Community?

It’s occurred to be today that there may be something missing in the rush to conquer the hot new social side of the internet. When I think of community, I think of a group of people all working together, unified in a common goal or purpose. One of the major features of a successful community is that people tend to contribute in a variety of ways. For instance, there would be a blacksmith, baker, teacher, trash collector, general store owner, etc… Not everyone is a blacksmith, not everyone is a teacher.

Similarly, in the case of the social content sites I generally cover here, Digg and Netscape, there is little of this going on. Here is the breakdown of each site:

Digg
At Digg, the fragmenting of the community into different jobs probably exists, though on a small scale. Basically, you can choose whatever job you want and try your best at it. In my estimations, not everyone does what is best for the community. Some people submit spam stories, some people bury things inappropriately, some people trash up the comments area, and the majority of people just pass on through Digg just to look.

Netscape
For Netscape, the story is a bit different. As with Digg, you can choose whatever job you want, though there are a smaller number of duties carried out by the general population. Any user can submit, but there are specific users designated to keep the place tidy. The Navigators and Anchors keep the place clean from spam, duplicate stories, and trashy comments.

Given the ~2 year history of the social news arena, it seems as if Netscape has moved toward the traditional community model. This is not to say that Netscape is superior to Digg or anything, because I enjoy both sites, and they obviously appeal to different types of people. What I am saying is that social news seems to be progressing toward a more traditional idea of community.

However, the majority of the population seems to be rather apathetic to helping the common good. When this happens it is necessary to give the individual increased control and more powerful tools for personal use. Hopefully the next generation of sites will give this to us.

On Diggs and Votes, but no Reads....

One thing I hear a lot about is the fact that people do not read the articles they Digg or vote for. While this is the case and there is no denying it, there are some very plausible reasons for this occurance.

1. The Title and Description Give Everything Away.
A lot of times I find that there is no need to click through to the actual story because it is already summarized for me. However, the summary is usually a poor one that doesn't explain everything. This causes people to digg, vote, and comment on stories without knowing exactly what the story is talking about.

2. Diggs and Votes are used as bookmarks.
I believe that Diggs and Votes are to signify that you like something, or feel that other people should see it. All too often, users 'bookmark' a story because they are at work or cannot read it at that moment. This inflates the digg count and is not helpful at all. I am hoping for some sort of bookmarking feature to come in the future.

3. Users Post the Content of the Story in the Comments.
I don't know that I have ever seen this on Netscape, but it happens fairly often on Digg. Some users feel the need to include the content of the article in the comments. This happens most often with lists and makes it unnecessary to view the article.

I'll give users the benefit of the doubt here. Sometimes there is simply no need to read the article.

Netscape Userbase Woes (Insert Debbie Downer Noise)

I've been gathering user signup data on Netscape ever since it began. This is a very easy thing to do with the use of their handy Tracker. My goal was to show a trend, either positive or negative. I do believe that this is what would be considered a negative one:

Obviously, I do not think the main goal of Netscape is to get more users, but rather to have more participation. However, I would consider this information an indicator of waning interest. It is fairly difficult to compare this to Digg at the moment since there has not been any public statement of their userbase in a while. My guess is that it is fast approaching the magical 1 Million mark. Anyways, take this information for what its worth.

Edit: Muhammad gives some good positive analysis on the topic here.

Any other stats people are interested in seeing?

What Makes a Top Contributor?

I was over at Netscape today when I became intrigued by the "Top Contributor" box. Curious as to what makes one a "Top Contributor", I looked closer and came up with some surprising stats. Here is what I found:

Looking at the data it is quite easy to come to a conclusion about one thing; that there is a difference between submitters and contributers. In my mind a contributer would be someone that contributes to the community of Netscape, and not necessarily someone that submits many stories. As you can see above, some users submit a large number of stories but have terrible homepage ratios. With the same data it is possible to also recognize that the users with better homepage ratios tend to be the ones actively commenting on stories.

In my opinion, the users with higher homepage ratios seem to submit less stories, but obviously higher quality ones. The users with low homepage ratios probably submit anything that isn't already submitted hoping to get lucky. Of course I didn't research that, but I'd guess its pretty true.

I hope that is somewhat enlightening to someone.

Feature Request: Polling

I don't know much about anything, but what I do know is that I like polls. Just as users submit new stories, users could also make up poll questions which would be available for the masses to vote on. For instance:



Of course, only heavily voted on polls would make it to the front page. But it could be an interesting tool to find out how people feel about a certain topic.

Similarly, quizzes would also be an interesting feature offering multiple choices, rather than just a simple 'yea' or 'nay'. I'll save you the heartache of another paint image by leaving this one up to your imagination.

Netscape makes the list....

Unfortunately it is the list of the Top 10 Web 2.0 Losers. Paul Scrivens writes that:

"It’s hard to call Netscape a loser because by default they should be receiving a ton of traffic with the use of one of the oldest Internet brands around. However, I don’t see them doing much simply because of the use of that old brand. Many people remember Netscape as being Microsoft’s whipping boy and newer people could care less what Netscape is because they know one thing, it isn’t Digg.

With a broader range of categories than Digg, it seems Netscape is trying to appeal more to the general public than just the technology crowd. However, that crowd doesn’t seem to be interested in going through stories and voting up the top ones and too much of the Digg crowd will remain loyal to Digg because of the community and interface (Netscape needs a UI overhaul in the worst way)."

While Netscape is definately not Digg, I would say that there is a different type of user present. Netscape does have some extremely active users that post, vote, and comment, but it looks like the a lot of people just don't get it, or don't want to get it (or don't know how to change their homepage). Some people just want their news without the social aspect attached. It will be most interesting to see what if anything is left in "social news" in a couple years.

On Netscape Promotion

I was skimming the homepage at Netscape today and decided that I am confused about how promotion works. There are some really popular stories that hit the homepage like this one, which has 73 votes and 832 comments and this one, which has 31 votes and 22 comments.

What struck me was the four stories in a row (here) (here) (here) (here) with 6 or less votes and no comments. It just seemed a little wierd that there were four obviously unpopular stories, which happened to be submitted by Navigators. Now, I don't think anything kooky is going on or anything, but perhaps the promotion algorithm needs some tweaking? Maybe less weight given to Navigators?

On Digg/Netscape User Stats

(Click the image for better quality)

Netscape:
1st 12 hours: 985 new users (1970/day) (source)
1st 7 days: 3000 new users (428/day) (source)
1st 48 days: 34,000 new users (708/day) (source)
2nd 50 days: 26,255 new users (525/day) (source: netscape tracker on 9/20/2006)

Digg:
97 days since first stat I could find: 194,809 (2008.34/day)
32 days in between next two stats: 66,327 (2072.7/day)
Number Sources: ~250000 444809 511136

I decided to forget about analyzing the story count because of the lack of numbers to look at.