After having been around support communities for products with large amounts of users for many years, I have found the differences in the level of support available for smaller communities to be interesting. Level can be defined in a couple of ways, namely quality and quantity.

I’ve concluded that the quality of support in technical support communities can be somewhat described by looking at a normal distribution curve.

If ‘Mean’ represents the average level of technical support proficiency within a technical community and standard deviations represent overall skill level, I have observed the following:

  • The larger the community, the more the support tends to be toward the center of the distribution. In terms of quality, I would describe that as average to pretty good/bad.
  • The smaller the community, the more the support tends to be toward the tails of the distribution. In terms of quality, I would describe that as horrific or amazing.

After thinking about this for a few days, it makes sense at least to me. As an example, I had an issue with my micro.blog site, and then later the micro.blog theme I was using. In both cases, I was able to establish direct communication with the creator of those products and work to a solution. In the case of the theme, I had somebody that was technically knowledgeable and very helpful post a response to my help forum query within 10 minutes.

Small technical support communities seem to attract and keep those truly invested in many/all aspects of the product in question while it seems like larger communities seem largely comprised of average skill level users finding ways to make the product work for them.

There is no judgement here, I just find it interesting. Sorry for the statistics refresher.