I’ve been a Muti fan since the day I first saw it. Funny, but its not even that long ago. Lately however, I don’t visit Muti half as much as I used to. I might go there once or twice a week, when in the past I would open it and leave it open in my browser the entire day. Lately, when I go there I seldom see items voted much higher than 10 votes. In the past, you would almost NEVER see an item with only 1 vote on the hot/home page. I just checked and there are no less than 3 items, but I’ve seen a lot more some days.
The other thing that irks me is that 48% of the new items submitted was self submitted blog posts(when I checked). Quite frankly, it might not be bad, but it carries no real value. Everybody deems their own content valuable. It’s a fact. Self submitting is plain and simply wrong.
So here is my suggestion to Neville, Dave and Charl. Do with it whatever you like. Use it, don’t use it.
Bring down voting back! PLEASE!!! FFS!!!
Yes, I know that in the past there was lots and lots of controversy. There was many claims of elitism and god knows what else, but at least the content was solid, the self submission was zero and Muti was on everyone’s blogs/tongues.
I know about the whole thing about “mod points”. Fact is, its not working. People don’t really use it. It is capped. It is not as simple a process than it is to up vote an item. Why not simply do as Reddit does and allow people no more than one vote every 5 minutes or something? There must be a better way of doing this.
Please do fix things up for us! We miss the golden days! You have the potential to bring it back. Do it.
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Arné 10:25 am on February 5, 2009 Permalink |
I’ve been looking for the “thumbs down” button for some guys that spam muti with their own links on a constant basis.
Good points.
Cape Town's Favourite Son 10:34 am on February 5, 2009 Permalink |
I disagree.
If Muti is to be revived, it needs to open it’s arms to the mainstream Facebook users, the ones who think Joomla is the band that Johnny Clegg used to sing in.
Currently, most of the content is too niched / narrow for it to have any real traction on the local web. If you look at some of the campaigns run through Muti (the 1 vote per 1 rand for Jail4Bail, the Blogger Bakeoff etc) it seems that there are only about 200 active users?
The concept of Muti needs to be sold to the regular joes who enjoy sharing emails of the monkey smelling his bum at work. Muti should be the place they go every morning for interesting, quirky, and yes, sometimes tech and geek related news.
My 2c.
gmk 10:36 am on February 5, 2009 Permalink |
+1
The above from serial self submitter.
Stii 10:44 am on February 5, 2009 Permalink |
Shaun, I get your point. Really I do. To some extent I do agree, but do you really believe those type of mainstream users appreciate self submitted blog posts? They’d probably hate it. I have no objection taking it to mainstream users, BUT the whole point about Muti is to be a democracy. It is not very democratic having to sift through endless self submissions.
“Muti should be the place they go every morning for interesting, quirky, and yes, sometimes tech and geek related news. ” I’m cool with that as long as its not a blogger’s own “interesting, quirky” stuff. Let the community decide what is interesting and quirky. That is my point!
Stii 10:45 am on February 5, 2009 Permalink |
Arné, thats my point. Thank you. Below each item there is a moderation link, FYI.
graeme 11:26 am on February 5, 2009 Permalink |
A down vote would be more democratic, but the thing is, while i admit to serial self submission, I don’t think there is anything wrong with it, at least you know where it came from and if folk don’t like what they read then they can downvote it, if self posting is wrong this will lead to the ‘hey can u muti me?’ industry that grew up around digg. I would rather see someone post their own stuff and then let the community rate it. At the mo it’s kinda fun tracing the you scratch my back, i scratch yours of submitting to muti, but as the user base grows this will become more shadowy and end up skewing the entire thing. That will lead to a ‘connected elite’ who exclude outsiders unless they are willing to pay to get in. So, let folk self-submit, get the down vote back, perhaps organise some categories so you don’t have to see what you are not interested in, and put the content rating in the hands of muti users. The thing with the mod points is folk can see who and why, this may be preferable to serial downvote trolls, but maybe one vote up or down per link per user to limit those who have caffeine headaches and hate everybody today serial downvoting just to feel better. That should also balance out the permavoters who always vote the same folks up, while never voting for people who are not their ‘friends’. Just my 2c, but i upvote downvoting.
Stii 11:41 am on February 5, 2009 Permalink |
Graeme, I’m glad you agree on the down voting issue. As far as self submitting goes, I do see what you are saying, but unfortunately it leads to more spam that is necessary or even tolerable. Yes, it might lead to elitism. I’ll rather live with elitism than spam.
Cape Town's Favourite Son 11:41 am on February 5, 2009 Permalink |
@Stii,
Thing is, if Muti captures the mainstream market, wouldn’t the effectiveness of self submission be diluted?
