Tuesday, September 7, 2010

How To Piss Off An Online Community - 4 Recent Examples


How to Piss off an Online Community – 4 Recent Examples

Betray your users’ trust

Example: Facebook’s Privacy Settings

While this wasn’t the first time Facebook was under fire for its privacy policies, it is arguably the worst example by the social media giant.  Outraged bloggers became concerned news outlets which eventually evolved into a main stream media fire storm of concerns over Facebook & privacy.  A storm that is still going strong today.

Create a feature that people want, but ruin it

Example: Twitter’s Re-tweet Button

While this wasn’t the worst thing that Twitter could do, it was widely criticized by the community.  Almost a year later, people continue to use the original format and manually RT instead of using the button.  In fact, in my own twitter feed, I had to go 3 pages deep and pass over 10 manual re-tweets before finding a Twitter generated re-tweet.

Take away core features

Example: Sphinn announces they’re removing voting

In case you hadn’t heard, just a few days ago, Sphinn announced it was doing away with user voting.  The social media news site for the SEO and Internet Marketing community will now be completely editor hand picked content.  The decision came just a couple weeks after the announcement of a more strict editorial policing of content to prevent sub-par submissions from reaching the front page through group voting.

Completely change the entire way the site works (including breaking it)

Example: Digg v. 4

Digg’s creator and former CEO (who stepped down this week) Kevin Rose promised that they were working to bring back many of the removed features, but the damage has been done.  The site has lost over 1/3 of it’s traffic and devout users have already started migrating elsewhere.  What will become of Digg?  It’s anyone’s guess.

Read more at www.searchenginejournal.com
dannysullivan Today 12:02 PM
Todd, many "loyal" users at Sphinn are not upset by the removal of voting. Consider that the site gets about 2,000 or so visitors per day. Practically no one complained about the voting announcement.

The article on Sphinn announcing the change has 49 people who Sphunn "for" it versus 10 who Desphunn it. First, that tells you practically no one out of the daily visitor to Sphinn vote, which is a primary reason for removing voting. Of the tiny number that does, most were in favor of it.

There's an "anti" article about the changes that also got submitted. In that case, it has drawn 36 votes for it. That's still less than the 49 who voted for the article about voting being removed. And 36 votes -- that's what you've got as evidence that many are upset? Thousands of visitors per week, and all of 36 people complained about the change?

Heck, if we were a store that made a major change, with thousands of shoppers per day, getting only 36 complaints would be seen as successful.

Most people don't vote on stories at Sphinn. As a result, the tiny pool of votes is easily polluted by any "old boys" network that wants to push content from a particular site or company, even if that content isn't exceptional in nature. That's what the announcement was a few weeks ago, by the way -- not a change but a reminder to vote and submit for exceptional content, as we'd always asked.

We've had far more complaints over the past year about why some so-so content from a particular site seems to be allowed to go hot, complaints that some particular site might have a vote gang network to push anything hot, or some site "gets away with it" because the editors clearly must love them, or you name it.

Dropping voting does away with all this. Sure, editors will have their decisions come under criticism. But that's nothing new for editorial sites, nor does it mean that editorial sites can't offer value.
Read more at www.searchenginejournal.com
Cool posts and as someone who runs a blogging community I know people can be your friend one minute and ..
What I didn't like about Diggs move and maybe this is Karma is they say we are making a change and then say we will send out invites to the SOMEBODYS so they can get tons of followers and then we will let the nobodies in I hate when sites do that. I read their advertising page and basically they are saying PAY us and SPAM DIGG submit your feeds etc I never liked Digg anyway it's no friend of bloggers.
I read about the Sphinn I don't use that site as I found it to be SNOBBED up but read the whole debate the sad thing is to see the editors Chirping in to defend the removal of the VOTE button basically that site is DONE :) Karma is a MOFO sometimes
as far as Facebook I don't care about that site it's lame and useless, Now if twitter can get the @ to work on there like FB it would be a rap :)
The bottom line is that sites that think they are slick and PUSH it to far in their favor with toolbars NO FOLLOW links Snobs are DONE :)
Nice post Stumbled
Read more at www.searchenginejournal.com

Template developed by Confluent Forms LLC