of Butter, I’ll share a big-picture overview, what I think is Butter’s finest feature, an example of how to implement a meeting design in Butter, and my closing thoughts.

The usual caveats

Butter is less than a year old. Like just about every recently introduced online platform, its developers are continually updating it. (In fact, my demo focused on a brand-new capability which I think is one of the best features of the product.) So by the time you check it out, some aspects of this review may be inaccurate or incomplete.

In addition, this is not an in-depth shakedown of the product. I haven’t had an opportunity to take Butter through its paces with a full crew of participants and co-facilitators. If you do so and have additional observations, please feel free to share them in the comments below.

Butter — the big picture

Butter is a meeting platform designed for planning and running online “workshops”. I’ve written about workshops that aren’t, and I’m happy to report that the Butter design team defines workshop as I do: a meeting that emphasizes the exchange of ideas and the demonstration and application of techniques and skills. In other words, workshops involve significant amounts of participation and active learning.

What I like about Butter is that it’s easy to use, has a short learning curve, and, most important, its design provides efficient and effective meeting facilitation. I’ve facilitated in-person meetings for decades and online meetings for the last ten years. And, as facilitators with experience in both environments know, there’s a significant workload difference between these two environments.

The challenges of facilitating online versus in-person

I can normally facilitate an in-person workshop with, say, fifty participants by myself. If there are tools I need — whiteboards, flip charts, a few slides, sticky notes, pens, room layouts, etc. — I can set them up in advance and bring them into play if and when needed. Because these tools are an integral part of the physical environment, introducing them during the session is a natural part of the facilitation process.

I can’t run an online workshop of the same size without additional help. Guiding participants through the session while paying attention to group energy and dynamics takes all my attention. I simply can’t do this well while simultaneously handling the event production. (For example, setting up breakouts, running polls, monitoring chat, noticing that a breakout group has only one member, reading participant energy from a host of tiny windows on multiple screens, etc.)

Butter makes facilitating online workshops easier. I explain why below.

A perfectly serviceable platform for most online meetings

It’s worth mentioning that, while Butter lacks some features available in competing tools, it’s a perfectly serviceable platform for vanilla online meetings with fewer than 200 participants. So it’s reasonable to consider adopting Butter for all kinds of online meetings with a specific group. This can ease the inevitable learning curve issues associated with introducing any new tool.

The finest Butter

[Sorry, but this 1982 commercial sprang to mind.]

I think the best feature of Butter is its recently introduced Session Planner. The Session Planner provides an integrated run-of-show, called the agenda, which is more than a detailed production agenda. Many production teams use spreadsheet tools like Google Sheets or Excel to create production schedules, though high-end run-of-show software, like Shoflow, is also available. What’s cool about Butter’s Session Planner is that it integrates any desired combination of Butter’s tools into the run-of-show agenda, so they become available for use when needed.

The Session Planner allows you to prep your entire workshop beforehand, just like I do at in-person workshops where I set out my tools in advance. You build a Butter agenda with blocks, and each agenda block can be customized to your needs with the tools — whiteboard, breakouts, polls, Miro boards, Google documents, YouTube videos, and more — that you’ll need for that block.

What’s more, the same agenda, minus the production details, is also available to attendees, so they know what’s going on.

Integrating your chosen tools into the production schedule in this way makes it much more feasible to effectively facilitate an online workshop by yourself. (Butter’s paid versions allow you to add co-facilitators.)

How Butter spreads

Butter’s excellent orientation and Handbook provide detailed information on how to use the product.
review Butter online meeting facilitation

Butter rooms

Butter sessions take place in rooms.

You can create and preplan as many meeting rooms as you like. Paid Butter plans allow you to share your room designs with other users.
review Butter online meeting facilitation

Let’s hold a meeting session in Adrian’s workshop room.

review Butter online meeting facilitation

Each room has its own link (which you can customize) and share in various ways with attendees.

Once you’ve created a room, you can add a Waiting room, co-facilitators (paid plan), custom Tools to be used in this room, and the all-important Agenda.

