Netscape.com Clearly Not a Democracy
January 6th, 2007 by Michael Gray in SEOIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
Trying to offer an alternative to Digg Netscape.com is doing everything in it’s power to squelch the input of it users, even it’s most active users, instead opting for some draconian leadership that is pretty intolerant of differing opinions.
A few weeks ago they introduced a new feature known as “sink”, most of the community hated it. An organized protest happened the leadership gave paid it lip service since it didn’t change anything. Today a whole lot of drama with some bad behavior on both sides resulted in a member being banned and a moderator going unpunished. In full damage control mode Netscape buried the thread and closed it for comments.
The community and the management at Netscape are really having some communication problems right now, and not agreeing on which way they want to go. Since this isn’t really an employee/employer relationship it will be interesting to see where this goes.
Sphere It
January 6th, 2007 at 10:28 am
Apart from Netscape there will be many other sites that will be trying to find an alternative to Digg
I don’t think that any other site will be able to beat that concept so soon.
IF someone wants to to over run Digg they will have to come up with something unique and brilliant.
January 6th, 2007 at 7:07 pm
Excellent comment Dave, but I think you underestimating the size of the market for social media sites. It’s large enough that there is a room for a few major players even without anything unique or brilliant. For example digg targets a lot of high-tech geek stuff and an exact duplicate of digg that effectivley broke into a younger “hipper” target demographic (xanga and myspace crowd) could be extremely successful. Netscape seems to be after the same demographic as digg, which is why it’s generally not working so well. I like Netscape for SEO purposes, because the links are still valuable and it’s easier to obtain influence among the smaller active user group.
January 7th, 2007 at 4:48 pm
the problem is that also digg has problems with the community… they have never been able to give a clear explanation of the bury brigade or to reply to the questions about their banning algorithms…