Strong loyalty.
Earlier today WordPress.com along with 10.2 million blogs under its control went down for almost 2 hours. The most amazing part to me is reading the comments on the outage announcement. I don’t think there was a single negative comment… truly amazing considering most companies would have been screamed silly by their customers for such an outage. Granted WP could be moderating negative comments out but historically that is not there style.
If you offer users an amazing experience from end to end. They will repay you with loyalty and understanding in those times where things don’t go as planned.
Historically, I’ve had several comments remain in moderation on the news blog, some ‘negative’, some not. I think their ‘style’ mostly depends on who happens to be on comment-approval duty that day.
It’s impossible to make a definitive statement on the ratio of positive to negative comments on any blog with comment moderation unless you have access to the moderation queue. The number of comments praising WP for the outage is certainly remarkable, but it could be equalled or exceeded by people ranting in the privacy of the dashboard. Or maybe there really are no dissenting voices. We simply don’t know.
Agreed, you never really know. But I believe if they had not been as transparent and communicative (part of a solid user eperience) as they where you wouldn’t have seen as many positive comments.