Think Basis It's Good For Business

Alright Digg, the honeymoon’s over, so I want to cut right to the chase. When we first met I was pretty much smitten. I loved the way you showed me new and exciting things, and took me to wonderful places I might never have found without you. However, as time went on, you started to grow more distant, and I quickly learned that despite all your talk about community you really didn’t care about my needs at all. You don’t care about anyone but yourself, and to be quite honest, you’re kind of an asshole sometimes.

Now don’t get all defensive and start telling me I’m the asshole. I’m only telling you this because I do care about you deeply and I want us to be happy together. Consider this an intervention of sorts. I’ll be the first to concede I may not be the perfect user all the time, and there are probably a few things I’ve done that you weren’t particularly fond of. For starters, I’ve been cheating on you with reddit for a couple years now. But you know what? It’s because reddit gives me something you don’t: honesty.

So, in the interest of honesty, it only seems fair to tell you where we stand, and point out a few simple ways we could right this sinking ship and regain a healthy respect for one another:

Make Up Your Mind About Shouts

Alright. So you say you want people to be able to promote their stories among friends? Seems reasonable enough. But, then you turn around and seem to devalue a person’s digg if it comes from a shout. How does this make any sense?

So, just level with me. Should I shout my stories or not? Don’t talk out both sides and tell me the variety of people digging a particular submission is important, and then provide a feature designed explicitly to solicit diggs from the same people over and over.

All I can figure from what you’re telling me is that I’m better off just digging as many different stories in “upcoming” as I possibly can so 1) friends will feel obligated to digg my stories back, and 2) my submissions have a better chance of showing up in the recommendations for other digg users.

Eliminate Blind Digging

This brings me to the next point: please eliminate blind digging. Sure sure, you’ve slowed people down a bit, and you can’t just go around digging a story a second like the gold-ol’-days. But, the fact remains you can digg a submission without ever even clicking through to look at the site, and to be fair, I’ve found myself guilty of doing this on more than one occasion. For the most part it’s an innocuous thought process of “sure, who doesn’t love zero punctuation reviews, I’ll digg it now and watch it later.” But, this can be taken to ridiculous extremes and people digging several hundred stories in a day can’t honestly say they even looked closely at the majority of what they were digging.

And yes, Digg, I blame you for this. Sometimes it seems like you’re more caught up trying to be the hip parent / best friend instead of an authority figure. Just grow a pair and decide when enough is enough. Tell us how much is too much and then stick to it. We might be mad at first, but at least we’ll respect you for it.

Show the Number of Buries

Speaking of respect, let’s use the “if you have a problem with me, then say it to my face” mantra as a start and at the very minimum begin publishing the number of buries a particular story has gotten alongside the number of diggs. You do it with the comments, so why treat a bury like some big secret when it comes to the actual stories themselves?

How many people who have had submissions with 200 or more diggs fail to make the front page are left wondering “why didn’t my story go popular, dammit?” At least it would help eliminate the frustration if you could quickly see your picture of a beagle reading the newspaper wasn’t as newsworthy as you’d initially thought.

Allow for Customization

Similarly, it would be nice if I had a little more say when it comes to what I’m greeted with when I come running to you in the middle of the work day for a quick reprieve from productivity. Yes Digg, maybe reddit has spoiled things by letting me be so picky about what I want to see, but I’d appreciate it if you were at least decent enough to respect some basic allergies from time to time. Can’t I at least opt out of the war on Scientology and have a brief respite from reading headlines about the RIAA becoming even more bastardly?

I don’t see how it would hurt things if you gave your friends a chance to choose what interests them the most. You don’t even have to let me choose anything significant, I just want to pretend my say matters. Let me eliminate a category that doesn’t interest me from showing up on the home page when I’m logged in. Let me pick title keywords that I don’t want to see ever again. You can start by providing me a way to filter out anything with the words “best” and “ever” in the title.

Honestly, if someone can write a whole book that lets me choose my own adventure, the least you can do is give me the flexibility to only see upcoming stories with titles in the English language.

