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if you’ve contributed to any of the major social news sites, you are probably aware of the fact that the commenters on these sites are not the most articulate or the most civil members of the social web. in fact, in many cases, on sites like digg, the commenters are juvenile and downright abusive. for most people, this is a deal breaker because of which they refuse to participate in social news, or seek out the social news audience as potential readership. in fact, many big companies are actually afraid of being picked up by a social news site because of this potential backlash and the potential for brand suicide at the hands of the rioters.

it’s fitting then, to use the example of the baiting crowd as laid out in the wisdom of crowds, to analyze this subset of the social news audience. surowiecki explains, borrowing from a study conducted by leon mann, that baiting crowds are formed mostly at nighttime, when it is both easier to go unidentified and but also for each individual to imagine himself as a part of a bigger group. the crowd on digg, for example, acts similarly. the most abusive users are those who have very little invested in the community, are virtually anonymous, and are usually opining as a part of a larger thread rather than a single contrarian voice.

their willingness to riot depends on what other people in the crowd are doing. specifically, it depends on how many other people in the crowd are rioting. as more people riot, more people decide that they are willing to riot, too.

there are, of course, some people who will never act in this way. people who are invested in the community, those who actually take the time to read the comment and want to make a substantive contribution to the discussion, or are simply not radical by their very nature.

what is interesting as a content producer, is to look at the reaction of a social news audience, and then compare it to the reaction of your regular readership. the main difference, apart from the very nature of loyal readership, is that commenting on blogs is less anonymous. you can require people to enter certain pieces of information before they comment (although this information can be faked), and you can always record people by ip addresses and ban them from commenting if they abuse the system. the extra steps they have to take to leave a comment, and the ease with which you can eject them from the threads if they misbehave make a lot of people think twice before they mouth off.

even more interestingly, the kind of comments you get depend on the culture you create as a content producer. i have been published on a vast number of different sites but the nicest and most productive comments and criticism i received were quite unsurprisingly from the problogger audience. similarly, the crowd on stumbleupon tends to be much lest hostile than the crowd on reddit, which tends to be much less hostile than the crowd on digg. as surowiecki concludes,

…if there are enough people in the crowd who will not riot under any conditions-that is, whose actions are independent of the crowd’s behavior as a whole-then a riot will be far less likely, because the more people who do not riot, the more people there will be who don’t want to riot.

apart from creating a culture of constructive input and criticism-which is easy on your own site but not easy on a social news site-you as a content creator can set the tone for the rest of the conversation by commenting yourself or you as community members can prevent unnecessarily hostile babble from taking over the discussion threads simply by voicing your sane opinion before the fools take over. (more on influencing discussion) ultimately, the main problem many of these sites face is that the rioters tend to scare the more sane people away and therefore can run wild with their opinion. the best way to fight it is to be a part of the community and actively start your own discussion threads or talk back to the rioters. if enough sane people step out and voice their opinion, they can change the tone of the entire community.

this post is a part of my journey through james surowiecki’s the wisdom of crowds.

Technorati Tags: social news, comments, digg, reddit, stumbleupon, discussion, problogger, blogging, james surowiecki, the wisdom of crowds

before i realized what had happened, i was actually confused and pleasantly surprised that something had changed at reddit. then i came across the official reddit blog post explaining the change.

one of the most annoying things about social news sites is that because the content tends to be skewed heavily towards the preferences of the early adopters and the core users, it can be very difficult for newcomers who don’t subscribe to the same preferences to enjoy the sites. as a result, many of the newcomers end up leaving the site. in an effort to curb this problem, reddit has updated their algorithm to normalize the ‘hotness’ of the stories promoted to the front page of the site.

what this means is that you will start seeing more content on your front page from smaller reddits. we did this to give the smaller reddits that you are subscribed to a fair chance of getting displayed. if a particular link is very hot within its own reddit, it will now be very hot on your front page as well.

the situation before we made this change was that the more popular reddits (e.g. reddit.com and politics) would wash out all the other content.

i’ve witnessed the problem many times. one of the things that prevented me from getting passionately involved in reddit was the fact that 95% of all content seemed to be very political. in the new system, people who enjoy that content can keep reddit the same by only subscribing to the politics reddit whereas the people looking for more diversity can change their subreddit subscriptions to reflect that.

we’ve been experimenting with a similar idea at propeller for a while. we had the same problem, where a majority of our content would be politics-only and the other channels weren’t getting the attention they deserved, so i understand reddit’s problem and love the solution that they have come up with. this type of customization along with a robust recommendation engine are two of the most important elements that social news sites need to work on if they want to break out of the niche and gain mass appeal.

touche reddit.

