Wyze Community Appreciation Day - Thank You

Echoing @Seapup s praise, thanks for creating the summaries!

Whenever i hear about an upcoming Wyze related AMA, my very first thought is “i’ll wait for @carverofchoice s recap”… :slight_smile:

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Thanks for summarizing this! I read a lot of the posts on Reddit but didn’t get through them all, and your summary is super helpful to extract the important info.

Thanks again!

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Aww, thanks guys. In full disclosure, It is Jason who did most of the work this time. He has taken up the mantle to quickly copy all the AMA questions and answers both verbatim (I used to paraphrase the questions) after an AMA ends, and posts the full copy here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/wyzecam/wiki/ama/

Since he now does this in such a timely manner and a good format, I have thought it over and decided there really wasn’t a huge benefit to me spending all the time to manually format it my previous way. There are benefits to keeping things standardized, so now I just copy Jason’s summary and make sure it is formatted correctly for the Forum use (most of which is automatic).

So, I’d like to mostly thank Jason. He put an insane amount of work into ensuring the AMAs are successful. He organized it, he now collects questions early and passes them on to employees the day before so they can prepare several good answers in advance, and if there is a question whether something is confidential or sensitive information or not, they can check with higher-ups to get approval first. It also allows Jason to sometimes pass on some questions that aren’t specifically related to the AMA topic, but which may be important to answer to someone in other teams who can help out. Jason keeps passing on questions and directing where to answer, Jason does some follow-up questions with people to post a few bonus answers even after the event ends, and NOW he even quickly gets the entire summary posted shortly after it ends so I don’t have to do it for everyone who has been waiting for it. Jason’s made these events WAY better than they even used to be and it is very appreciated all the work he organizes and does to make these amazing events. Thank you @WyzeJasonJ

Now all I really have to do is copy and paste Jason’s hard work.

I know some people liked my previous format for various reasons (I did too), including for the ease of use of quoting and citing things to other places and looking up the exact original source.

This new format can be slightly more complicated, but once you get used to it, it’s not too bad to have it be effective enough, and not too hard to find the original source. Just open the link above the Copy and pasted Q&A and then search/find the text for that question or answer. So it just takes a few extra seconds.

For anyone wanting to know the effective way to quote reference things in a table, here is what I do:

First I select the part that says “Question & Reply” at the top of the table and select “Quote” so it shows up like this:

[quote="carverofchoice, post:3, topic:266761"]
|Question|Reply|
| --- | --- |
||
[/quote]

Then I go find the text I actually want to quote and copy and paste it just above that double “||” line, (making sure there is a “|” mark before the Question, between the Question and the Answer, and one after the Answer, so it would look like this:

[quote="carverofchoice, post:3, topic:266761"]
|Question|Reply|
| --- | --- |
|Question Text | Answer Text |
||
[/quote]

And then will show up like this:

Or you can just ignore the question, and select the answer text and click quote. That might be easiest for most people to be honest. Then just paraphrase or give context about what the question or subject is that they were answering before posting the quote.

Either way. I do love having a copy of the summary in here for us to reference!

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ok! Thank you @WyzeJasonJ & @carverofchoice!!! :grin:

thankssign

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The AMA questions are STRONG. Well done.

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Aaaaand post bookmarked, ready go! :slight_smile:

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Just noticed Jason missed one answer on accident So I am posting it in here now, and I’ll let Jason know to update the Reddit summary too:

Question Reply
u/WyzeMaximK We have seen community managers say indicate that you normally do a major Production Tract App release to the public once per month. Sometimes we see a different number of Beta releases during that same time for different amounts of time. Some of them will have a Release Candidate version, and other months there is never a Release Candidate version. How do you decide how many beta versions to test, for how long, and whether or not to do a Release Candidate version before it launches publicly? How many App beta testers do you have for Android and for iOS Testflight? Are the Beta Tester numbers sufficient for you to generally feel good about the testing, or do you feel you need more beta testers to ensure more bugs, etc are found and resolved first? What kind of Alpha testing do you do with the app before it ever even reaches Beta Testers? Hi u/choicehunter, We are following common release cycle, every 4 weeks production release, and every two is hot fix, if it is needed. Ideally we would have one RC version of app to test, but if we find critical issue we will have one more, or a few more, to re-test. Beta users actually is testing feature we are planing to release, i believe we have enough of them to build an idea of usage. u/WyzeMaximK
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Haha, I tried to add the update into the original post, but it told me it was too long:

