With the AMA voting over it is interesting that most of the top questions are surrounding issues with the current workflow mainly the handling of rejection reasons.
This could have been addressed if the Ambassadors - or even Community members (new and experienced) - were involved in the design stage or beta testing of Wayfarer. Any consultation really. If they were we’d be surprised these questions, and particular voting, came out of it. Looking at the big picture the same patterns will happen time and time if nothing changes. Most of us do lessons learnt and continuous improvements. Or another way to look at it, what’s the definition of insanity again?
Looking at the optics, it may come across as this AMA is a fail even before the answers are published as the fundamental issues still exist and not addressed.
At a glance, this forum has over 106,000 users and the top question only had 43 votes. Whereas on Reddit, with only 16.7K registered users, over there posts like AI slop and literal garbage had more interaction.
Don’t get me wrong there are a few obvious reasons for this not including inactive / one-off users and bots but always goes back to advanced comms. As with the Wayfaer eligibility level drop to 35 there was no real marketing or promotion. With that one we knew of the changes after the fact. But with this AMA it was buried within the Roadmap post and that was it.
I will say this approach is better in terms of transparency than previous years where we had to submit questions via Google Forms. IIRC we never saw what was actually asked. And would have been interesting to see what was repeated from previous AMAs.
One suggestion would be opening up the AMA to everyone don’t limit it to the Discourse Forum. I know a few possible reasons why this approach was taken but again the good outweigh the bad here. Remember a lot of Wayfinders don’t have a need to access the Forums or have never required any help / engaged with an Ambassador in their Wayfarer journey for that matter. Does raise an interesting question about the role of an Ambassador going forward or if it would be superseded by a new role. But that’s a topic for another day - and hopefully that particular AMA question will be answered. But anyway, having community members more involved benefits everyone. It also shows respect, awareness and even trust (not bad values to have to support said pillars).
Going back to comms and marketing I’m surprised there wasn’t a drone drop in Pokémon GO about the Wayfarer AMA, something at a Gathering Point in Monster Hunters Now or even sponsored fruit in Pikmin Bloom. The absence from Pokémon GO was particularly curious given most of the driving is coming from that team but can’t be the other way round? Wayfarer can’t promote or impact on Pokémon GO? You can scratch their back but they won’t scratch yours? Or they’ll stick a k-n-i-f-e in yours? Goes back to the punching bag perception some have. The relationship between those teams are weird to say the least. Like I said curious but not surprising. And while this is not the point but you can even offer incentives or rewards to get trainers interested.
You would have at least expected to see a pop-up notification in Wayfarer as you do for say Challenges or Upgrades, you know?
Lots of missed opportunities here and as a result of some of the questions - more relevant and timely - may not get answered. Be curious how feedback is gathered and improvements made from this AMA as the post image alludes to.
I’ll leave you with this someone once said:
Growth: The Wayfinder community is growing, and we’re bringing Wayfarer to new places.
Growing maybe but that doesn’t really mean anything if there is no engagement or conversion. Plus it’s not about quantity but about quality.
Thanks.