People do it now (myself included), because it’s fairly easy to get on to the Hot Page. If we have more people using and voting on Muti, it becomes harder to do this, unless your content is actually worth reading, and is being enjoyed by other users?
graeme 11:52 am on February 5, 2009 Permalink |
@shaunoakes
It would be great if muti captured the mainstream market, and if you self submit to places like reddit, you very quickly get lost unless folk are really reading you. That said it takes a certain ‘critical mass’ of votes before folk will think it worth their while to go and see what everyone else is checking out. Socionomics, and the herding menatality, etc. but ye, basically the post must be worth it in a case like you put.
@stii
Spammers, well i am sure at least a few of them don’t see it as spam but as worthwhile, and a difficult one to deal with for everyone who does see it as spam. maybe then we could use the social network (yes the shadowy one on the fringes:) to serial downvotebomb them. Or institute a bot check on the submit page.
Stii 12:01 pm on February 5, 2009 Permalink |
Shaun, I’m not keen to wait until it goes mainstream one day and have to live with mediocre content. Let users decide. Give back that little down arrow…
Graeme, most other social bookmarking sites penalize or in some instances BAN you if you self submit excessively.
graeme 12:06 pm on February 5, 2009 Permalink |
@stii
so how about you can downvote and then the mod points can be used to track spam, a certain amount of spam (mod) votes and you get cautioned about the site terms of use, a few more and you get an account suspension, and so on. These mod points could be balanced against both up and down votes, to stop vindictive spam marking.
Stii 12:17 pm on February 5, 2009 Permalink |
There are some self submitters that submit EVERY SINGLE blog post they ever write to Muti. I have found some valuable stuff people have self submitted in the past. If it was good, I’ll subscribe to that blog’s RSS feed. If not, I won’t. By continuously self submitting you’re either showing me content that I have seen before (useless) or you are showing me content I don’t want to see (aggravating).
Stii 12:21 pm on February 5, 2009 Permalink |
Graeme, I’ve learned and burned plenty times in the past. The simpler something works, the better it is. DO NOT complicate things. A simple downvote button is the simplest (a.k.a. best) solution. Let the community decide. Plain and simple. Yes, people will try and game the system and exploit it for personal use, but they usually get caught and then “slapped on the wrist”.
graeme 12:25 pm on February 5, 2009 Permalink |
yep occams razor ftw
Chris M 1:28 pm on February 5, 2009 Permalink |
ROFL, I can just sit here and laugh, poor old Muti, on, then off, then on, then off :P
ismail 2:07 pm on February 5, 2009 Permalink |
Stii, Mod points work. I use them all the time when you have 100′s. i.e all the Ideabounty posts or the repetitive posts from algoa
ismail 2:13 pm on February 5, 2009 Permalink |
maybe integration with FACEBook? so FB username & password can be used, and posts to your profile. This will let it spread!
Stii 3:02 pm on February 5, 2009 Permalink |
Chris, yeah it is ridiculous, but at least we care enough to say it.
Ismail, that is quite a brilliant idea!
thakadu 4:44 pm on February 5, 2009 Permalink |
Stii, man I dont know what to say :)
I am very glad that you and others care enough to write and comment about the issue. I really respect your opinion but I happen to think you are wrong about downvoting being the solution.
The real problem is that there is not enough *upvoting*. Downvoting will simply make the number of up votes even less.
My theory as to why the upvoting has declined is that too many people follow Muti on twitter (or RSS), instead of coming to the site which is the only place you can vote.
As an aside on the serial self submitters why don’t you just hide those users? I believe the hide user feature was even your suggestion ;)
@shaunoakes
Your description of the concept of Muti really nails it, its precisely what the goal has always been.
But getting back to Stii’s concern, clearly something needs to be done. How do we get people to vote more? One fairly radical idea comes to mind, which is to drop the twitter feed.
Another that I suggested to Dave a couple of day’s ago was to remove voting altogether. (He quickly nixed that one!)
The point is we need to find a uniquely SA solution, because we will never be a Digg or a Reddit, there are just not enough users. Any and all suggestions welcome, and Stii, if nothing else original comes up, then well maybe we try your idea.
Cape Town's Favourite Son 5:03 pm on February 5, 2009 Permalink |
As Ismail as touched on, I think you need to have a tie in with Facebook somehow. Perhaps a Muti app with the top 5 stories displayed on your FB profile?
I think long term, you need to move away from mostly techie / web 2.0 type news, and offer more mainstream content.
thakadu 5:19 pm on February 5, 2009 Permalink |
@shaunoakes
There is actually already a Muti Facebook application, perhaps not quite what you had in mind but take a look: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2447578299
In addition to that Muti also has its own Facebook profile to witch submitted items are streamed as status updates.
