Neville Newey of muti responds: you just don’t get it!

Posted on October 19th, 2007 by Richard Catto 2,989 views

Richard

It seems that you (and a few others) still don’t get the point about self submissions. I have always said, and continue to say, that self submission is okay as long as its not repeated self submission of all your posts. (Go back and read all my comments on muti if you dont believe me, I have been saying it from the start) Why is the distinction so difficult to understand?

Here is my point again: If you are a new blogger or have a new site its fine to self post it as a way of introducing the site or yourself. Even if you are a known blogger, and you feel you are making an unusally strong point, such as your post here Richard, and noone else has posted it then its fine to post it. What is NOT acceptable is to post each and every one of your items over and over again and NEVER post anything to any one else’s site. This is just plain selfish.

Regards

Newey, you’re waffling and I’m not interested in being congenial towards either you or Duarte. Your system doesn’t work. I’ve been completely put off submitting any of my own articles to muti, ever since you tarred, feathered and rode Guy McLaren out of town.

Now you say, that under some circumstances, it’s okay to maybe self submit. That’s as CLEAR AS MUD. No-one knows when it’s okay and when it’s not okay, except perhaps you.

Not good enough. You and Duarte need to rethink how muti works. Essentially, you’ve got something similar to digg and other social networking sites. Well digg doesn’t give me much traffic either. Muti would give me perhaps 10 visitors in a day and digg would send me perhaps 150 – 200. StumbleUpon usually gives me over 500. Sometimes more.

I think the key to StumbleUpon’s success is it’s toolbar, especially the Stumble! button which magically transports people to the next site, without them knowing what it’s going to be. It’s a surprise. That’s part of its charm. People like surprises.

Here is what I would like you to do:

Fix the muti system – make it popular, make it send us visitors. Stumble takes people directly to the site, rather than presenting a list of articles to click on.
Fix your attitudes towards people who self submit. Publish clear guidelines.
Consider giving bloggers a subscription option to allow self submission of their posts.
Stop giving people (me) grief about the tags we (I) choose. I have never once been scolded on digg for my use of tags, which are identical to the ones I submit to muti.

As long as a tag is relevant to an article, it’s okay. Tag spam is a different story – that’s where people attach tags such as ‘sex’, ‘Paris Hilton’, etc. to wholly unrelated stories just to show up in searches. Also your tag system does not handle ‘Paris Hilton’ as one tag – it breaks it into two tags. You have bitched at me about this. This is YOUR problem, not mine.

If you can build a system which attracts a wider user base which uses your system joyfully without the current rancour, then you will be on the road to giving the South African Blogosphere what it needs – MORE EXPOSURE.

That is what we want.

What we don’t want is more of the same old shit. We’re done with that. It’s old hat. It’s Passe.

The proof is in the WEB TRAFFIC that you are able to generate – either you can produce that for us bloggers or you cannot. That is the key barometer to measure your success by. That and having the ability to float QUALITY content to the top whilst filtering the junk out.

Your major problem right now with your system is that the people in it who are rating the submissions have gone BAD. StumbleUpon works because they have a large user base, so the effect of any particular rogue element is muted by the sheer number of users in the system. Not only has your user base gone bad, but so have YOU. You and Duarte are leading the users into bad practices.

I wrote these posts to get YOUR attention and also that of others, with the vague hope that perhaps you folks can get your arses motivated to fix things and put an end to the friction that has been generated by your summary axing of Guy McLaren and your siding with a bunch of pricks who have slandered him up and down the SA Blogosphere for absolutely nothing.

Guy McLaren is NOT a spammer. He’s just a regular blogger like the rest of us. Actually, he’s better than that. He’s put together his own network of bloggers and he looks after them quite well as far as I can see. He’s doing very well these days, in terms of the amount of traffic his network receives.

Essentially you managed to make muti irrelevant to the entire South African Blogosphere when you bared your teeth and bit McLaren. You have succeeded in scaring people away from using your service. Not many people want to get involved in conflict – they’d sooner avoid it. I take it upon myself to engage those who need engaging. That is why you are in the firing line right now.

