Walnut Creek, CA 94598
(925) 286-7573
This social networking site was profiled in a San Francisco Weekly article which focused on an innovative business concept that has distinguished this site from some of its rivals, one which can perhaps best be summed up by the words "the customer is always wrong"; protesting that the staff has punished one unjustly is itself considered an actionable offense on this site! Anybody thinking of investing time in this site would, perhaps, do well to read the article, making sure to read the comments that follow, especially those written by the supporters of the site. Pure, smug arrogance blended with an almost mindblowing idiocy that stands out, even on the Internet; eg. the anonymous supporter who snidely commented on the fact that I wasn’t out partying at what would have been around 4am my time. Yes, one gets to deal with such things online, but does one really want to travel to do so?
My initial comments / observations:
| "Admission: I only skimmed the article and comments. I might come back later, read all of this more carefully and come to a much different conclusion. I’m just sharing a gut reaction. Take it for what it’s worth, but keep in mind that most of the silent lurking majority will probably be doing much the same. What I saw, especially the remarks made by the site’s owner and his supporters, sent up red flags all over the place, so much so that I would not want to have anything to do with his site. Michaela - was that the lady’s name - certainly sounded very reasonable, the "ad hominem whiners" label attached to her complaints sounded like whining and an ad hominem. Then there was the fact that protesting that one has been punished unjustly is itself something that one can be punished for - wow. Bad, really bad. In how many different places have we seen that standard applied, and never with anything but quasi-Orwellian results? Flakiness is a real problem, but not one that calls for a centralized, bureaucratic top down solution - miniature judiciaries never seem to produce anything other than Kangaroo court justice for very long. Just let hosts of individual groups exercise discretion in who they allow to stay and who they send away, and give hosts the opportunity to link to other groups which they recommend. Remember that the real power of the Web is to be found in the simple concept of hotlinking, of giving the individual user a choice of who his virtual neighbors will be, so that the "signal to noise ratio" problem of that bad old days of the Usenet era ceases to be a problem once one finds one’s way to a good location; the million bad places that may exist for every one good one don’t matter, because the few good ones you know of mainly just point you to other good ones, so the bad ones sort of vanish for you, and the once good ones that become bad ones fade away for that reason. This simple principle has worked for websites, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t work for social networking groups that work through websites. K.I.S.S. worked for the Web; there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be able to work for this, as long as sysops are willing to put their inflated egos to one side and get out of their user’s way. This particular site seems unwilling to do that, but head over to Mashable, and you should be able to find a multitude of social networking sites that treat their users with far more respect than this one seems to have. I’d put in the url for my own profile, where I’ve linked to a set of them that seem to be fairly headache free, but I guess that might be taken as spamming but look - just ask Pete for some advice. He seems to be a nice guy who knows A LOT about this subject, and could probably point the unhappy users of this other, not so friendly site in some very positive and constructive directions." |
First Posted: 12/22/2007
Yelp Rating: One Star
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