Comments on: Suggestions For Muti

By: imnakoya

imnakoya — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 12:53:27 +0000

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.

By: Global Voices Online » South Africa: Suggestions for Muti

Global Voices Online » South Africa: Suggestions for Muti — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 11:12:30 +0000

[...] Mike blogs about Muti: “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.” Share This [...]

By: Global Voices Online » South Africa: Suggestions for Muti

Global Voices Online » South Africa: Suggestions for Muti — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 11:12:30 +0000

By: Wade Balsdon

Wade Balsdon — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 13:56:09 +0000

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.)

By: Andrew Smith

Andrew Smith — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 09:44:54 +0000

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.

By: Dave

Dave — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 05:33:39 +0000

@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:)

By: CTFS

CTFS — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:43:35 +0000

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.

By: Mike

Mike — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 19:11:11 +0000

@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?

By: Wogan May » Moot.ee - South African social bookmarking moet maar weer probeer.

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 18:13:36 +0000

[...] Stopforth also has an article on this. I wouldn’t be surprised to see one or two others share their thoughts. Muti has proven [...]

By: Wogan May

Wogan May — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 17:47:36 +0000

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