Let’s look at each of these in a little more detail.

Waiting for Butter

review Butter online meeting facilitation

When participants join a meeting, they arrive in a waiting room, like the one above. There they can add their name and a profile image (photo or avatar) if they don’t have a Butter account. Attendees have the opportunity to download the Butter desktop app and can test their camera and microphone while waiting.

You can customize a waiting room can with an image, background color, and optional wait music that an attendee can mute. (Butter has some audio clips or you can upload your own). You can also choose whether attendees can enter a meeting session immediately or must “knock” for the meeting room owner to let them in.

In addition, you can choose to share the meeting agenda with attendees in the waiting room. And a Tips menu informs waiting attendees about how they can react to what’s going on in the meeting and Butter’s hand-raising system for queuing participant comments, questions, or ideas.

Butter tools

Butter includes a comprehensive toolset that you can customize and add, as needed, to a room’s meeting agenda blocks. Each room has its own unique toolbox. A really important feature is that some of the tools  — Google Drive: docs/slides/sheets, YouTube, Miro, and Whiteboard) — integrate core resources from other providers directly into Butter. For example, participants can work collaboratively on Miro boards during a session without having to run Miro in a separate app or browser window. Similarly, you can display and work on Google Drive files and watch Youtube videos in a seamless fashion.

Butter breakouts

Importantly, Butter provides breakouts quite similar to those available in Zoom, and with some features that Zoom lacks. You can prebuild two kinds: Rooms and Groups. Participants can move between Rooms, and initial participant assignments can be prechosen or random. With Groups you decide the number of participants you want in each Group, and Butter assigns people automatically when the breakout begins. Participants cannot move between Groups.

In addition, you can assign tasks for breakout groups. Butter shows these tasks in each breakout, and breakout members can mark them complete. This is a nice feature that obviates the need for the session facilitator to message breakouts to tell them what to do.

What’s especially cool is that you can assign tools to breakout groups! Members can watch a video, or work collaboratively on a Google Doc or Miro board.

While breakouts are going on, a facilitator can monitor what’s happening in each breakout. You can observe a breakout without joining it, and see the tasks they’ve checked off. Participants can ask for help and you’ll be notified and can join their breakout. You can broadcast messages to all breakouts. And you can reassign participants to different breakouts, or reshuffle Groups to get a fresh set of people in each.

Butter breakouts provide a well-designed feature set and user interface that other meeting platforms would do well to adopt!

Polls, timers, and whiteboards

Basic polls are another tool. You can create multiple-choice or open-ended polls, which should be sufficient functionality for most situations. Upvoting is available for open-ended polls.

Buffer’s integrated countdown timers provide a welcome tool for keeping sessions on track or timing a break. You can prep them beforehand and start them with a click. Facilitators can stop the timer, and add an extra minute. Participants see a timer task description and can click a button when done. The facilitator can see how many have finished. I love this feature!

Tool use flexibility

You can preset just the tools you need for each agenda block, ready to use when the time comes. But should you need a different tool during a session you can add one on the fly.

The heart of a Butter session — the Agenda

To give a taste of the heart of Butter, here’s a hypothetical meeting design and how you might implement it in Butter.

Meeting design case

Twenty-one people are meeting for the first time as a group to work together on an issue: increasing governmental and non-profit support for the elderly population in their region. The group will meet regularly over the coming year. Some of the attendees know a few other people in the group. The first desired outcomes for the meeting are that:

  1. Participants get to know each other better;
  2. The group creates a coherent set of initial issues and topics to address at subsequent meetings, and;
  3. The group identifies who is interested and willing to work on the selected issues and topics.

Oh, I nearly forgot, we have just one hour for our initial meeting. Obviously, that’s not enough time to completely address these outcomes, especially #1. But let’s see what we can do in the available time.

