Digital Marketing Specialist, Social Media Consultant,
and Tech Geek at Heart

Home >

Posts tagged as:

kevin rose

Do Negative Comments Hurt Social Media?

October 10, 2007

Group InteractionOne of the more important aspects of social media is the emphasis on user generated content that blends with community discourse. As people have noted, many comments are negative. Some of the comments are downright scathing. As such, many users in social networks tread carefully, and I really cannot blame them. Whereas some of us are so much less anonymous than many commenters, we’re bound to feel vulnerable since nearly all of our cards are on the table.

There’s also the element of being able to vote comments up (for agreement) or down (for disagreement). Many community-based sites operate in this way (and for the sites that don’t, I am often compelled to search for a + sign or a thumbs up sign so that I can vote my approval). A few weeks ago, a user contributed to a respected blog with a comment that said that giving a thumbs down is negative and reflects a natural homogeneity within the specific community. The comment in question was critical of a blog post but clearly lacked sufficient information in its criticism, if only to say that the commenter did not enjoy the post by the poster. This is fine, and in general, criticism is quite valuable, but criticism needs to be backed up.

This is a preview of Do Negative Comments Hurt Social Media?. Read the full post (654 words, 1 image, estimated 2:37 mins reading time)
Continue Reading16 comments
Read the full article →

Where Digg Fails, Reddit Succeeds

September 25, 2007

Reddit's Aquatic LogoA few weeks ago, the Bounty Fishing blog came out with an excellent and well-thought-out blog post about 27 Aquatic Lifeforms You Never Caught While Fishing. The story did quite well on Digg and on Reddit, with Reddit users noticing that one of the fish forms actually looked very much like the Reddit logo.

So what did Reddit founder Alexis Ohanion do? He changed the Reddit logo to that aquatic lifeform for several hours.

That story hit the front page of Reddit and on Digg, and 67 people voted on my comment:

Props to Reddit for visibly interacting with the community it serves.

Beyond the cool factor, Reddit is easily getting new users by paying attention to its user base and even creating surprises when not even necessary. (And Reddit doesn’t stop there.)

It’s great to build a self-sustainable social network and then be able to sit back and relax while the users run the show. It’s even better when you take part in the everyday details of your site and focus on your user’s experience. Not long ago, I wrote about how 17-year-old Andrew Sutherland was doing this on Quizlet. His site is successful on its own, but his involvement makes the user experience all the more enjoyable.

This is a preview of Where Digg Fails, Reddit Succeeds. Read the full post (332 words, 1 image, estimated 1:20 mins reading time)
Continue Reading20 comments
Read the full article →

The Downside of Social Media (Or Why it Sucks to be on Top)

September 12, 2007

You might think it’s all fun and games when you become a top submitter on a social news site. However, that’s not exactly the case. The more popular you get you get, the harder it is. It’s a natural progression of what some people might consider “celebrity” status: once you hit fame, you’re also scrutinized a lot more closely. You’re no longer really sailing smoothly, and the critics abound.

I learned a lot after writing my open letter to Kevin Rose. I learned that six months ago, I was a different type of Digg user. I learned that there are people who are merely spectators. Some of these people seek out discussion. Some of these people look to simply vote on stories and use Digg as a bookmarking tool, which is primarily where I started when I first signed up to use Digg. Then there are others who primarily focus on contributing content to Digg.

Six months ago, I wouldn’t have liked myself as I use Digg today. There’s no real way to explain that except to say that it’s not easy to jump into the head of someone who submits heavily to Digg unless you’re one of those people. It’s a completely different mindset and one that, for me, took months of study. I can have this discussion on Digg for hours, but nobody will be able to relate unless they’ve been there.

This is a preview of The Downside of Social Media (Or Why it Sucks to be on Top). Read the full post (1371 words, estimated 5:29 mins reading time)
Continue Reading26 comments
Read the full article →

An Open Letter to Kevin Rose

September 7, 2007

Dear Mr. Rose,

I am writing to follow up with you regarding correspondence with a member of your team several weeks ago. I inquired about a domain that seems to be on your auto-bury list. Granted, you have never admitted to an auto-bury list, but the statistics speak for themselves. In the first link, it is obvious that the last story that was not buried was also popular and hit the front page 184 days ago. As of this writing, it has 903 Diggs. Not too shabby. However, in the second link, it appears that every single story submitted since then has been buried. That includes a total of 25 stories. One of them is from less than 24 hours ago and was buried with 2 Diggs. As an avid user of your service, I don’t think it would be off the mark to say that you are burying stories internally given that it is very rare for stories with less than 5-10 Diggs to be buried from my observations (and you know how often I wander the halls of Digg). I’m going to go a step further and make a claim that you are not only burying stories internally; you have a method of burying domains after an arbitrary amount of time has elapsed since the story was submitted. Here was a story from the domain that I submitted that got buried with 45 Diggs. Somehow, it accrued another 60 after it was buried. I have a hard time believing that the democratic voice of Diggers was responsible for this story’s burial. Similarly, these two stories are good Digg content, and I think that a good number of people would agree with my claim.

This is a preview of An Open Letter to Kevin Rose. Read the full post (1152 words, 2 images, estimated 4:36 mins reading time)
Continue Reading55 comments
Read the full article →

The Thing About Friends and Digg: Hit up the Big Guns

June 19, 2007

Here’s the deal. If you’re real life friends with Kevin Rose, you have a new product website to launch, and Kevin submits the story for you, expect that the submission will make the Digg front page within hours of its submission.

There’s preferential treatment to young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and their close-knit circles are pretty exclusive.

Many have contested the launch of Jason Calacanis’s newest venture, Mahalo. The discussion pretty much revolves around the same concept: 1) “old is new again”; 2) this is Wikipedia and About.com; 3) it’s just not scalable.

Many believe that Mahalo, by itself, would probably not gain popularity. Guy Kawasaki’s Truemors seemed to have been big for all of a week but many seem to have already forgotten about it. However, once you have a rockstar Digging your site, you’re bound to make waves and get popular.

Once upon a time, Jason whined that SEOs were snake oil salesmen. Jason said: “SEO is BS, if you generate a web page with good content Google will rank the page properly.?? I personally don’t have anything against Jason’s very candid opinion.

This is a preview of The Thing About Friends and Digg: Hit up the Big Guns. Read the full post (485 words, estimated 1:56 mins reading time)
Continue Reading9 comments
Read the full article →

Next Entries →