March 15, 2008
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Xangans are too Nice!
Of all the online communities I’ve been a part of, the
people on Xanga are by far the nicest.
And that’s a problem. It’s got to
stop!Take Xanga’s direct and indirect competitors for
contrast. I don’t have any experience
with LiveJournal so I’ll leave them out.Blogger - Everyone
seems isolated and an island unto themselves. People only interact directly
with the people that they know and don’t seem to care in the slightest about
strangers.MySpace – A community in which greed dominates. And I don’t
just mean the money grubbing, spamming, advertising bots and sick twisted
individuals preying on children either. There’s a hoarding factor on MySpace. You’re
sort of greedily collecting junk to show off on your page!Facebook – Again there’s a sort of show off attitude, but it’s
more of a preppy sort of aloofness here than greed. With facebook it’s all
about saying my applications, my groups, my networks, my gifts, my photos, and
of course my friends are better than yours. Mine are cooler! See come look at how cool they are!YouTube – YouTube
users are just plain mean. There’s no other way to describe it. If you put your
heart and soul into making a video blog to post on YouTube but your sound
quality isn’t up to snuff, if anyone even notices you at all, expect to get
riddled with messages filled with hate filled bile. Not to mention your video
will get many many low star ratings and you’ll probably even get reported as
inappropriate content. That’s just the way YouTubers roll. People don’t think
of the people posting videos as people with feelings that might get hurt. It’s
all impersonal.Xanga’s different.
Xangans are, for the most part, just nice guys and girls. Pure and
simple. That’s what makes the community tick.Nowhere is the overwhelming, almost sickening, kindness of
Xangans more evident than when you look at the evaluation schemes Xanga has
tried to employ to try and bubble up the best blog content to higher levels of
visibility.Take eProps for example.
It’d be a great system right? If only people would just give 1 eProps to
entries that were, you know, good. And if only they would reserve 2 eProps for
entries that were exceptionally good. But
we don’t. We give 2 eProps to
EVERYBODY. Without exception. If I read
your blog and leave a comment, I’m leaving 2 eProps. And everybody else does it
too!Part of this is that it’s the default and people just aren’t
thinking about it. And part of this is also the self advertising aspect of it,
since posting eProps puts your name on a visible list making your site more
visible. But these are clearly not the ONLY
reasons. We can tell because actually as
the 2 eProp list grows enormously, you’d actually be better off joining the
relatively sparse 1 eProp or 0 eProp list from a shear advertising exposure perspective.
Your site would stand out more that way. But most people don’t. They still give
2 eProps. Not only that, but people will
go around to all their friends just giving 2 eProps on all of their entries.
Why? Because it’s nice!Take stars as well. It’s sort of the opposite issue. It’s not that people star too much, it’s that they star too little.
Here’s
the thing about blogs. They are personal. Sometimes very very personal. So when somebody poors their heart out in a
blog entry, talking about some terrible time they are going through or the
troubles they are having and whatnot, even if they write it with terrible
grammar and it’s barely comprehensible to the reader, nobody wants to say “Sorry
my friend, I feel for you, but your entry only deserves 1 star!”So most posts don’t get starred at all. Most people even
forget that the Stars exist. I know I sure have. There have been lots of really
good posts I’ve read that I just forgot to star. When I’m reading blogs the
last thing that is on my mind is the objective quality of the post. I’m curious about what my friends are up to. Or I’m worrying about how my friends are doing.
What is their state of mind exactly? Or I’m looking for new friends with similar
interests. Or I’m just looking for a momentary distraction satisfying my curiosity. I literally have to make myself switch
mindsets when I think about starring and it’s tough.As a result of that there aren’t enough ratings to provide a
sufficient average of the quality of a blog entry. And that means high star ratings stand out a
lot. And LOW star ratings stand out even more! If there were thousands of
ratings of every entry, nobody would care if somebody went in and unjustly down
starred your entry. It would disappear in the midst of the on average accurate
starred ratings. It would be
statistically insignificant. But since sites don’t get a lot of ratings, if you
have made an enemy on Xanga who down stars your entries out of spite it’s a big
deal. And it feels bad too. Most Xangans are far too nice to do that to
somebody!It’s like that for other things too. Subscription alone
would be a decent metric of what blog sites are best in a normal rational world
right? But nobody wants to unsubscribe to a site. That’s like saying, sorry, I think your blog
sucks these days! Write some better content!