Technorati Tags: social media, social news, reddit, propeller, diversity

you may remember, in a blogosphere full of people berating yahoo! buzz, i was perhaps the only one who gave the site a chance and wrote a contrarian review. well the results are in and here’s what the content producers are saying:

• salon got so excited about a february 28 link from the yahoo home page to this story that they issued a press release - they had 1 million unique visitors that day, the most ever to the 12 year old site.
• us magazine was linked from yahoo on february 27, and had the second highest traffic day ever. 32% of visits that day came from the yahoo home page.
• huffington post reported 800,000 unique visitors from a yahoo-linked story.
• smoking gun, portfolio.com, dallas morning news and imaginova all reported significant traffic increases after links from the yahoo home page.

it’s not just traffic, as techcrunch mentions, the yahoo visitors love to comment too.

despite the fact that yesterday was a saturday (slowest traffic day of the week) and that it was up only 1/4 of the day, we had our highest traffic day ever and over 1,000 comments were left on the post.

so what are you waiting for? it’s no longer a leap of faith, it’s the right thing to do.

Technorati Tags: social media, social news, yahoo, yahoo buzz

a couple of days ago i was pondering the value of connections versus conversations because it’s clear that while there are many social networking sites out there that allow you to network - or connect - with people, most of them don’t help the average user leverage these connections into conversations on the sites. that is not to say that the conversations aren’t taking place, they are just taking place off the platforms or via person to person messages. with the imminent launch of a facebook instant messaging application, all of this is about to change.

i want to emphasize that facebook isn’t the first social network to do this, bebo has had this functionality for about 6-7 months though it is somewhat tied to microsoft’s windows live messenger. basically, any user can click on an ‘im me’ button in your profile and the social network opens an im window in your browser for you to initiate the chat. im curios to see how facebook plans on implementing this, via a profile-based application or in a pop-up browser window because facebook has the potential to set the tone for how the functionality is implemented across the board.

there is a very good reason why facebook might want to tie it to the site and not let the feature loose. the more restrictive it is, the more time people have to be logged in and using the site, and the higher (skewed) facebook’s attention metrics are. with the web moving from a visitors and page views metric to a time spent per visitor metric for measuring popularity, a decision to keep the instant messaging service localized would give facebook a major boost. this would be even more important to facebook because the application might make people want to drastically decrease their usage of other features like poking, sending facebook messages, writing on each other’s walls and so forth. at the same time i do see how having it only on the site may become a major annoyance for many people, including myself.

regardless, in my opinion, instant messaging will be one of the most useful features to come to facebook in a long time. not only will it allow friends to chat with each other but i can see a huge potential for group chats and conferences. ideally, i would like this feature to be implemented so that when someone clicks the icon form your profile, the chat is opened in a window for whatever desktop application you use for chatting with people on a regular basis. not only would that ensure that all your contacts are stored in one location (though that problem can be avoided by importing/exporting contact lists) but would also allow for convenient conversation logging (which i find incredibly useful for recalling details and finding links people share with me over im).

Technorati Tags: social networking, social media, facebook, bebo, instant messaging

before you read my opinion on the two relatively similar services, i would recommend checking out read/writeweb’s look at friendfeed versus socialthing. while i think the article has a great overview and good points, i do have to disagree with the conclusion.

in short, the idea behind both services is to help users lifestream all of their social media activity through one simple aggregator and allow their friends on each network to subscribe to these actions and interact with them. thus far, friendfeed has an advantage because it has more services integrated into its stream and has more media exposure, which is understandable because they have been around much longer. by comparison, socialthing only has 6 services integrated (versus friendfeed’s almost 30) and has a fairly small community.

the main problem i have with friendfeed, (and the lack of which i think is socialthing’s killer app) is that friendfeed isn’t simply an aggregator, it is a network of its own. for example, when you interact with someone’s stream in friendfeed, let’s say a friend’s twitter message, the interaction is posted within friendfeed and not on the external site.

socialthing on the other hand is quite simply an aggregator and not a network (at least not yet) and the reason why i love it is because when i interact with an element from socialthing, the interaction appears on the external site (from which the lifestream was aggregated) and not on socialthing itself. for example, when i reply to someone’s twitter message, the reply appears on twitter (whereas on friendfeed, when i comment on a twitter message, the comment stays on friendfeed).

in the future i can foresee socialthing allowing you to respond to comments on your blog, or social news sites, or on people’s social networking profiles, and more, directly from their service and without having to visit each site independently.

quite frankly, we don’t need a social network of social networks because that just further exaserbates our information overload problem. what we need is an aggregator of social networks so that we can efficiently consume and dispose of (or interact with) information - which is precisely what socialthing does.

please leave a comment if you would like an invite to socialthing.