So I guess it gets to be separate from the rest of the AMA :man_shrugging:

I guess that’s one downside of copying all the questions verbatim instead of paraphrasing since there are some crazy users with really long detailed questions (most of them are me :rofl: … I submitted nearly 30 questions and most of them were longly written beasts as you can see). One benefit of the old format. :slight_smile: Fit more answers in 1 post.

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Did anyone in the AMA peanut gallery broach this subject directly? :slight_smile:

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Dam, @UserCustomerGwen , you’ve been busy. :wink:

How essential is statistical analysis to good social planning within the business? Can you give an example of a past insight that guided Wyze to great effect?

Do you turn the analysis inward (employees) as well? :slight_smile:

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  • Your absolute least favorite part of Core:
    • The people. No, seriously. Other community members is listed as a favorite part but Which explains a lot, actually. This is divided into 2 sections:
      • Being upset at people who are negative/complaining/aggressive in their posts.
      • Being upset with the rude people who are often specifically rude to the first group as a reaction to the negativity or to the more favorable Wyze responses on negative posts.
      • This is actually why Core requires the most direct moderation and why post approval is so handy for us since we know to prepare for posts we expect to be explosive and can choose timing. :slight_smile:

Three years ago on the Forum:

Not no more.

I was gonna sandbag with some recent @carverofchoice but I can’t find the place where he says Contentious Core sucks and he avoids it in favor of The Fabulous Forum! :wink:

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Haha, that’s because I don’t even have a Facebook account. I don’t really have personal experience with the Facebook Core group, so I rarely comment on it because I don’t really know except what the stats say or some others. But I can’t speak of it first hand.

I do follow Wyze on pretty much all the other platforms though:
Forum
Discord
Reddit
Twitter
TikTok
Instagram
YouTube
LinkedIn

But no Facebook, so it’s rare to have me discussing it.

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Really? I didn’t know that. Me either. Ever.

I love the fact that Wyze is so… forthcoming? Candid about their business and the people, their customers, who support it. Or don’t.

Seriously, it seems extraordinary and in-line with their stated principles. So, kudos to them. :+1:

You’re a stats guy.

Do you think sometimes a human’s empirical analysis is superior to formal statistics?

Everything has it’s strengths and weaknesses. Plus, if you want to get technical, when you say a human’s “empirical analysis” that is saying an EVIDENCE-BASED approach to the study and interpretation of information. So in a way, the right statistics are simply a subcategory of empirical analysis anyway as they are both dealing with information and data. They aren’t exactly separate things. Though I suppose there is a case to be made for experienced and directly observed vs not. Try explaining what salt tastes like to someone who has never had it. On the other hand, you have to be careful not to generalize a case-study to the norm. Sometimes they are outliers. But in other situations, a case-study can be very valuable, even when or because it is different from the norm. Empirical (personal direct observation) can be prone to significant biases and errors, while statistics (when done right) can provide rigorous and objective results, but may miss some nuances and complexities of the data. So in that sense, good research should often (not always) combine both for valid conclusions. Empirical is great for generating hypotheses and exploring the data, while the stats can help to test them and make estimates, among other things.

People like to rag on stats, but usually the problem is not the stats themselves, but the cherry-picking and the narrative being applied to them to misrepresent them, often by people who do not actually understand them or their implications, or have left out other measures that are critical. The same can be applied to anything in life. This is the importance of transparency and the unfettered power of narrative. We spend a lot of effort worrying about “hacking” our digital devices…meanwhile, learning few to no critical thinking skills to prepare for all the “hacking” against ourselves personally, socially, emotionally, cognitively, etc. People are too susceptible to the right kind of narratives, especially when they get hacked through their cognitive biases and heuristics. These things should really be taught in school. Maybe as a “Cognitive Anti-virus skills” class or something.