A possible design

To begin, after a brief welcome, we’ll use one of my key facilitation techniques: The Three Questions. (See my book Event Crowdsourcing for detailed instructions for designing and running this powerful process.) Because of the limited time, we’ll run The Three Questions in trio shares. This will start to satisfy the first desired outcome, while simultaneously uncovering issues and topics that the group wants to explore. Next, we’ll address #2 using a Miro board for participants to share the issues and topics they think are important and/or want to work on. Participants will also cluster what they share during this block, addressing outcome #2.

Finally, we’ll switch to a facilitated group discussion on what’s been suggested, and work on next steps for future meetings (outcome #3), followed by a short closing.

Agenda example

Here’s a potential Agenda for the one-hour session.

I built this Agenda quite quickly in Butter. It’s built of Blocks, each of which can be given a title, description, duration (with the option to show to participants or not), associated tools (see above), and private notes for the facilitator(s).

In the above example, I’ve added several tools to the relevant session blocks, Google slides to introduce The Three Questions, a Group breakout for trio sharing answers, and a Miro board for sharing, clustering, and reviewing topics.

When I begin this session, each Block’s tools are shown in a sidebar, with a Start button for each tool. A click activates the desired tool. Like this.

I haven’t seen an easier online platform for facilitative process tool integration than Butter.

Check out Butter’s extensive Agenda help to learn more about how it works.

Additional capabilities while spreading Butter

Butter includes a spotlight mode, which you can use to bring one or more participants “on stage”, as shown below.

And Butter includes two well-designed participant interaction tools: Reactions…

…and the especially useful Raise Hand Queue. This is another feature that facilitators will love. Here’s how a participant raises their hand, with an idea, comment, or question.

And here’s how a facilitator chooses who speaks next.

Butter also includes public, private, and facilitator-only chat. Chat can be “popped out” to a separate window, which is handy if you want to read it on a second monitor. Nice!

Butter quality, onboarding, help, and more

I found Butter unusually easy and intuitive to learn. You can run it in a browser (preferably Chrome) or a desktop app. The user interface is simple and logical. I never found myself thinking “now how do I do that?” — a common experience with other online meeting platforms. I think most new users will have little problem getting up to speed.

Though I haven’t used Butter in a demanding environment, I encountered no errors or glitches while investigating its capabilities. The only limitation I found is that I can only access my root Google Drive folder; I can’t see its subfolders. Hopefully, Butter will remove this limitation in the future.

The Butter Handbook succinctly explains how to use the platform. It’s clearly written, available during a session, and includes excellent graphics, animated when appropriate.

When the platform needs a moment to implement what you’ve requested, a lighthearted message appears letting you what’s going on. The whole product has a “we don’t take ourselves too seriously” vibe.

You can invite participants via Google Calendar, a Room link, and even during a live session.

Online support from Butter is built into the platform. It currently states a response time of under two hours. I didn’t hear back in that time period, but, hey, I asked on a Sunday…

Butter’s parent company, MeetButter ApS is based in Denmark and Butter has a clear privacy policy and GDPR.

A review of Butter costs

Butter currently has three pricing plans: one free and two paid. The free plan, which I used for this review, includes up to 50 participants and one facilitator.

The Pro plan ($25/month or $300/year) ups the maximum number of participants to 100, allows up to 2 co-facilitators via shared rooms, and includes the capability to record sessions in the cloud.

Butter’s Legendairy(!) plan ($42/month or $500/year) ups the maximum number of participants to 200 and allows unlimited co-facilitators.

Cheska, my demo partner, told me that Butter is reviewing its pricing and may drop the maximum number of participants in the free plan to 20 in the future. I asked about one-off pricing and she told me the company was considering it.

In my experience, it’s common for new platforms like Butter to adjust their pricing models over time, so check here for current information.

Wrapping up this review of Butter

Butter’s tagline is “Virtual collaboration as smooth as butter“. While I have enjoyed thinking up butter-related phrases to use in this post, I’m not a big fan of the product name. (But I’m not a marketing expert either.)

Want to learn more about Butter? You can:

I hope this review of Butter has been helpful. I’m a fan! I encourage you to add questions, corrections, and your own thoughts in the comments below.