Technorati Tags: social networking, lifestreaming, socialthing, friendfeed

i was reading dave winer’s opinion on how internet news should work and while i totally agree with the model, i think there are some limitations to it that social news sites can/are addressing.

dave winer writes,

i immediately put together a web application that scanned these “feeds” periodically, and put the new stories at the top of the page, pushing down the older ones. then, to do my hourly news trawl, i’d just have to start at the top of the page, and read down until i came to something i had seen before. i thought of this as “automated web surfing.” it took the labor out of the hunting and pecking i had been doing before.

this is, imho, the way news should work on the Internet.

sounds familiar? it certainly should, at least to anyone familiar with socially driven news and content sites. the site that winer’s model resembles the most is reddit. however, the social news site takes the model and improved it significantly.

rather than one person trawling for news and updating the content hourly, there are hundreds of thousands of users doing the trawling and submitting stories by the minute. furthermore, rather than having one person dictate the importance and therefore placement of the story on the site’s front page, the site’s enormous user base votes on what is important and how important it is. lastly, rather than manually updating the list for to replace old content with new content, the site’s algorithm automatically pushes down older stories that are losing steam with the audience and pushes up newer, more active ones, and even gives you the option to automatically hide the stories you have already read. karp has more.

although social news sites are growing at a very healthy pace, they have nowhere near the audience of more established news outlets. perhaps there is even room for a cross between the social news model and the editorially driven news model (something that propeller has experimented with). publishing on the web should definitely follow the social news iteration of winer’s model, and i believe that we’re getting closer to that everyday.

Technorati Tags: internet, news, social media, social news, reddit, rss, dave winer

i definitely see the value in social networking sites (facebook) as well as professional networking sites (linkedin) but what i find more important and more valuable than connections on these sites is conversations. you can use both kinds of networks (social and professional) to get networked with people in your geographical location as well as your industry and even with people that share your interests. what i don’t see these networks doing is facilitating people in leveraging these connections into useful conversations. these conversations, it seems, are happening off the sites and through other mediums.

yes, these sites have tools like person-to-person messaging and status updates but for the most part conversation through those features feels disconnected and contrived. for me, these conversations are happening over email and instant messaging, but primarily through twitter (the microblogging tool has pretty much replaced networking tools for me) as well as blogging (either in the comments sections or as response posts). similarly, when people refer to social news or social bookmarking sites as social networking platforms, i think the classification is somewhat misleading. while these services definitely have both social and networking elements to them, they are very limited and almost ‘tacked on’. even for these sites, once the connection has been made, a large part of the conversation takes place off the site.

while we wait for these to sites become truly social (as in mediums for conversations not just connections), i am curious to hear what tools you are leveraging to extend conversations beyond the limitations of these sites.

follow me on twitter: msaleem

Technorati Tags: social media, social networking, social bookmarking, social news, digg, twitter, facebook, linkedin, blogging, conversations, connections

i’ve written a guest post at read/writeweb on the death of the page view as a useful metric.

the problem it seems, arises because there is a disconnect between the advertising industry and the publishing industry. the reason why there is an eternal quest for traffic, not only in terms of unique visitors, but also maximizing page views per visitor, is because advertising networks let you in on the basis of how much traffic you’re generating, and your eventual income is based on the number of impressions (and clicks).

what do you think is the fate of the page view and what will replace it?

Technorati Tags: social media, blogging, traffic, advertising, metric, page views, readwriteweb

i’ve written a guest post at read/writeweb on yahoo! buzz. this will probably be the first and (for now) the only positive piece about the site that you will read.

as soon as the online press got hold of a sliver of information about yahoo! buzz, the predictable cries of “digg clone!” were loud enough to drown out anyone who thought that yahoo! buzz might be something more than a lame attempt at socially driven news (without the social elements). while many people think that the flurry of recent launches from yahoo! represent nothing more than a cry of desperation, i think yahoo! buzz, at least, sets itself apart from the rest.

yahoo! is moving in the right direction, and a very exciting one for all parties involved, and here’s why.

[tags] yahoo!, yahoo! buzz, social news, digg, social media, readwriteweb

i’ve written a post on search engine land explaining why sharing content is a good idea, and laying down some guidelines to help you share without overwhelming your friends.

no feature that i can recall in recent memory has polarized the social news sphere more than the ability to mass-alert stories to other users for immediate votes. stumbleUpon has the “send to” feature, propeller has “site-mail” and digg has “shouts.” as i’ve said before, the feature is a great one in principle but can be a horrible one in practice. as with any tool you give to people, half your job is to educate them on how to use the feature and set some guidelines so that it’s not abused.

learn how to use the feature without annoying anyone.

Technorati Tags: search engine land, social media, digg, propeller, stumbleupon, share, site-mail, shout