Tags: David Duarte, Digg, muti, Neville Newey, reddit, Social networking sites, StumbleUpon
Filed under David Duarte, Neville Newey, muti |

27 Responses to “Neville Newey of muti responds: you just don’t get it!”

Charl van Niekerk Says:
October 19th, 2007 at 03:55
If you would like to market your site, please use digg, delicious, reddit, or whatever else you like. If you want to submit quality content, please use muti. Muti is about quality content, not giving people the opportunity to market their own sites.

My 2c.
ctn editor Says:
October 19th, 2007 at 07:19
I’ve editted this comment of mine to remove some of the excessive emotion I expressed previously

I don’t wish to “market” my site. I wish to submit my articles to various social networking sites, including muti, so that people will be made aware of my latest articles, so that they might read them if they wish to.

I feel that the point escapes you.

It seems to me that you don’t want people submitting ANYTHING to muti UNLESS YOU approve.
candy Says:
October 19th, 2007 at 07:28
What a fantastically constructive and transparent article, Richard. There are so many reasons to pay attention to people like you. You express intelligent opinions boldly and bravely without reservation.

We (the SA blogosphere, specifically) need people like you. The reason you receive such strong reactions is because you are not afraid to ‘name the game’.

What you write might make some people uncomfortable, but it still makes them think; it encourages them to leave the comfort zone; to be more; to offer more; and to consider that perhaps, they don’t have ALL the answers.

What you express here IS constructive. It is not critical for no reason. It offers suggestions for improvement. Now it’s up to others to either receive that information humbly and graciously – or not.

Any professional person would take your views and suggestions seriously. That IS how you do good business. Any other kind of business conduct is quite simply not sustainable.

How MUTI representatives (and others) choose to respond is a reflection on them, not you.

Some words of wisdom from Apple Computers:

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
ctn editor Says:
October 19th, 2007 at 07:51
Iâ€™ve editted this comment of mine to remove some of the excessive emotion I expressed previously

This argument surrounding muti has raged for some time now. It’s enormously frustrating for me to take the time to painstakingly make my point as crystal clear as possible and then discover that my point is not being understood. Or if it is understood, still rejected anyway.

Basically, they’re saying they don’t want to see a long list of article submissions all coming from the same site. They want variety… a variety of top class content. Gripping stuff. Everyone a pulitizer prize winner.

That is not going to happen. We’re just ordinary people blogging about this that and the other. Not all of us are fantastically good writers.

By advancing the argument that muti wants only “quality content” submitted, one is immediately plunged into a murky pool of uncertainty. What indeed counts as “quality content”? That is not at all clear to the community of South African bloggers. Many may feel that their material is not good enough.

I feel that muti should strive to broadly encompass the local blogosphere rather than encouraging the elitism that is now ruling the roost over there.
Mark Says:
October 19th, 2007 at 08:20
No, you can fuck off Catto. Stop your god damn incessant whining. You’re like a little bitch.

Boo hoo, the big bad Muti guys don’t want me to play with them. GROW UP dick head!

If you don’t like it, start your own social site!

Fuck you’re a retard. Everywhere you go it’s bitch bitch bitch – insulting others, being arrogant and argumentative. That’s no way to go through life.

I hope your stupid Cape Town piece of shit site gets permanently banned from Muti.

Fuck you.
Vincent Maher - Media in Transition » My take on Muti: a failed democracy now a not-so-benevolent dictatorship Says:
October 19th, 2007 at 08:35
[...] both extremes the positions taken by Neville Newey and, among others, Richard Catto, represent private rather than public interests. In Neville’s case, clutching onto an idea he [...]
Nic Says:
October 19th, 2007 at 09:38
OK here’s how I see things. Richard, your points are OK at a push, but you are tarnishing any valuable contribution to any sort of valuable debate with your abusive and almost defamatory use of language.

