The B&B Thread of So... Is This place officially dead now?

Didn't the same sort of thing happen years ago and give birth to rllmuk forum? Well, I've already joined B&B; (I like the name as it sounds like a pub!), and I will get around to posting at some point.

So, has Edge stopped doing 'Online-Offline? Shame. Hey, I know! Edge could use the TeamYu #GiveYuTheShenmueLicense thread in their next issue, that would be huge!

That's despicable.

Just read the following news articles, and thought some of the things mentioned might be relevant to Edge's website (especially after their recent Facebook status update about Day Z). One thing it can be argued about though is that the Edge community is broken. And the (Edge) community,is also the content machine (of varying quality) :

http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/10336-five-lessons-learned-from-digg-s-rise-and-fall

Quote:
Your community can abandon you.

Digg was never able to recover from a series of poorly-received, and in some cases disastrous, redesigns beginning in 2010.

While the redesigns may have been well-intentioned -- the company believed it needed to innovate and evolve to stay relevant -- users voted with their feet: they were a big step in the wrong direction.

While one might argue that by this time, there was little Digg could do, but it's worth considering: other popular social communities, like Facebook, had been through numerous user backlashes over botched redesigns and ill-conceived features, and they lived to tell about it.

So it was perhaps far easier for Digg to believe that it could weather its storms as well. Unfortunately, as Digg learned, online communities -- even popular ones with millions of users -- can be pushed too far.

Quote:
Design Arrogance. Digg redesigned its website in August 2010. It was a disaster. Not only was the redesign buggy, but it removed popular features, like "burying" stories. The impact of the design mess was swift. Digg experienced a 24 percent drop in traffic and within months, it was laying off people. At its height in 2008,

Digg was attracting 30 million users a month. When it was sold, that had dropped to seven million.

Biting the Hand the Feeds Your Feeds. Digg had millions of users, but the popularity of news on the site was driven by a couple of hundred "power users." Those users kept the site lively. Instead of encouraging activity by those power users, Digg treated them like lepers. I guess power users in this case would be people like GMan.

Failure To Look in Rear View Mirror. While Digg was alienating members, a viable alternative emerged to what Digg was offering. That alternative was Reddit, which allowed news hounds to determine news trends on the Web but to take action, too. For example, Reddit was a key forum for protestors that brought down legislation that opponents maintained would undermine freedom in cyberspace. Hello B&B;.

Cannibalization by Competitors. The ideas underlying Digg -- including recommending news to others—were absorbed by rivals like Facebook and Twitter. That erosion of Digg's preeminence in its niche began even before its design disaster. In 2009, for instance, Twitter passed Digg in popularity and never looked back. Hello IGN and Eurogamer.

Founders Fled. The tandem behind the site, Kevin Rose and Jay Adleson, moved on. As they did, so did the site's verve. Rose is now with Google's venture captial fund. Adleson is an adviser at SimpleGeo. Goodbye Ian Evendan

Quote:
The good news for Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and everyone else is that Digg’s fate was avoidable. The precipitous drop in usage that saw its audience slide from 30 million to 8 million in a little more than a year wasn’t due to fickle consumer tastes, or to competitive pressure from a hotter rival, whatever some might say. It was self-inflicted, the result of discreet and obvious missteps.

You’ve gotta dance with the one that brung you. A fanatic user base is a mixed blessing. Users who feel responsible for success can be your most fervent champions, but they’re also likely to feel aggrieved when their concerns aren’t prioritized.

Every company that tries to evolve from a niche product with a cultish following to a mass-market offering has to contend with resistance from its core. There’s no way around that except to finesse it. Digg didn’t do that. At times it seemed to be going out of its way to antagonize its superfans — as when it got rid of Shouts, which many community members used for talking to each other, in 2009.

“It was the only major social site that had no means of communication on the actual site,” says Vernon. “They just did so many things that showed their complete disregard for the community.”

Lip service doesn’t count. In 2010, when the Digg team was preparing its “Version 4″ makeover, it invited a number of top Diggers to be part of a private beta test. Scorcini and Vernon both participated and gave their feedback. Both hated the changes and said so. “I flatly told them that if they launched this version of Digg, the regular usership would abandon the site,” says Scorcini.

It didn’t matter. Apparently the Diggers were invited to give them a feeling that they were part of the process, but not actually to be part of the process. “There were no changes made from the private alpha to launching V4 publicly,” says Vernon. “They ignored everything we said.”

Scorcini’s prediction proved accurate, of course. Muhammad Saleem says he blames Digg co-founder Kevin Rose “for not listening to his community,” and also blames TechCrunch editor in chief Michael Arrington for “egging him on with moronic bullshit” like this piece urging him to ignore all community feedback and stick to his vision. (Rose didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

User experience has to be paramount. The most reviled aspect of V4 was the way it allowed partner publishers to auto-submit articles to the site via RSS feed. Suddenly, what had been a quirky forum for user-submitted stories was overflowing with generic content no actual human had uploaded.

You would think social companies would have learned a lesson from the demise of MySpace, which drove away its audience with a user experience that felt cluttered, spammy and over-monetized. Some have. When Facebook started worrying that faddish social readers were filling users’ news feeds with articles and videos they weren’t interested in, it slammed on the brakes, even though it meant discomfiting publishers who were counting on the readers as a major new traffic source.

“When you put the need to become profitable over the core purpose of the site, you’re going to lose your community,” says Scorcini.

The less you do, the more important it is to do it right. Arrington is right about one thing: Facebook has managed, over and over again, to implement some change it wanted to make in the face of resistance from its users. But that doesn’t mean Digg could afford to show the same level of nonchalance.

“With Facebook, so many more people use it for so many different things,” says Daniel Honigman, director of digital strategy at LoSasso Integrated Marketing and another former power-Digger. It could afford, therefore, to tinker with photos, or the news feed, or its messaging function, knowing that no single change would lead to a walkout. Digg, on the other hand, really only did one thing: aggregated news stories and let users vote on them.

If the Olive Garden changes its pizza recipe and people don’t like the new ones, it can ride out the waves. If Pizza Hut does it…that’s the problem.