Thank You + More MSA Updates

Thank you for taking the time to write to us in the last post. We learned a ton about what broke trust and what was just frustrating. Thank you for your responses, your candor, and your support. 

We have work to do to deliver an experience you really love. Some of these things will take time to fix. Some of these things we are going to try to reinvent and do differently. Some of these things we can change today…

From our last post, we learned that you want to see more reviews and more reviews from the community. So let’s get moving on that now. If you’re interested in writing a review with MSA, please reply in the comments with the brand you’d love to review with one of our writers. We’ll reach out to you on next steps based on your feedback in the comments! 

Change is on the horizon for MSA. This is just a starting point. Over the last few days, I tried to reply to all comments, but also want to summarize what I heard.

What We Heard

There are distinct themes and areas to improve upon.  

Reviews: Bring more reviews to the site, including bead box reviews. Cover new subscription brands. Do more MSA community reviews and use more reviewer photos.

Trust: Provide more information when there is change, such as when a writer departs or a new one joins. Explain why something is the way it is, such as old comments on articles and why comments don’t appear immediately. Provide information to help learn, remove promotional tone, and make it clear when something is sponsored.

New Ideas: Revisit brands and products that were discovered in boxes and provide an update on whether or not they have withstood the test of time. 

Diversity: Bring greater diversity to the site in those who write and provide a point of view, as well to the subscriptions that are covered. 

Timely and Accurate: Get the right things right about brands, ranging from their essential pricing information to making sure the community is aware of the latest spoilers on time. 

MSA Features: Give the Swaps site more love, specifically by removing outdated swaps and swappers. Improve the Search experience so all reviews appear for the brand, and fix the broken RSS feed. Also, folks really miss the forum. 

What's in the Works

More reviews: As mentioned above, we would love to do more community reviews! Please reply in the comments with a brand you’d like to review with us. We will follow-up with next steps. (Thanks for the feedback on bead boxes and hope to see you sign up in the comments, Lauren, Crafter, Alice, and Alice a Rachal!)

Reviewer photos: More writers started taking photos of their own this month. For example, Lindsey took the photos in her Vine Oh! Box review, and Naomi took the photos in her most recent November Birchbox review. It was great to read that you wanted more of the same! You can expect to see more of this in the future. 

All brand reviews: Search results are not serving you as well as they should be today. We will update the search results to address your feedback, and I will post an update once that’s live. Until then, the best way to get all reviews by brand is by searching for and then selecting the brand name. This will take you to the brand page. On the brand page, you can see all the reviews, including reader feedback too. Below are screenshots in case that helps! 

Censoring Comments: There is a lag in your comment appearing on the site from when you submit the comment, and if the comment is at risk of offending anyone in the community, it doesn’t appear on the site. Someone on our team scans comments every hour during business hours and tries to minimize the time lag from when you post a comment to when it appears onsite. However, I hear your frustration loud and clear and it makes sense - why can’t you real time chat and react to comments, especially when you can do that on other sites? We are testing new ways to do real time interactions on MSA and will have an update next month. 

Lists and Old Comments: There are some articles that summarize the best brands based on a category (“Best Subscription Boxes for Kids”). We strive to make these lists your single best resource for that particular type of subscription. The Directory is now the most up-to-date way to get this information. We are working on a way to compare and contrast subscriptions in The Directory, and we will also see if we can add something similar to lists (Thanks for the feedback, Sarah and Lauren!). Also, lists have old comments to reference what was said in the past, but we will rethink how to do this better too (thanks, CDG!).

Timeliness and Accuracy: We are working on getting subscription details and timely spoilers consistent, and it is humbling. No one did this better than Liz. We are brainstorming ways to improve this. In the meantime, please keep doing what you’re doing - let us know in the comments if something is not working right. It's helpful to figure out where we are tripping up. 

What to Expect Next

Year In Review: All next month we will be featuring segments of “Year In Review,” which is a look back at some of your favorite subscription brands. It’s the subscription box version of Spotify’s Wrapped, where we do a review of what subscriptions did for its biggest fans this year. 

Follow-up Product Reviews: Christen’s November monthly favorites roundup (here’s one from October favorites) will feature a new product MSA writers are loving and one that is withstanding the test of time that was discovered in a subscription box. We will also launch a new series next month to highlight products that are still favorites after living them for months. (Thanks for the ideas, Carol!)

Secret Santa: We are working on getting Secret Santa ready for next week on the Swap site, which Lindsey will post about on December 1st. 

Next Update: I’ll provide another update before the end of the year to share what’s new or fixed based on your feedback. Right now we are working on improving comments, fixing Search results, making it easier to find There’s a Subscription for That, reaching out to old writers for an update and improving tagging onsite. I will also share more about what to expect in the new year from MSA. We are excited to bring new brands, features and experiences to the site! 

We may stumble a bit as we keep improving, but we want this to be a place that you love again. No one here can build or deliver exactly what Liz did. However, I’m hoping you will see that there are folks here, both new and old, who care about the community, want you to have a fun experience on MSA, and also happen to love subscriptions. Our goals are to get the basics right, like a familiar tone in the writing, and to evolve MSA with new features and experiences, like community reviews, Mary’s What I’m Wearing This Week series, and a new comments experience. I also want to share more about how I ended up at MSA after meeting Liz, but let’s fix some things first - more on that in the next update! Thanks for giving us another chance.