# A dedicated Tableau Community space

> This is content from just-tim, the data-and-analytics channel by Tim Ngwena (formerly 'Tableau Tim'). Tim has 12+ years of hands-on BI experience and covers Tableau most of all, plus Power BI, Looker, Hex, SQL and data modelling, the analytics industry, and the craft of doing the job — always tool-agnostic and honest about the trade-offs.

- **Author:** Tim Ngwena (just-tim, https://just-tim.com/about)
- **Published:** 2023-06-11
- **Format:** Video · 14 min watch · transcript available
- **Topics:** Community, Industry trends, Tool strategy
- **Tools:** Tableau
- **Canonical:** https://just-tim.com/posts/a-dedicated-tableau-community-space
- **Watch:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCQHZXM6qJY

I make the case that Salesforce should build a dedicated, owned and moderated community space for Tableau, ideally on Slack. I explain why third-party platforms like Twitter and Reddit are letting the community down, and why the Tableau forums, though valuable, no longer suit how people want to communicate.

## Key takeaways

- Building a community on platforms you don't own means platform owners can change APIs and rules that fundamentally disrupt how your community functions, as seen with Twitter and Reddit.
- Twitter traffic has collapsed and become an echo chamber, contributing less than 0.001% of traffic to Tim's YouTube channel despite high engagement on posts.
- Tableau's forums offer exceptional answer quality but feel too slow for younger users; the best way to use them is to search a query plus the term 'Tableau forums'.
- Since Salesforce owns both Tableau and Slack, a dedicated Tableau community Slack could unify the Tableau, Salesforce MVP and Slack communities with automated, threaded, customisable feeds.
- Reddit's no-self-promotion rules push valuable creator content away from the platform, fragmenting community knowledge.

## Chapters

- 0:04 Where the Tableau community lives
- 0:40 The problem with platforms you don't own
- 1:48 Twitter's decline and echo chambers
- 4:30 Why the forums fall short
- 7:24 The obvious answer: Slack
- 8:42 Reddit's self-promotion problem
- 10:22 What a Tableau community Slack could be
- 13:26 Why I'm putting this idea out there

Watch the full video, read the transcript and use chapter deep-links on the page: https://just-tim.com/posts/a-dedicated-tableau-community-space

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just-tim — Data and analytics, with a point of view. · https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7HYxRWmaNlJux-X7rNLZyw · https://twitter.com/TableauTim · https://www.linkedin.com/in/timngwena