Currently, the SCP Wiki maintains seven official offsite social media presences: our subreddit, our twitter, our tumblr, our instagram, our deviantart group, our facebook, and our twitch.1 That is a lot of platforms to keep active simultaneously, and the need to keep all of them adequately staffed has presented a continuous problem since before Internet Outreach team even existed.
As IO captain, I am proposing that we reduce and refocus our efforts towards our more active and useful platforms by ceasing to operate our tumblr and Deviantart platforms.
Why these two platforms in particular? Firstly, the remaining platforms are all performing very well. Facebook and twitter are long term platforms whose followers have grown steadily and stand at about 60k each, and thanks to the work of DrAkimoto and Cerastes the SCP Instagram grew from nearly nothing to 26k in just a year. r/scp in particular has experienced explosive growth these past few years, growing from about 120k when I became a mod to over half a million subscribers today, and averaging about 170k new subscribers per year for the past 2 years. By contrast, the SCP tumblr has less followers than the one year old instagram account does and the deviantart has only about 4500 followers. The tumblr platform additionally has had the most frequent burnout and turnover of any IO site, and has been a serious challenge to keep staffed.
I want to make clear that this stagnation is emphatically not the fault of our tumblr and deviantart staff over the years, who have worked hard and well in their roles. It is due fundamentally to demographic trends on these particular platforms as well as smaller miscellaneous issues outside their control.
I consulted the current lead staff members for these accounts, and received the following responses:
Roth (tumblr): "The staff burn out on tumblr and devart is horrid … I can agree to axing them both in favour of focusing on the rest. It'll free up some staff, and take stress off of them."
Yossi (Deviantart): "The Deviantart doesn't require many resources to maintain (about 10 or so minutes scattered throughout a week), but it serves no functional purpose and it has no real room for growth. I'd be fine with dissolving it if you want to."
I also consulted a few additional IO staff whose views ranged from supporting the restructure to ambivalence on it. No one I've talked to expressed strong support for keeping the platforms.
It is my firm belief that taking this step will allow IO to become a stronger and more sustainable team, raising the productivity of our successful platforms and reducing overall burnout. Technically, taking this step is within my power as IO captain given the lack of policy regarding our social media websites in our rules and charter, but I think it would be terrible precedent for an IO captain to do so unilaterally without first consulting staff as a whole for obvious reasons.
This discussion will be open for one week, and if there is serious disagreement on the subject I'm fine with the ultimate decision being made via a staff vote. All staff, including junior staff, are welcome to weigh in on this discussion.
Edit: With more than a week passing and no major objections, I will begin the process of phasing out these two platforms. Thank you to everyone who weighed in!
