Neville Newey of muti responds: you just don’t get it!
Posted on October 19th, 2007 by Richard Catto 2,988 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 Comments »
Thakadu aka Neville Newey self submitted muti.co.za to StumbleUpon
Posted on October 18th, 2007 by Richard Catto 2,212 views
Yeah!
The same people, Neville Newey and David Duarte, who banned Guy McLaren from muti for submitting his own site urls DID EXACTLY THE SAME THING THEMSELVES.
Thakadu’s twitter showing his name as Neville Newey
Gentlemen, you’re screwed! You have been caught red handed!
Now I’ll inform you HOW IT WORKS because both of you, Neville Newey and David Duarte, need some basic educating because you’re not SMART enough to figure it out for yourselves.
People are self-absorbed. They mostly care only about their own interests FIRST. This means that they are motivated to submit their own articles to social networking sites in order to get traffic. They are not particularly motivated to submit other sites UNTIL they have first taken care of their own business first.
This applies uniformly across the board – it even applies to YOU TWO, because that is in fact what YOU DID.
The whole point of a social network is to get your own articles in front of people who are interested in reading it.
That is the ENTIRE DEAL.
The problem to solve is how to create such a system which allows people to zone in on what interests them and filter the rest.
StumbleUpon seems to have figured that out, above all the other social networking sites, because their system gives the MOST traffic.
StumbleUpon doesn’t have to ban people who self-submit. They simply impose a limit on the number of times a user can stumble their own site, and they lift that restriction if the person is prepared to pay $20 per annum. Plus they offer various other advertising options.
Stumble users see only the sites that they’re interested in because Stumble provides them with a system to filter out stuff that they have no interest in. A user is only shown sites which belong to categories that they are interested in. Then as they are presented with sites, they can give a site a thumbs up or a thumbs down. A thumbs down tells Stumble not to present sites like that to the user again.
The bottom line is that they have an automatic system that individuals use to decide what they want to see and what they do not. Blanket bans on sites or people are bad because they deprive people of choice.
Just because a whole bunch of people aren’t interested in seeing someone’s blog postings, does not mean that EVERYONE feels like that. Why should EVERYONE be deprived because a bunch of irate punks don’t like it? This is precisely the situation on muti. And both David Duarte and Neville Newey are buying into this insanity.
Muti is bad. Neville Newey and David Duarte have designed a crap system. Furthermore, their attitude is crap. They’re typical patriarchs – they’re men who rule with an iron fist giving no-one a choice.
In short, they’re hateful human beings. I give them all one BIG THUMBS DOWN.
This is NOT the South Africa I subscribe to.
I DEMAND individual choice. I refuse to allow either the majority or a minority to decide for me.
So get that straight right now.
Tags: David Duarte, muti, Neville Newey, Social networking sites, StumbleUpon
Filed under David Duarte, Neville Newey, muti | 13 Comments »