Provide Some Transparency

Really, I think all of my complaints boil down to this last criticism. You don’t tell people where they stand. The open letter to Kevin Rose from a few months back actually did a pretty good job of pointing that out. You hide behind an algorithm because it lets you keep us at a distance and you can easily sidestep people’s questions without ever having to let things “start getting real.”

It would be wonderful if there was someone who actually took the time to interact with interested members of the community and treated the users with a little respect. Obviously you’re not going to be able to respond to every email wanting to know why a submission didn’t make it, or what you can do to make the front page more often, but developing some clear standards and then communicating those to the community at large would be a fantastic start.

So, even though I do feel bad for kicking you while you’re down, now seemed like as good a time as any to pull you aside for a little heart to heart. However–and this might just be me being paranoid–I have a sneaking suspicion you aren’t even listening to me. My guess is anything I said was only falling on deaf ears while your eyes darted around the room getting sidetracked by pictures of anteaters and nerdy comics.

Yeah, I know, that stuff is amusing. And you win, I’ll probably keep coming back. But, if you actually took a few minutes to really think about what I said and considered making a couple of changes on your side of the fence, we might be able to rekindle a little bit of that excitement we’ve been missing for a long, long time.

At least think about it. Please…

Too much is said about the ulterior motives of some of the submissions on social media sites. From time to time, great content has been called out by people in the community as being “spam” simply because it has a commercial agenda. To me it seems like judging a piece of content based on what its creator hopes to gain is pretty much on par with boycotting a movie because you don’t want the director to make any money. The bottom line is that if you find the content interesting, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to go around complaining about what’s going to happen as a result. Quality is quality and you might as well just enjoy it.

This isn’t to say that there’s not a huge amount of stuff being promoted that is both weak and heavily commercial, it’s just to point out that commercial doesn’t always equal bad. I for one, will never get tired of watching Terry Tate level an unsuspecting colleague.

So, in that vein, here are a few pieces of content I’ve come across (or been “force-fed”) over the past several months that I’d never have found if it hadn’t been for some savvy company leveraging social media to deliver me a subtle advertisement which I happily consumed.

Thule Trail

Despite seeing this a little over a year ago, it still resonates as a great example of what you can do with a relatively straightforward product and a lot of creativity. Thule is probably best known for their ski and bike racks, and–through what must have been some brilliant brainstorming–decided to remake everyone’s favorite elementary school classic The Oregon Trail as modern road trip across the country. The result is an ingenious game that has minimal ties to their product line, but does a considerable amount toward branding their product. Also, it’s a lot of fun.

How Long Could You Survive Chained to a Bunk Bed with a Velociraptor?

Easily the most bizarre of the four, this amusing quiz showed that with a little ingenuity you can take a topic as boring as bunk beds and just add a carnivorous dinosaur to the equation. It’s another great example of a company providing light-hearted content that helps distinguish their brand, but also offers a bit of fun for a huge amount of people that have absolutely no need to ever buy their product.

Salary Madness – 2008 March Madness Predictions By the Dollars

When the NCAA tournament brackets were announced back in March of this year, PayScale, a salary information resource, had the idea of using some of their data to forecast the tourney based on the median salaries of the school’s graduates. Since there’s a natural curiosity surrounding how much money people make, this was a great way for them to capitalize on something that was topical while also showcasing the core strength of their service. It hardly matters that the site itself offers subscriptions, because this was a quick piece of content that could be enjoyed without even taking the time to find out what it is they do.

The Eight Phases of Dating

With some incredibly successful linkbait and an increasing notoriety among social media communities, the dating site Mingle2 has gotten a decent amount of flack from some users that apparently object to having anything they’re looking at tied in with a service they don’t want to subscribe to. Here’s one user’s comment on the Eight Phases of Dating comic:

Admittedly, this one was harsher than most, but it does show the unwarranted disdain some people have for all things commercial. Contrast that with the similarly themed XKCD comic, that will likely receive little flack because it has no specific call to action on the page.

It seems as if many users don’t typically equate sites that rely on ad revenue as having just as much of a commercial interest as those promoting a product or service, and Digg has even gone as far as banning some retail driven websites altogether.

