Suggestions For Muti
Muti is a social bookmarking website for Africans (it’s currently dominated by South Africans though).
Social bookmarking works like this: if I find something on the Web I am particularly intrigued by – be it video, audio, image or an article – I can submit the URL (Web address) for that item to a site like Muti (other examples are Digg or Reddit) so that others can see it, check it out and if they like it, democratically cast a vote of approval that will promote the item higher in the site’s organic hierarchy.
In theory this means that the front page of Muti will show, at any given point in time, the most popular Web items submitted to the site based on the opinion (and the collective votes) of the user community and one or two other components that are built into the site’s algorithm.
On Muti one can also vote items down if one disapproves of the content. This is my only concern with Muti. It means that people can club together to vote content down the organic hierarchy resulting in what is being perceived as an elitist ‘clique’ owning the prime property on Muti. Look, let me say firstly that much has already been said about this particular issue so I don’t want to fuel negative fires – I rather want to offer Muti’s brains trust some options.
But first a confession… dan dan daaaaaaaa. I am guilty of voting items on the front page of Muti down for no reason other than to promote my item (which is probably in third or fourth place at that moment) higher up the hierarchy. This is wrong. Now I’m sure all the other innately pure-hearted citizens of Muti would never be guilty of such an atrocity, but I am. Would it not then be better to only allow positive voting on Muti? That way if I like something, I vote it up. If I don’t like something, I ignore it. The most valuable items as voted by the whole community will still rise to the top of the list. Less interesting things will remain static at 1, 2 or 3 votes. And that’s it. No negative voting.
Now the people who have been arguing that cliques and elitist triads dominate Muti would probably have less to complain about. The only clubbing together that could happen is a circle jerk of positive voting (posivoting?) and anybody can get a circle together – this is in my mind potentially less damaging than collective negative voting, if that goes on at all.
Still, some would argue that this might mean that less popular submitters, or those out of the ‘clique’ would get lost in the river of news coming in to the ‘New’ section of the site and therefore have a far less likely chance of rising to the top of the front page. My suggestion to Muti here would be to allow me to subscribe to the submissions of a user by RSS (can’t currently find a way to do so?) in the same way that I can with tags… This would improve the chances of those less ‘cliquey’ people not getting noticed as tag and user subscriptions would increase their chances.
Cast your minds a year back to Jason Calcanis’ very controversial decision to offer Digg’s top submitters $1000 to move over to his Netscape interest (which has since dissipated). The reason he did so is because he knew that a very small percentage of Digg users (maybe even 1%?) contributed a huge majority of the total submissions on the site. Incidentally, this Digg user group is a bit of a clique.
To all you Muti-haters – there are reasons certain people become prominent and connected and valuable in a community and others don’t. Examine those reasons carefully and you might find the key to getting all that traffic you so dearly desire.
*Mike turns and cowers in anticipation…*
my suggestion to muti is to not renew their domain name cause they suck.
I agree with you Mike – I have noticed that certain articles seem to lose votes faster than others. I generally feel guilty when I log and see red arrows, so I leave the articles I didnt enjoy alone, and up-vote the ones I am interested in.
I suppose a system based on a measure of trust is open to abuse.
Digg, Reddit etc have algorithms that detect ‘group voting’ and once noticed, the group members get ‘blacklisted’. Unless one belongs to the ‘Kevin Rose and friends’ group of course.
Hearty debate is the foundation of a robust democracy.
What if Wikipedia didn’t allow people to remove what other people had put in an article even if they disagreed with it?
I think would have megalithic articles, and virtually no coherence. Instead, there is an active community of editors who care about the quality of content on the site, and generally try ensure that the most accurate content survives.
Hi Mike
Thanks for your thoughts. There are of course pros and cons to having down votes as well as up votes. Down votes are very handy, for example, to down-mod spam, and they do make the environment richer, but then of course could be abused as you have observed. Democracy is a tricky thing! If enough people call for removing downvotes then of course I will remove them. Democracy is a wonderful thing :)
> My suggestion to Muti here would be to allow me to subscribe to the submissions of a user by RSS
You can do that with a url similar to the following:
http://muti.co.za/by?name=mikestopforth&output=rss
(Almost any url in muti can be turned into an RSS feed by adding “&ouput=rss” onto it)
regards
Only up votes is a much more positive way of going about things.
I like Muti for it’s simplicity, but I agree with you that it’s way too open and trusting to last as a social bookmarking site. Firstly, there are no registration verifications. As a test, I registered five random accounts in two minutes, and used all of them to vote one of my posts “up”.
Guess what? It worked. It was unethical, but it shows up a hectic gap in the system, in that it can be easily gamed.
Now before I turn this comment into a blog post, I’d rather do that on my own blog, lol.
~ Wogan
@Dave – You said “Hearty debate is the foundation of a robust democracy” and I couldn’t agree more. However hearty debate finds it’s happy home in your comments section, where up and down voting has a great way of regulating the conversation to reflect the feelings of the majority.
However I know of no robust (national) democracies that allow voters the right to submit their vote and cancel the vote of another voter simultaneously. If that happened in the previous elections in South Africa the ANC vote would have had enough power to wipe out the DA entirely. Am I making any sense? Not voting is as powerful and act as voting. But the canceling of others’ votes opens the system to abuse.
Please note that I wasn’t playing down the value of Muti at all – I promoted the site at DEMO and continue to laud it all and sundry when I get the chance. However Muti, a bit like the SA Blog Awards, seems plagued by the negativity and complaints of a minority that is not doing it any favours and I’m simply offering some suggestions for avoiding that in future?
Hi Mike,
Even if manage to get your post to the top of the Muti rankings (artificially or not), it’s not as if this leads to a traffic spike for your website.
It doesn’t.
There are probably only about 40 people at most who use Muti regularly.
In fact, the top voted stories almost always involve Muti itself, or some “exciting” techie news that then gets regurgitated by every other Web 2.0 guru / blogger in South Africa.
Big wank.
For Muti to actually become meaningful, it needs to appeal to a wider audience, with a bigger variety of stories and content, not just the geek fantasies of a few bloggers with heavy delusions of grandeur.
@Mike – Agreed, but the votes down are also a form of editing, which is why I reference Wikipedia as an example where other user’s inputs can be canceled out.
@CTFS – gladly I can inform you that Muti records over 40 000 unique visits a month, and serves over 700 000 pages. It’s also growing all the time:)
In the last 2 months , according to Google Analytics, Muti has sent Ideate 425 visitors, of which 41% were “new” (ie this was their first interaction with our site). That’s nothing to sneeze at. On some days Muti is sending 30 to 40 visitors to our site.
I think that we should be able to submit what we like, including self submitting. The votes up or down should be related to the article and not based on self submitting. To be honest there arew many articles submitted on Muti that bore the hell out of me, out of courtesy I do not vote them up or down. Besides what is the point of voting an article down, you are not attacking the submitter. (unless it is self submitted.)
Group voting and elitist gangs have always being elements that make nonsense of aggregators built on the ‘democracy model’. Unfortunately Muti appears fraught with similar problems.
Although I’ve always been wary of the so-called “voting system “, I think the problem facing Muti is more of relevance than “how to voting”.
CTFS captures my impressions perfectly in his earlier comment:
For Muti to actually become meaningful, it needs to appeal to a wider audience, with a bigger variety of stories and content, not just the geek fantasies of a few bloggers with heavy delusions of grandeur.