The cure that kills the patient
10/3 '14
I think the “one post” aspect of One Post Wonder is going to hamper (and is already hampering) its success, and it needs to be done away with.
Users need to be able to post when the whim strikes.
If I understand the reasoning behind “one post”, it is the thought is that having just one post per person per day will reduce the amount of clutter in a news feed, making it manageable.
I think there are many things to challenge about the above, not only about the desired outcome, but about the means by which one may achieve it.
What is “too much”, when it comes to a social media feed?
One person’s firehose is another person’s dripping kitchen sink.
If you restrict post frequency so that the only available output rate is a drip, then you will lose two kinds of people — the people who want a firehose, and people who would otherwise help create a firehose. Both of these kinds of people are high engagers. They, jokes aside, make a site sticky -- with long, frequent visits. They enliven a site and tend to produce the content that first-timers, lurkers and casuls eat up.
But if you chase high frequency posters and eager readers away, all you are left with people who are okay with not posting much, and people who don’t read much because there isn’t much there. These are low engagers. And because their engagement is low, they tend to drift away if something better comes along. There's nothing to keep them around absent some external force (like knowing Tom personally).
I've certainly seen people come, and then go. Even people who know Tom.
And I've certainly been basically laughed at on Facebook for suggesting a site where you can only post once a day. "Be serious," my friends might say, "the only way we can really stay in touch with each other is through posting online, why the hell would I get anything out of an internet site that intentionally discourages me from interacting with my friends?"
Don't restrict writing; Instead, empower reading
The internet thrives on original content. There are enormously successful sites out there that do nothing other than repost other people’s content.
Social media sites are even more hungry for content, because humans thrive on social contact. Thrive, hell, we require it if we're not to fade into darkness.
If the problem that OPW was created to face down is “there is too much crap posted on sites like Facebook, so much so that the site is forced to filter it for us -- in an opaque fashion that only suits their needs and we can never really see what our friends are doing” then I think there is another way to solve the problem.
Don’t restrict the amount of posts -- posts are content. Content is the fuel that drives the internet, and social contact is the fuel that makes humanity go.
Without a deep, self-reinforcing wellspring of fuel that can only be produced by hungry readers driven by engaged writers, One Post Wonder is likely going to be forever just running on fumes, doomed to the dusty back-roads of the Internet, never really getting above walking speed.
So, instead of restricting the content for everyone based on one person's idea of the right amount of posting, allow each user to decide for themselves how much content is enough by giving them tools to manage and filter their own feeds. And let everyone post as much as they want.
In other words, getting all Kurzweil on you, instead of using technology in a negative way, saying "you can't do that, it's not allowed", use it in a positive way to giving users control over their lives.
Initial OPW changes
I am proposing several changes, most of which are fairly lightweight to implement.
First, allow people to post as often as they wish.
Second, encourage social connection-reinforcing short posts like FB check-in updates or tweets or whatever you want to call them. These little “blurbs” (<200 characters or so) don’t get a title, and are shown in a compact form with just the text, icon, and dateline. They won't take up much space on the screen but they'll help bond people together just the same. (Note that we keep the beautiful formatting for long posts, which will continue to encourage long-form quality content. I don't want to take that away.)
Third, on a user’s profile page, show an average post frequency of how many short/long posts per day/week that person makes, based perhaps on the past month. This will give you some idea of what kind of commitment following a particular user might engender.
And fourth, when you follow a user, you can choose the level of engagement you want with that user. We can call that level of engagement the user “rating”. You can change the rating at any time. And no one can see what rating you’ve given to someone else. I freely admit this idea was in part inspired by ello.
The rating works altering how posts from that user are shown on your read page.
Level 1 is “bestie.” All posts are shown, fully expanded, automatically.
Level 2 is “buddy.” Long posts are shown in compact form (300-400px tall) with the expander thumb-tab to reveal the rest.
Level 3 is “bozo.” All posts from this user are shown in abbreviated blurb form with an expander.
On someone’s own profile page, their posts are always shown at level 2 so that it’s easier to scroll through them.