Nobody wants to send that
message to their subscribers!So even though there are many blogs I subscribe to that
haven’t updated in months, they are still on my subscription list. They will probably always be on my
subscription list.Similarly we also subscribe to blogs we don’t even like or
want to read. We subscribe just to be nice! Sometimes people comment on your
blog and you’re so grateful that they took the time to read and to comment that
you want to show them a kindness in return!
And you don’t want to say that their blog isn’t interesting enough for
you to subscribe too. So you subscribe anyway. And you just ignore the entries.Many Xangans end up with sickeningly large subscription lists this way. And friending is pretty much identical.
Comments themselves would probably serve as a good metric too,
except again we comment too much out of shear kindness. Xangans comment
absurdly in fact. We so often comment when we’ve got nothing to say! We comment
just to say “hi”. We comment because we are bored. We comment in hopes of
making a friend. We comment because we want to get into a discussion with
someone. We comment to join the bandwagon when everybody else is commenting on
some popular blog. We comment to reply
to someone else’s comment. We comment when we see that someone hasn’t gotten a
lot of comments. We comment because we don’t want to be rude. We comment to make a new user feel more at home. We comment to
remind our friends that we are still out there and still their friend. In short, most of the time we comment just
because it’s nice. And
nowadays we comment just to earn points too!And likewise we want these kinds of pointless comments. We
thrive on them. It’s a big part of what makes Xanga feel like a close knit
community. But that of necessity means that comments don’t work at all as an
evaluator of community interest in a blog post. Far too many comments are not
based on whether someone is interested in what a blog post is actually saying.That’s the thing though isn’t it? Whenever you are trying to evaluate
something, you are implicitly or explicitly making a comparison and every comparison has two sides. If I am saying I like A better than B, I am
also saying I like B less than I
like A. And the latter isn’t always the
nicest thing to do. But for an evaluation scheme to work people *have* to do
that. People have to do it a LOT.So I wonder, can any evaluation scheme that Xanga chooses to
implement, defeat the inherent kindness of the Xangan community?It will be interesting to watch and find out.
Comments (10)
hmmmm you bring up good points…
I’ll try to comment where/when i go…i figure it’s just good manners to thank my host, whether i particularly enjoyed the content or not. I subscribe when i do enjoy it. I have canceled some subscriptions for various reasons…even one because of the massive amount of posts. I couldn’t sign on without having page full of ‘this feller has added a new weblog entry’ and, for the same reason, he’s easy enough to find without a sub when I’ve the inclination to drop in on him. I’ve never ‘starred’ anyone. I’m fairly new to Xanga (bit over a month) and didn’t even know about them until all the posts came out (last week?)about cheating the system and this one purposely downgraded me ’cause she’s jealous and that one’s starring herself. Now that i know, considering how/why i came to know, ima likely stick to my no ‘starring’ policy. Keeps me out of the muck. Slainte!
Hooray for sweeping generalizations.
@qccan - I’m not saying everyone does all of these things but that enough people do each of them, whatever their reasons, that it throws off th efficacy of content evaluation schemes. I totally missed the posts about cheating the star system and whatnot you are talking about. I only learned about it when I attended the Thursday Xanga Team chat and they were talking about the star system. But the star system has always irked me for the reasons I stated above amongst other reasons. I always thought something like favorites would work better, but I don’t think even that would stop people from being too nice to one another skewing the system.
@Dewdropsonthegrass - Yup! My favorite kind of post!
I like Xanga’s niceness. I think it’s part of why I’ve been on xanga for 5 years now while other communities have sort of fallen off the map for me. Xangan’s respect each other. If you comment them, they’ll usually make a point to comment you back. If you write an entry that’s totally ridiculously craptastic no one hurls insults at you. Even someone disagrees with you they actually debate instead of just hurl insults. I think this atmosphere improves the community and in the end leads to better quality sites.