Both the app and the profile have been around for well over a year so perhaps the fact that you dont know about them higlights another problem, and that is one of marketing. :(
thakadu 5:22 pm on February 5, 2009 Permalink |
@Shaunoakes
you said: “I think long term, you need to move away from mostly techie / web 2.0 type news, and offer more mainstream content.”
Just to respond to that too, we obviously don’t choose the type of news, thats 100% up to the users. If you look at my own submissions you will see they cover all bases, but my submissions rarely get voted up ;)
Ash 7:16 pm on February 5, 2009 Permalink |
I agree with Shaun about the tech/web2.o feel that Muti has. I feel guilty when submitting a sport story from my blog.
Don’t agree about the down voting though, that will just lead to “popular” users(you know who you are) dominating the submissions.
Marcel 8:31 pm on February 5, 2009 Permalink |
I prefer the ‘positiveness’ up Up-voting only, moderate for Down-voting – in principle.
But then again, I click my Muti links from Twitter … so I never really up/down vote. Which means I’m not really participating.
So here’s a suggestion: How about loading a floating bar above the link’s content. Something similar to what Facebook does now if you click a shared link. On this floating bar, there’s are Up/Down/moderate buttons & login fields. This way, even if I follow a link from Twitter, I still have my ‘voting bar’ right away to voice my opinion. Perhaps the bar would also indicate number of Muti comments?
(I’m going to chat to @thadaku about this & see what he thinks…)
Stii 10:12 pm on February 5, 2009 Permalink |
Thanx Nev. I know this is quite painful. As Chris said, up then down then up then down.
Unfortunately the hide users is not an solution as some of the self submitters does have good posts at times.
Hell, some of my friends nowadays self submit simply because it is acceptable. I think the voting problem is not necessarily due to traffic that gets diluted by Twitter, etc, but rather due to the fact that people are more hell bent on gaining traffic from Muti rather than seeing the true value of it. At least, for myself that’s the case.
I know people hate frames, but honestly, Marcel has a good idea going. Maybe look into that!
Shaun & Ash, I’m not blindly unfair or anal. If it is a good article you submit, I’ll vote it up. Whether it is sport, politics, humour, anyting. If you self submit, you do it for personal gain and that’s the bottom line. The naked truth about it. You want to get readers. THAT IS NOT THE PURPOSE OF MUTI!!!
I do think, Nev, you have the right idea. Make it uniquely African. The problem, specially with Digg is simply that people use it to get massive traffic. Once more, that defeats the object. If you can overcome that, it would be problem solved!
Daniel Neville 11:22 pm on February 5, 2009 Permalink |
“I do think, Nev, you have the right idea. Make it uniquely African.”
I second this, one of the things that attracted me to muti in the first place was how unlike Digg etc it was.
Adding my 2c…
personally i would vote for trying to keep away from the down voting thing, although im also guilty of using Twitter to follow Muti submissions.
Just had a look at the Muti Facebook app and it only has one active user.. hmmm. I like Shaun’s idea though, how about looking into that as well as Marcel’s frames idea.
That should help in bringing in new users, and help with encourage up voting.
Nic 11:50 pm on February 5, 2009 Permalink |
OK so I’ve resisted and resisted getting in to this topic but I can’t help myself.
Let’s be honest, we are all debating what we PERSONALLY all think of our own experiences of the interaction WE have with Muti. The dead honest truth is that there is generally not enough activity on Muti for any solution to work. The way this should work is that the devs (Nev, Charl, Dave) make choices and decisions based on the actual activity of the COMMUNITY in it’s entirety and the community then acts on the changes.
What we have here, consistently since I brought up self submissions a year or so ago (maybe more) is a couple of people telling the founders how it goes and then another faction disagreeing.
Personally I love upvoting and downvoting as a solution but there just aren’t enough active voters to make either valuable to be honest. A post can get to the top of muti with 4 votes sometimes. That’s not a voting mechanism, I can easily find myself 4 email accounts and sign up, or get 4 twitter mates to vote up my post and bam, it’s there. I should know, I get many many posts to the top of muti daily.
What we, as a community need to do, is rally support for muti, active, registered members voting and submitting. We need to reblog about muti, get our new readers on to it, facebook it, spread the word and grow the community. Then some of these suggestions will be worth something. But for now, I think we need people, not downvoting.
Jason 6:25 am on February 6, 2009 Permalink |
I think downvoting should be reinstated as a natural part of Muti. Those who cheated the system by downvoting links now cheat the same system by just logging in with 5/10/20 accounts (no email address required) to vote their own items up.