You were the one who quickly jumped on the bandwagon beside Guy when some idiots hacked his site. You even had the guts to comment on my blog about the issue. That is all past, but here you are doing the same damn thing as you accused me and others of doing to Guy. You are targetting two people (and anyone else who gets in your way) and you are name calling, insulting, abusing them at the drop of hat.

Screw your point, I couldn’t care it flew in to space so far over my head that it was burned in the sun. The fact is you are no better than anyone who hacked Mclarens sites.

You’re a flipping hypocrite.
Vincent Maher Says:
October 19th, 2007 at 10:23
Why can’t anyone just sustain a rational conversation for more than 2 lines?

@Mark: XL anger there dude, not helping
@Neville: While you sound sane and rational the problem is you need to get that in black and white in a terms and conditions people can see and judge for themselves.
@Nic: “flipping”???
@Candy: Are you Bolton Deventer?
@Charl: Good, sane-sounding 2.1 line comment but the problem is your statement is blatantly false. What you mean to say is that you would like Muti to be about quality content – it, in itself, has nothing to do with the type of content in it.
Richard Catto Says:
October 19th, 2007 at 10:53
I’ve decided to instead approve all the comments, no matter how bad they are.

I think everyone needs to unload all their feelings on this matter. At least online we can do it without beating each other to a bloody pulp.

Perhaps when we’re done unloading our emotions, we can arrive at ways to take things forward in a more constructive manner?

I’d sooner see muti fixed than blown out of the water. I believe that South Africans need to do things for ourselves. This means having our own workable social networking sites, instead of relying on American sites.
candy Says:
October 19th, 2007 at 11:56
Vincent, have you gone
mad?
Guy McLaren Says:
October 19th, 2007 at 14:09
Wow Mark, You mus be a real fuckwit but then thats not real surprising not being part of that gang of arsewipes anyway. Mark I know Richard is to polite to say this so I will. You are so fucking stupid you make the rest of the muti clicque actually seem reasonable.
Mark Says:
October 19th, 2007 at 14:22
Good LORD I am sick of you McLaren. You’ve got a big mouth for someone who’s “CMS” system is still WIDE OPEN to attacks from people that you continue to piss off. Maybe you should go back to high school programming courses and learn how to prevent SQL injection attacks similar to this:

http://www.trafficdepartment.co.za/viewblog.asp?id=4‘%20OR%201%20LIKE%20′%25

before you act like such a smartarse. You’re lucky you have any database left at all.

I wish you and this Catto character would make your OWN social buzz site, and self-submit all your articles there. Awesome, see how much traffic you’d get from that.

FUCK YOU GUYS!!
Guy McLaren Says:
October 19th, 2007 at 15:57
Mark I got damn near buggerall from MUTI
so don’t miss it at all.
madgenius Says:
October 19th, 2007 at 16:03
Neville, I was banned within one day of submitting my opinion on muti. Not even a courtesy email to explain the rules. Your site sucks old chap. Sucks like there is no tomorrow. Who are the clique on muti to decide what is quality opinion and what is not?
madgenius Says:
October 19th, 2007 at 16:06
Mark, where is all that anger coming from? Relax man, chill read the Bible. Love your neighbour.
Mark Says:
October 19th, 2007 at 16:50
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sql_injection

Look it up.
Charl van Niekerk Says:
October 19th, 2007 at 23:33
@Vincent: Sorry, but I fail to see the point you’re making. Could you please elaborate? How is this nogal “blatantly false”?
Charl van Niekerk Says:
October 20th, 2007 at 01:29
(Sorry for two separate comments.)

@Richard: I can assure you that emotion is not necessary as I am not attempting to attack you in any way from my side. I would like to have a civilized, rational discussion about this.

The purpose of Atom / RSS feeds is to allow a user to easily subscribe to your blog and be notified of all your posts. This also goes for blog aggregators such as Afrigator and Amatomu (in alphabetical order). To me, the purpose of Muti is somewhat different (to showcase the crem-de-la-crem of the South African blogosphere). If a link to your blog is posted once and they visit it and are interested in receiving notification of all your future posts, they can simply subscribe. Now of course, that’s just my opinion, and I’m just a user of Muti like you, so there’s no reason why my opinion should be any more important than yours in any way. These are just the way I see things.