I wish they would just get rid of all the rating systems and credits. It’s just creating more attention whore static rather than encouraging people to make things of quality. I like Xanga because it isn’t like other sites (and I doubt I’m alone in this), so they ought to stop trying to emulate them.
LiveJournal is pretty much like Blogger if you ask me…
I like xanga’s niceness…
sometimes users get nasty though…
@iamthebella - I also like Xanga’s niceness. That’s why I’m here. I’m just saying the evaluation schemes have problems as a result. Yeah, and I know there are nasty people on xanga too. I’ve encountered a few.
@elvesdoitbetter - Credits are pretty unique to xanga as far as I can tell. I haven’t seen many sites that do similar things.But the rest sure some of it does sometimes seem similar to youtube or facebook, but these ideas that all of these sites are implementing are sort of the natural progression of online community websites. They all sort of blur together over time becoming similar to one another. It doesn’t matter so much so long as each retains their distinctive characteristics and does not alienate long term users.
I agree with you that too many systems can distract from the business of blogging and sharing good quality writing, but at the same time I think it is important for xanga to have a means to help people identify the interesting blog entries that they might want to read and find the people who have similar interests with whom they might want to interact. I also want the featured content to be selected in an objective fashion so that people feel the system is fair and open to everyone. I’ve known people who have quit xanga because of the biases they felt were present in that selection process.
No system is perfect, but I don’t think xanga should just give up and leave things as they are. That they continually strive to experiment and improve the site is one of the things I like about Xanga too.
@nephyo - credits were kind of an old school online community thing. Does anyone remember kiwibox? And you would get kiwipoints for doing different things around the site that you could cash in for certain other things. The system was all over the internet back in the late 2000/2001ish. That’s where I think eprops were derived from as well. Which is why they confused so many first time users back in the day — you gave and got points but they didn’t really mean anything but “good show.”
I don’t think they should stop developing the site, I just don’t think they should try making the site into another myspace/facebook. The developments should be geared towards what the basis of the community iis. Sure, myspacers have blogs, but that’s more of a throw away function, not the main purpose, and it’s really more of a diary than blog for most people anyway. People on Xanga are here to blog and read other’s blogs. The advancements need to be geared towards that purpose. Otherwise they’re just making noise in the machine rather than really improving anything, and will end up scaring users away.
I agree we need a better way of choosing featured content though. Didn’t it used to be random selection? then a few years ago it was people with the most comments/eprops/whatever.
@elvesdoitbetter - My understanding is that featured blogs are chosen through a sort of editorial process right now. That is specific people read around blogs, looking for interesting stuff that they think the community will find interesting with a preference toward picking blogs that haven’t been featured and have few subscribers.
That sounds like a fun job to have to me, but it strikes me as an enormous amount of unnecessary effort too. And no individual no matter how much they pride themselves on being fair, will be able to choose blogs without their own background and biases influencing their decisions somewhat. But still it’s a lot better than random selection or using eprops or comments or stars.
Anyway, I’m curious as to what ideas you have for developing the site in a way that enhances its main purpose rather than turning it into a myspace/facebook clone. You should blog about it! If you haven’t already that is. If you have point me to it. I’d love to read it. I’m always thinking about stuff like this.
@nephyo - ah, so they changed it again. Featured blogs used to be based on how many eprops a blog got. A lot of people were actually turning off the eprops function on their sites because they didn’t want to be featured. I’m glad they’ve changed that now, though I can’t help but notice 2 out of the 3 featured blogs is sponsored most of the time these days. But I guess that’s better than having to deal with even more adds on out actual blogs.
I haven’t blogged about that yet. But it’s been in my head for while, so maybe the blog after the one I have for tomorrow. Just be grateful Xanga isn’t behaving like livejournal these days. Xanga might be adding ridiculous features, but LiveJournal is busy insulting the intelligence of its users and censoring content. So it could be far worse.