I also think that people have started to use Twitter as a quick/lazy way of posting links.
@Neville: how about adding functionality for a user to add their Twitter username/password to their Muti account, and then auto-adding any links posted to Twitter to Muti as well?
Stii 7:26 am on February 6, 2009 Permalink |
Nic, I’m not convinced. Why was it cool a couple of months ago? It was never this bad. Besides there are a myriad of users I’ve never seen before. Surely Muti’s user base has in fact grown and not declined? Taking it mainstream might be a solution, i.e. getting the masses to use it, but the masses might want to use it for the right reasons, which is not state of affairs at the moment.
If Twitter/Rss are such a big problem, here is a quick, win-win solution. Simply redirect to the page on Muti (http://muti.co.za/comments?sbid=34434) instead of straight to the article. This will have one of two effects, both good for Muti. 1) People will start voting again or 2) They’ll get pissed off and stop using Twitter/Rss to read Muti submissions and start using Muti instead. Both ways Muti wins.
Finally, Nev, if you do at all want to go mainstream, you sadly need to stop listening to every other suggestion (this one included), take charge and you make the decisions. If you think it is a good idea, do it without asking everyone every time whether or not they think it is a good idea. It works great while the community is small, but once it gets bigger, you’re going to struggle!
Stii 7:35 am on February 6, 2009 Permalink |
Jason, spot on. I concur, it should be a natural part of Muti.
Daniel, the reason it is not like Digg/Reddit/etc is mainly due to the fact that it is so much simpler. When the down voting was removed and the moderation implemented, it lost some of that simplicity.
Wogan 9:25 am on February 6, 2009 Permalink |
And on and on and on … sheesh.
Personally, I think Mod points turned out to be a good idea. If you care _that much_ about the quality of the stuff on the Hot page, you now have 2 tools you can use to do something about it, and it can’t be gamed as easily as downvotes.
Also, I’m not sure the quality of the content has anything to do with self-submissions, as it has to do with the lack of good quality content in the local blogosphere at all. And if I’m so wrong on that point, why aren’t people submitting any?
I don’t do a lot of browsing beyond my favorite forums and news sites, so very often, I have very little to submit. Maybe that holds true for a lot of people?
Also, if you look at the contents of the Hot page over a period of 24 hours, it doesn’t move too fast. During any given period of 2 days, you’re practically guaranteed to see the same stuff there – so why bother upvoting if it’s updating so slowly, and the “best” articles see a lot of Hot time anyway?
So echoing what a bunch of others said, we need more users. Plain and simple. And we need those users we do have (and that are so passionate about Muti) to break out of their surfing patterns, because that’s how you find new things.
~ Wogan
Stii 1:12 pm on February 6, 2009 Permalink |
Wogan, there are plenty of quality content around, just not from the same sources. There are brilliant new blogs sprouting up, so it is not a lack of content.
Yeah, mod points works for some it seems. I’m a lazy bugger. The quicker, the better for me. That’s why I prefer the down vote button rather as it is as simple as to vote up.
thakadu 3:31 pm on February 6, 2009 Permalink |
There have been some great suggestions here so Stii thanks for bringing this up and thanks all for chiming in.
In the short term here’s what we are going to do:
The Twitter and RSS feeds will take you to the Comments page rather than direct to the url (@Stii’s suggestion). This will at least give people the opportunity to vote on the item. Its similar to what Digg does and although it means one extra click for the user IMO its worth a try.
We are *not* going to bring back downvoting, at least not in the current version. As people have pointed out this has gone back and forth and there was a huge discussion about the mod points and that was supposed to put it to bed. I agree its not as simple, but the simplicity of the downvote hides the fact that a downvote and an upvote are not symmetric. (A downvote has far more power see this excellent article: http://keithmclachlan.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=66&Itemid=1)
Another reason is that I would rather focus development on the new version which addresses many of the UI concerns.
Wogan 3:45 pm on February 6, 2009 Permalink |
@Stii – Like I said, if it’s not a lack of content, then it’s a lack of users submitting that content.
Stii 10:44 pm on February 8, 2009 Permalink |
Wogan, because people are simply too busy self promoting that it would be stupid for them up voting other good articles.
Events | Startup Africa 2:10 pm on February 9, 2009 Permalink |
[...] has started once again to “Fix” muti. Calling for downvoting again, and quite strangely Stii’s claims it’s a way to ‘revive muti’. Dont get me wrong, i respect Stii, [...]
evl 2:49 pm on February 9, 2009 Permalink |
I totally agree. Muti needs a downvoting button.