Your post apparently mislead me to think that it was about marketing and driving traffic to your blog but maybe I misinterpreted this – apologies if this is the case.
Richard Catto Says:
October 20th, 2007 at 07:36
Charl, there is no way that anyone can just post one link to their blog and get repeat traffic.

It simply does not work that way and will never.
Guy McLaren Says:
October 20th, 2007 at 11:42
Funny how registering with Google will get you tons of traffic according to people like that even if you only post once on MUTI
Richard Catto Says:
October 20th, 2007 at 13:05
I’m not sure what you mean, Guy.

My blog pings Google each time I update it and Google comes and crawls my site again, putting all my new content into its index so that people can find it when they do searches.

I also have the XML Sitemap Generator plugin for WordPress installed which generates a valid sitemap.xml file. Google uses that to more effectively crawl a blog. It’s basically a list of all the content that you want indexed. You can avoid duplicate entries by telling the plugin to construct a list of unique pages.

Google gives me 34% of my daily traffic. The rest, Jesus gives to me. Thank you, Jesus!
Charl van Niekerk Says:
October 20th, 2007 at 22:34
@Richard: Again you speak of getting “repeat traffic”. This rather sounds like marketing. You claimed earlier that it’s not about marketing but about helping users to find your blog. I am honestly very confused now. Somewhere we need to pull the line between when it’s helping the users and helping yourself. There’s nothing wrong with helping yourself, as long as you help users in the process. Then everybody wins. However, when it starts to become an irritation to users, things change. Please note that I’m not saying you were irritating users, this is a general observation. This line is in the gray area and difficult to define, and probably largely depends on personal opinion.
Richard Catto Says:
October 22nd, 2007 at 09:18
Charl, you have to submit each post you write individually wherever you wish it to be read.

People need to be told when there’s something new, they don’t have the ability to remember to go check a whole bunch of sites. Even RSS readers get neglected. I have Google Reader setup with a whole bunch of feeds – I check it quite infrequently.

People access social networking sites to see what’s new. So, you have to put your story there if you want it to be noticed.

That’s the whole deal.
Charl van Niekerk Says:
October 22nd, 2007 at 13:04
Richard, that’s what Afrigator and Amatomu were made for. What do you think is the difference between those (aggregators) and Muti? The only difference would be that you had to post your links manually to Muti, and in the case of the other two, your posts are picked up from your Atom / RSS feed automatically. Muti is social bookmarking; the purpose (I thought) is clearly quite different from aggregators.
stii.za.net » Blog Archive » Muti wars - a simple solution Says:
October 22nd, 2007 at 13:17
[...] a rather senseless argument and there will always be those that is going to be unhappy by the state of affairs. Although Vince have a point about the Terms and Conditions and the possible prevention of creating [...]
Twylite Says:
October 22nd, 2007 at 17:12
Hi Richard,
What makes you think that Muti is there to drive traffic to your site? You have a supplier-centric view that says social bookmarking sites are for content providers to attract readers. Those sites, however, have a consumer-oriented view that says their content is whatever the readers find interesting (e.g. Muti: Muti is a social bookmarking site … dedicated to content of interest to Africans or those interested in Africa. — http://www.muti.co.za/about). If the users/consumers don’t find a particular article (or site) interesting they will mod it down.
Richard Catto Says:
October 24th, 2007 at 03:36
Richard, that’s what Afrigator and Amatomu were made for

Sure, but I must go where the people are. I must make it as easy as possible for people to find my new content.

What makes you think that Muti is there to drive traffic to your site?

That’s the only thing I want from muti. If it doesn’t give me visitors, then it is worthless to me.

That is the ENTIRE DEAL, people.

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Neville Newey of muti responds: you just don’t get it!

27 Responses to “Neville Newey of muti responds: you just don’t get it!”

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