It’s probably not the most mind blowing take away, but it’s hard to look at the above pieces of content and say they don’t have some entertainment value as a stand-alone from the product or service they’re promoting. There’s no reason why each piece of content shouldn’t be judged on its own merit. Anyone should be more than welcome to promote their content across whatever social media sites they choose, they just need to be damn sure they make it interesting enough to stand on its own, because if it’s linked to a commercial site then it’s going to be an uphill battle.

In response to the upcoming, and sure to be awesome, launch of uSocial.net it seemed like a good idea to throw together a quick list of some things you might want to avoid when you decide to start spamming the crap out of Digg, Reddit, Propeller, and StumbleUpon.

For those of you who haven’t heard, there is a fantastic article on Eric Lander’s Blog talking about the December 1st launch of uSocial.net. The gist of the post is that uSocial.net will be providing their clients with paid votes, “enabling them to quickly and easily reach the front page of these sites and in turn, receive a flood of traffic.”

They even go on to brazenly mention that “we have already served tens of thousands of votes and as yet, not one of our users has reported to us their account has been closed.” In openly giving the finger to the Digg terms of service, uSocial has painted a target on not only their backs, but those of their clients as well.

In honor of uSocial.net, and Digg spammers everywhere, here’s a list of eight signs you haven’t really thought your strategy through.

1. You Submit Three Articles a Day From the Same Site

Sure you love your own content. Who doesn’t? But did you ever stop to think that maybe not every single post you write is worth submitting to Digg. Also, if you’ve already posted ninety articles from your Jonas Brothers Fan Site (laden with Adsense of course) what could possibly make you think that number ninety-one is headed straight to the front page?

2. Your Account Has the Same Number of Diggs as it Does Submissions:

This one speaks for itself, but I’m still stunned by the number of people who have over 100 submissions and have never actually dugg anything at all. You would think that an accidental errant click would have left them with at least one extra digg, but that would mean they were actually participating in the community rather than just trying to use it for shameless self-promotion.

3. The First Comment in Your Submission is Always Your Own

Commenting on your own story is sort of like complimenting yourself. It’s alright to make a self-deprecating comment if you notice a typo after the fact, but trying to boost your submission by being the first to say “wow, what a fascinating article” is kind of a douchey thing to do. Given that you submitted the article, I already assumed you liked it. You know what? Now I like it a little bit less. Nice job.

4. Your Shouts Begin With “I dugg yours…”

There are a few problems with this. One, your submission usually sucks, and two, I can quickly check to see if you’re even telling the truth. I’d say about 90% of the time you haven’t even dugg my submission, so don’t feed me this nonsense.

5. You Openly Brag About “Manipulating” Digg

As mentioned previously, if you’re smart enough to figure out a competitive advantage there are plenty of reasons why you might want to keep that to yourself and just STFU already. Nobody likes a braggart, especially the people you’re bragging about gaming.

6. Your Stories Are Buried Upon Hitting the Front Page

Wow, you were finally able to find enough friends to push your story to the front page. Now you actually need to have something that is decent enough to hold the attention of people who aren’t on your payroll. Spamming for votes can only carry you so far, but if your story sucks it probably isn’t going to last too long once it actually gets in front of a neutral audience.

7. You Have More Accounts Than Popular Stories

This one seems pretty baffling since you’re basically assuming that Digg will be unable to figure out that your multiple accounts (which always digg the same stories and sometimes come from the same IP) might be a little suspicious. Also, at least take the extra ninety seconds to add an avatar to your account. It might not make it legit, but at least it seems like you’re trying.

8. Treating the Community Like it’s Stupid

Probably the biggest offense of all is thinking that the Digg community as a whole will put up with you trying to force feed them bad content. If uSocial had any respect for the communities they were trying to game then they would have been afraid to come out and say they were buying votes. By being outed before they even start, uSocial.net has provided every reason for diggers to keep an eye out for anything unusual, and for the community to police itself and maintain some quality control on what type of stories are being promoted.

Here’s to hoping that uSocial.net has a fantastic launch on December 1st and is finished before the new year!