The Vocal Minority

In my time with FACEIT, the community's voice was a large influence on our product development, tournament formats and even company culture. We were super careful though with not following the vocal minority and alienating the silent majority, which is most of your players or users.

Firstly, you have to remember the 1-9-90 rule of online communities. Only 1% of your users/players/fans are usually creating the content and another 9% are engaging with it. That means 90% of your audience is observing and using the product without ever saying a word. If you pivot your entire roadmap to satisfy the 1%, you are effectively ignoring the experience of the 90%.

So, how to do it? Reddit is a great tool to see what lives, but dive into the comments and engage. Explain why you made certain decisions and listen to the responses. And don't just look at the most upvoted topics. You might get tweeted the same feature request 100 times, but if you dive into the downvoted sections of Reddit, you might actually see that that feature is downvoted by the majority.

Another great way to bridge this gap is to talk directly to your players. Find a number of actively engaged players and reach out to them. Have a conversation with them about what lives with them and their friends. This helps you find the quiet power users who have thousands of hours in your product but never post anything.

Try different things and see how people engage. Give your community tools to play with and see what they actually build themselves when they have the chance. This hands on behavior often tells you much more than Reddit or X threads ever could.

Finally, always cross reference sentiment with actual data. The vocal minority might be loud about a specific balance change or a UI update, but your internal metrics might show that the silent majority is actually playing more or completing tasks faster. Use the noise to investigate, but use the data to make the final call. Always make sure to actively engage with the vocal minority and explain your decision-making process.

At ELO that is exactly what we do. We build tools for the community to engage with on Discord so you can see firsthand what resonates. By giving them something to interact with, you get a much better understanding of how to engage them better and what they actually value. Reach out to us if you want to start building a better connection with your majority, and turn the trolls into advocates.