All that to say that both have value and different strengths, but regardless of that, the main issue is trying to overcome the narrative biases that are introduced to keep it as objective as possible.

Data’s strength is also sometimes it’s weakness. Take a Bell curve, for example, or what we kind of think of as the average. With IQ scores they always change the overall results so that a score of 100 will always be the average score. Due to the Flynn effect, though, human IQ has MOSTLY been increasing roughly 3 points per decade. So even though average IQ was still 100 in 2000, it would have been rated as 103 in 1990, and 106 in 1980, etc.


Why I didn't use 2020 as an example

I didn’t use recent years as an example of the Flynn Effect because a Northwestern University study showed that IQ scores have actually been DROPPING recently for the first time ever since they started tracking such things…people are getting worse in verbal reasoning, matrix reasoning, and letter and number series, although spacial reasoning went up). I have my own hypotheses as to why IQ is dropping recently, particularly with verbal reasoning, reading/writing, but that has potential for people to react emotionally, so we’ll avoid it here.


There is great benefit in the Wisdom of the crowd, and LLM GPT AI’s averaging out human language for predictive responses based on averages. We get a TON of benefit from these kind of averaging models. BUT if we ALWAYS did that with everything, we’d lose out on a ton of benefit. How terrible would it be if all of humanity was judged based solely on the “average?” I LOVE some of the outliers. The outliers are where some of our most incredible accomplishments lie. Brilliant people, amazing artists of every kind, innovative ideas, etc. It would be terrible if we lost all our beauty and progress from the outliers to a statistical average that ignored them. No, that would be a travesty. In some ways, there is no such thing as average (Incidentally, I highly recommend the book “The End of Average” for some good discussion on that). So, I certainly do agree that statistics can leave out the human side of things and overlook some of the beauty and potential in outliers and case studies.

Data is rarely the problem, my froggy friend. It is the interpretation, narrative and limitations we put on it. Part of the beauty is expanding the narrative to consider other things with it.

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A rich answer. Thank you.

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You aren’t wrong! :beaver:

Sure thing! I think that statistical analysis is important for good social planning. But a lot of the really meaty stuff probably falls under topics I’m not at liberty to discuss with the public. So I’ll leave it at statistical analysis being used to track the impact of changes to customer support, selecting features for our services, and more.

But I CAN talk more about the stuff I use community survey data for!

  • We were able to conclude that Reddit isn’t displaying our wikis and some other resources to folks well enough. We have a game plan to address some of this and make the maintained resources more visible on both old and new Reddit views.

  • I use the survey to assess problems with communities and with Wyze itself. I pass that feedback to the team. Support made a lot of changes and had a dramatic increase in positive sentiment since the last round.

  • I used the survey to help decide an AMA cadence for Reddit going forward.

  • I used the survey to assess sentiment around product families. And in this one, I checked on sentiment about specific services.

  • We have been having conversations about the impact of post approval in Core, if we should keep it, and if it’s providing value. The questions about that in this survey were pretty critical for community management in that platform.

There’s a lot more! But I hope this gave you a good view of some ways I use the data. :slightly_smiling_face:

I sure do!

Don’t badmouth my platform. There’s a difference in doing it in jest from the inside and bashing a platform you’re not in. I love my Core folks. :angry:

Though the forum is absolutely fabulous. :heart:

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Thanks for the rundown, Gwendolyn! I can see how it’s giving you purchase. :+1:

Understood. :slight_smile:

Be well!

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You’re welcome! Thanks for giving me an opportunity to talk about the survey stuff! I’ve been super excited about it. :grin:

Have a great week, peep! :wave:

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Thank you Jason for your summaries. They are great and very much appreciated for this and yesterday’s AMA!!

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