Hey Jason, thought I might hear from you. Ok, I see your point, but, according to the rules on muti, submitting that many links in an hour is spam. simple.

Submitting them yourselves is also an unwritten “no-no” according to the community.

This is why I brought up the topic with regard to the muti model. One of the problems is that people aren’t voting enough (not necessarily down). I tried to vote the stories down with little to no impact.

Now, I am not saying that you are doing the following but, some organisations would be able to vote for a story themselves then by chance 5 or 6 of their employees could vote the story up and then it stays.

Do you honestly think it was necessary to post 5 or 6 vids about the loeries? Surely one would have been sufficient then people could visit the video and see the related vids? Just a thought.

Anyhow, I would love to hear your opinion on the muti model, not just on the zoopy issue?

Thanks for the comments!

I love Muti but I rarely visit the site, I read everything through RSS.

I would vote more if there was some way I could do it through Google reader.

Also I think the design can be improved on the Muti site. The number of votes is just a small bit of text underneath the link, whereas on Digg you can clearly see the popularity of a post, this helps to remind users that half the experience is the voting.

That’s a good point, clarity and emphasis of vote status… Also I was thinking of some monthly, weekly incentives for votes, top voters, k-index etc etc… that might inspire ppl to get involved?

Hi again Nic

We posted the best 6 only because they were distinctly different. One for Saturday night’s events, one for Sunday (which were totally different awards) and then a few agency highlights.

But if the Muti community in general prefers to keep submissions down to 1 per event, fair enough. It was never our intention to spam - this is the first time we’ve ever posted more than one in a day, for all the reasons above.

It obviously also stings to have a post out there that puts ‘Zoopy’ and ’spam’ in the same title. But anyway, moving on …

Regarding Muti in general, I think the core issue to deal with is user registration and ease of voting. I think it’s far too easy for people to register a username, vote up or down, then register another username … and repeat. That said, your concern is that there isn’t enough voting, which is probably why Neville made it this easy to vote in the first place.

Perhaps what we need is another line of text under each post, with a ‘These users voted this item UP’ and a list of usernames and links to their profiles to see which other items they’ve voted for. This way, a pattern would start emerging if users were only voting their own links UP.

And for registration, I think everyone would agree that this needs to at the very least require an email address and email-click validation before being able to vote.

OK, back to work. Thanks for the excitement

Jason

Good points. Thanks!!

The underlying problem here is that it’s really difficult to ascertain whether any particular vote is a ‘genuinely objective’ one from someone ‘out there’ who sincerely thinks the posted item is worthy of being voted up, or whether the vote is from the same person/group who posted the item.

I agree with Jason that the registration process is problematic in this regard and makes underhand voting that much easier. A simple email validation procedure would probably do wonders to eliminate underhand voting.

Hi All and thank you for bringing up this issue Nic and thanks for the great responses from everyone else.

I would like to address a few issues:
1) The design. A complete redesign is in the works (yet again and certainly the score and or votes will be made a lot more prominent.
2) The registration was intentionally designed to be super easy, the thinking being that even though you will get the odd person cheating, if enough people vote they will drown out the cheaters. ie the philosophy was “dont make it difficult for evreyone just because of a few jerks”. Having said this many people have suggested an email confirmation so this will probably be included in the redesign. You can be certain that on digg and reddit there are also users with multiple logins however the sheer numbers on those sites make this a non-issue.
3) Nic, as regards the employees/friends of a submitter voting an item up, I think this is legitimate don’t you? Its not that different from people asking their friends to nominate them for the blog awards.

Anyway thanks for all the great thoughts guys, I can see that there is a lot of work ahead!

Oh and Jason, please don’t stop submitting the odd zoopy video, I love seeing those and they definitely add to the overall muti experience

Regards

I do think it is legitimate if intentions are admirable. But that theory applies to everything and all voting

Just came across this article (on Muti, ironically):
“It’s Not Wrong to Create and Submit Your Own Content. In Fact, it’s Necessary“

I just read that article Dave. think it’s a brilliant concept in theory. But if you legitimise the concept of self promotion it will inevitably become spam in a democratic environment such as muti. Publishers and authors and their relationship are not the same as a blogger (author) and muti and that relationship. As much as we all wish society was idealistic and pleasant, it’s just not.

I personally think the model should be that bloggers can be self-promoters if they so desire. Otherwise the blogosphere is overrun by the well-known and there is barely any audience for new opinions and commentary.

Just my 2c.

All,

The rule(s) and definition of what is and what is not considered spam is at issue here. In my opinion, Zoopy have contravened the generally accepted guidelines surrounding spamming and also arrogantly ignored the essence of what Muti has set out to do and achieve.

Submitting many posts in a very short time is tantamount to spam by any accepted meaning of the term in blogosphere. So Jason - in my opinion you screwed up!

No doubt the Muti site can be enhanced in a lot of areas but paramount is the need to rethink and re-define the rules by which Muti operates. And these rules must be clear and not allow for the slightest ambiguity by the reader.

Spammers and self promotion surely cannot be allowed.

Also the entire ethos of popularity must surely exclude self-promotion by the author. Such close subjectivity to the subject at hand does not allow for objectivity as to the article’s content, facts, style and message. I think every bit of dros that I write surpasses what Capote and Hemingway could ever aspire to achieve. But you know that I write utter crap. And you let me know it. Not an entirely pleasant pill to swallow but becessary if I wish to carry on and improve in the craft of writing.

We are trying to achieve better penmanship. We should be wanting to improve our writing craft. Only critiques by objective readers can help you in the process to better writing. Voting for yourself is not what I’d think is the best route to popularity. Acting on what others think or don’t think of your work is the only way to get to your goal.

In closing, I want to thank all at Muti for giving me 3 kudus! Yes, at long last after a year’s slog, I have managed to write stuff that has resonated with Muti supporters. And so for the first time I have got clear of the dreaded -2 kudus.

Be well all of you.

Robert@iscatterlings.com