Later Changes
Favourites. I would also like to add an opaque “favourite/like” system where you can mark any post as a favourite. You should be able to access your list of favourite posts separately.
Perhaps more interestingly, the number of favourites a post has vs. number of followers that user has might convey a sort of “warm/cool” rating about the post that could be shown in a small indicator on the post, letting them know there's something worthwhile to see even if the post is minimized in the "bozo" presentation.
Repost. I think the ability to say “hey look at this great post/user” is a vital part of social media and sharing. You should be able to echo a post to your own feed, but only if the post is public.
Sharing / reposting is huge on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. It's an enormously successful way of expanding networks, and is particularly effective at enhancing discovery. I think it's essential on social media sites.
How I think about it
Here's the super simple "thought experiment" I contrived which ultimately convinced me that OPW needs to change.
Imagine a clone of OPW, alike in every way, except without the one post per day limit. Put both sites on the internet at the same time. Which site is going to have more writer engagement, more content, higher reader engagement, higher overall user retention, and that much more sticky browsing experience that is so beloved by people who might wish to pay for eyeballs?
I just don't see how a "one post a day" version of the site, as opposed to a "post when you want" version, is in any way better for the users or for the developers. I've been bashing at this a month, and posting frequency is lower now than it was when I started. Either my changes really suck or some other factor is causing essentially negative uptake.
That's why I think it's time to "pivot". Especially if One Post Wonder is to become a profitable undertaking. I think the elevator pitch goes something like "let's make a social media site that discourages everyone who wants to be highly engaged with it." ... at which point the person in the elevator pushes the Emergency Stop button and runs away.
Discussion is good
I posted this publicly because I think everyone reading this is likely invested in OPW to some degree and would like to see it succeed.
If some other change/idea/approach will have as dramatic a positive impact as I think removing the post limit would, then I think it's time to explore it earnestly.
Looking forward to thoughtful comments on all sides of the matter.
(side note: I don't know what this means, but because I'm 12 I'm giggling because you typed "i don't p." huhhuhuhuhuhuhh)
We'd want to be able to manually curate the list, too, and there should be at least one "official OPW" account that everyone gets for news updates and so on.
And maybe there's a "person of the week" post in that account, or another account that's like "OPW community" or something.
I added a name field, to make it more practical for me to send invites to people I do know if they go that route. And then I thought, "and what about everybody else? What am I going to do with them? They won't be following anybody when they sign up, and there is no way to find anybody if you're not already following somebody."
It might be neat that if we had a way to track people's interests (like LJ did) then when new joiners join, the site can offer the option to set them up with an OPW buddy whose interests overlap so they can have a seasoned pal on the site to show them around and answer questions. These 'buddies' would have to volunteer to be paired up with a newbie though.
Again, just thinking out loud here.
Right now that makes a ton of sense.
Pretty soon, it will be wacky, with the amount of content that will be pouring in.
Some time after that, it will be unsustainable. (;
Back to the original issue:
I have had some time to question my assumptions here... as a newcomer I am more likely to be interested in inviting my own actual friends than in talking to complete strangers. Um... right?
As Jill says, even on LJ (which had communities) she mostly did the FOAF thing. And maybe that's fine.
I feel like tools for discovery based on popularity basically just enable you to find George Takei, ursulav, and theferrett, who you're going to find eventually anyway.
I was thinking more like "random according to whatever's reasonably random plus convenient for our database sharding strategy," but I would think that.
A better strategy is probably some combination of frequency of posting, number of connections, frequency of receiving comments, and lots of random numbers.
But also re-posting/sharing, because that's how I find most people on Twitter and Tumbler etc.
How about the ability to search on bio contents? Simple enough for a start...
So those can be done while the discussion rambles onward.
Meantime we can bend minds on figuring out how to raise engagement.
Something that would ALSO be useful on an unrestricted site.
What I like about OPW is that it seems much better suited to long-form compositions than Facebook. Facebook really is geared toward quick updates and link posts, with occasional discussion in comment threads, but it's not too friendly to longer musings. LiveJournal, though, was/is good for both. (It's hard to tell with Ello... primarily because Ello is so busted that I can't tell what people are using it for.)
But I've felt the same pressure of "Oh, better not post, 'cause that's my one for the day." And while the idea of saving up a handful is better than a hard limit, I find "average one per day" constraining. Concrete example: I wanted to post an anime review, but I waited until I had finished some series, because I felt I had to make a single post "worth it."
LJ and OPW share the highly desirable trait of knowing that I *can* see all my friends' writings. I know I'm missing stuff on Facebook, which is frustrating. (Even showing 'most recent', since Fb has that annoying habit of considering a post fresh when it is liked or commented on, even if it was written two days ago.) I have no idea whether I'm missing stuff on Ello, because I have no confidence that the engine is capable of showing me everything people are writing. Or maybe people really *are* that quiet, who knows.
But what's the deal maker-or-breaker for me? The *people*. Why did I get started on LiveJournal in the first place, lo these many years ago? All my mudder friends were getting into it. Why did I start on MySpace, hideous though it was? That's where the roller derby crowd was. Why did I migrate from both of those to Facebook (despite LiveJournal really having pretty much all the features I would look for)? That's where both of those groups migrated as well, and where I picked up family and friends-from-high-school and the con crew and so forth -- indeed, it's the first online venue I've ever been where all of my circles intersected. (And speaking of "circles", it's why I never went full-bore on Google+ -- a number of my friends started up there, but they fizzled quickly, and the action remained on the Fezbooks.)
So, yeah, OPW looks awesome, and I really like the topic prompts (though I usually already have something in mind when I come to post), and I like the feeling that I'm seeing everything my friends say. But to get beyond beta and conquer the world, it's gotta be ready for the onslaught of hordes, because nobody will want to stick with it unless they can bring ALL their friends.
I am finding the observation that comments are more the place whereby one engages, rather than posts, to be interesting. If one has >1 unit of desire for social interaction per day on OPW, it will have to be through engaging with others rather than making a post.
I haven't changed my position re the above, but I think one of the things we can do to help with engagement is make the commenting system more engaging. I'm doing some design work on that today.
If we went linear, but kept the "reply" button and made it embed an "in-reply-to" link with a tiny icon and excerpt (captured by highlighting text maybe).
An alternative I would also like would be tracking "new" comments with a timestamp method by session or by post, and when comments are expanded collapse "old" comment text into a single-line with an expander and dim or fade them slightly.
Ideas!
Observation while posting this particular comment, which is at the bottom of the thread: I clicked Reply, and OPW opened the comment box but then scrolled up to somewhere in the middle of the page and I had to scroll back down. Buh?
Didn't happen with this comment. Hypothesis: I had clicked a notification to read a comment higher in the thread, then scrolled manually to the bottom, then when I clicked 'Reply' it took me back up to the comment whose notification I had clicked.
I definitely prefer hierarchical threads. I'd be happy with a different visual treatment of new-to-me comments, or some way to collapse comments I've seen before.
A small counter-proposal: what if you could write as many posts as you wanted, but the system only *published* one a day? That would limit my bandwidth to a predictable maximum, and load-balance authors across dry spells. The obvious downside: I might write something timely that's a few days stale by the time it's read.
I was thinking about the 'write as many posts as you want but only publish them daily' solution as well, and your quote above summarized why it wouldn't be so hot. Thanks for articulating it! :)
I'm favourably impressed the discussion in this particular comment thread isn't devolving into either of the two common non-corrosive modes of social media comment:<ul><li>groupthink</li><li>a debate with two immovable positions, usually with at least one side dominated by an individual</li></ul>
And yes -- actually, one of the things I've publicly raged at on ello is the killer delete X no takebacks. Let's not keep that. :)
Who even knows about One Post Wonder at this point?
Most of the invitations have gone to folks at least forty who have already been through the wars, social media wise.
Might the site, with its own retro set of rules, be an interesting set of creative constraints to younger folks who don't yet know it's here? Really only one way to know.
I've talked about creating alternatives to Facebook many, many times.
But the one and only time I got any traction from friends on that idea was when I said, "how about a social network where you can only post once a day and it doesn't filter everything for you?"
People responded to that in a way they never had before.
Everything else I added to that proposal, I've suggested a half dozen times before. This was the new element.
Unless, and this is key, the new element was simply my timing. Maybe I chose a year when people are particularly sick of Facebook.
But I dunno about that. Because pretty much every year has had its Facebook privacy dustup, etc.
Here's a question: if One Post Wonder isn't about limiting posts to one a day, encouraging quality, and mellowing out to one good readin' session a day, what is it about? Should we all just go use Ello?
That's not a sarcastic question. Much as my heart says "of course not!", it's sensible to ask how more objective people (who didn't build this website) might answer.
First, I agree that the one post per day limit is stifling. I know this because it has stifled the hell out of me; I think "I should write a brief post about this" and then I think "but then that's it for the day" and then I don't do it. And that keeps happening and then I never post at all. So despite the domain name, I agree with Sean about the one post a day limit.
Secondly, some answers to "should we all just go use ello" and bear in mind that I have been trying to use ello and probably have posted as much as anyone I know on it: ello is nightmarish in many ways. Its UI is frankly horrible -- it may be artistically neat (although if so, I lack the aesthetic) but it is simply bad to use. OPW is not bad and it gets better all the time in this regard. Many people are simply appalled at the idea of another everything-is-public place, which ello is. OPW is not. And of course, there's the whole VC thing, which I shrug at a bit, but boy does it disturb others.
Truthfully, ello has one thing I find interesting, and that's the Friends/Noise thing. And here's where we get back to Sean's suggestions -- I really really like the idea of turning the firehose back on BUT letting people have a few different ways they engage. I like it so much I've gone back to Twitter and moved all non-personal accounts to a list called "pages" and unfollowed them all -- now they don't crowd my stream and I can go look at the "pages" list when I care to. But of course, Twitter has made that a huge hassle and it also gives the illusion that I'm not following those accounts at all. Fortunately, those non-personal accounts don't care, but my noisy friends might.
I'm not entirely sure about all of Sean's details; I need to read them again when my head isn't full and achy. But I think the gist is definitely worth a lot of consideration: don't turn off the spigot at the creative end; but rather let the (sorry about this word) consumer manage his or her consumption.
The biggest problems I see are the problem of content and engagement, which directly drive audience and sustainability. But restating those points won't make them more convincing.
The LJ-and-internet-famous people Kyle Cassidy and Bart Calendar have been hyping a post by LJ-user "fengi" which says "Why not just try to bring people back to LJ?"
Here's a link I have handy: http://bart-calendar.livejournal.com/2767236.html
So... maybe I missed this already. But if we open OPW to multiple posts per day (which I think is a great idea, BTW), how is it different/better than LJ, other than the fact that it's owned and run by people we know, love, and trust?
I think many people have long-forgotten LJ accounts, and perceive going back to LJ as just that: "going back" to something they believe they left for a reason. It's a perception thing. Boutell posted on FB in early 2014 a thing encouraging people to post weekly to LJ, and it worked for 2 weeks and everyone went back to sharing Buzzfeed lists on FB again.
Then I think, "Well, most of my friends are in their early 40s and have kids and hobbies and stuff, and in their early 30s (LJ's heyday) they had more to talk about and more free time to do it, too. But in our early 40s, kids take up more time, we're slowing down a tad, and the TL,DR/ADD mentality is overtaking everyone. Why read or post long-form when Guy Fieri is on TV?
(And for the record for folks who don't know me: I'm child-free and I hate FB and rarely am on it. I'd rather not have contact with people than only contact them on FB.)
I'm a dinosaur, but i would love to see the "newest first" newsfeed abolished. It has never made sense. There should be a way to set it so that when you visit OPW, it immediately takes you to the last point in your feed where you read, and you work your way forward from there, much like the newsreaders of yore (at the very least, make this an option). I will not buldge on this issue.
So yeah, queueing posts could be good; people will need to be reminded that saying "today I..." and the like might be misleading.