As another commenter posted:

“I find this site more useful in just checking out cool shit. Maybe it’s “Man” related. Maybe it just highlights the “tasty bits” in everyday life.”

I completely agree. If I have a specific “man” problem, I’ll usually google it. This is the type of site that I want to visit just to have a quick laugh and interesting story. I think Joel’s writing is key to that.

With that in mind, the site must survive someway. Instead of giving up content control fully to readers, I suggest having a tightly moderated blog with user content being filtered through the staff. In other words, a strong emphasis should be placed on users providing content on specific issues (or general “man” issues), and this content should be sent to the staff and posted by the staff, giving credit to content providers. I think this is the general model now. In my mind though, it’s still more about the staff writing and viewers reading, and less about the viewers wanting to provide content (aside from comments).

The trick is to find a way to give incentives to those content providers. A start may be to explicitly note on the site that you want and desire content from users. Secondly, you can find a way to reward content providers, for example, you can keep a tally of how many emails/suggestions each reader has provided you, and allow each of those readers to have voting rights/ suggestion power for choosing future weekly topics. You can keep a list on the homepage of the top 5 users who have provided you content. Essentially, you need to come up with a reward system.

The point is, I think a lot of readers are driven to not only the content, but to Joel’s writing, and I think the two cannot be separated to have a successful website.

Just something else to think about.

i think the addition of a recipe or video on how to cook something delish every week would be a good thing, like every tuesday or something.

It has problems.

There are solutions.

Wikis are great in places like Moped Army. Where you need specific information and don’t want to search. I don’t really think that’s what you need here, unless you seriously pursue the idea of creating a body of knowledge.

I find this site more useful in just checking out cool shit. Maybe it’s “Man” related. Maybe it just highlights the “tasty bits” in everyday life.

I seriously like the idea of tapping the masses. Sumissions from “members”, proofed by Admin, and posted when appropriate.

I know I would dig the opportunity to share some ideas and break some minty stories. Others would too.

That would take some of the pressure off Admin and would ensure a plethora of diverse ideas etc.

The other benefit of posting submissions from the masses, is that those individuals who submit a story and get it posted on the site, will likely tell all their friends to come here and check it out.

So new people might get exposed, and might stay. More people = more advertising right?

Of course, there’s always the route of having random “arty photos” on show, but it’s not the route I would want Dethroner to be heading. If we want porn, we know where to get it (…it’s the Internet for christ’s sake!).

I would like to state for the record though (even though I’m aware that my opinion doesn’t count for much), that wikis are sort of sucky and I’m afraid that the snarky wit that makes this site fresh and interesting would quickly be lost in that environment.

I kind of like the way the folks over at Parent Hacks do it (www.parenthacks.com). You submit your own parenting tip to them and they post it (I suspect after some review to make sure it’s “worthwhile,” hasn’t been suggested before, etc.) They have all the hacks organized into categories for future reference. And readers are still free to comment on posts.

I’ve never been a big fan of the everybody editing-the-hell aspect of wikis. Too many cooks in the kitchen and you’re left trying to figure out how to moderate who can and can’t edit, etc. And MZ hit the nail on the head about how it places the burden on the potential contributor to get motivated to come up with a topic and then actually contribute content. Also, readers are required to dive into the wiki and search it for topics of interest rather than having them shoved under our noses via RSS every morning…

What I DO really like about wikis, though, is the way they’re structured. The organization/interlinking of topics in wikis is one of the things that makes them so useful. If you’re going for something similar to the guidebook-like organization of The Modern Man’s Guide to Life, why not use a wiki-type structure for an archive of posts/articles/comments. Makes it easy to locate info on a topic and find related topics. I like this better than relying on tagging alone to structure an archive.

Regardless, you still need somebody to guide the discussion/posts around a topic to give potential contributors some focus. Of course, you mentioned that finding real experts who are willing to come and contribute/lead a discussion for Dethroner has been a part of the problem…

And none of this really takes into account the cool random stuff yall post though (like morning tonic, impatient bastard of the day, etc). Will that go away?

http://thottbott.com/q9228

It’s a ranking system but much more obvious than slashdot’s crapfest. It keeps the crap comments and everything in the same thread so you don’t have to lower your threshold to find the context of the post. New posts are at the beginning, old posts at the end. A quick glance gets you two things:

Yellow background posts: the most useful, and highly voted posts relative to that thread.

Gray text post: the very worst most negatively voted posts, blends away and is nearly unnoticeable, but still readable if needed.

I find this system of comments to be one of the best designs I’ve seen. It is easy to find the most important information and ignore the least useful… and yeah I know I’m a giant loser for playing WoW, but whatever.

not sure how you should move forward but the ideas above are certainly good. open opinion always brings with it the risk of “comment nazis” as andrew put it and they can be tricky to avoid. sadly some folk like nothing better than to express themselves and/or deride and criticise others.

the problem with a “guide” is that if 30 people try and guide any trip out; you’ll get nowhere except lots of dissatisfaction. the same will be true of such a web guide. ultimately, altho there has to be a leader/director/editor most of us enjoy just being on the trip, offering opinion but not deciding the ultimate destination. (hope the analogy hasn’t been stretched too far.)

perhaps, there needs to be a period of people with knowledge and experience offering opinion and then a lead ultimately selected by Dethroner and possibly from the contributers) to bring things together into a final, consise blog article drawing all the ideas into a definitive “Dethroner Guide,” which then remains comment free?

my 2 bits.

So perhaps a change to my idea above would be to make the questions indefinitely answer-able to promote depth, and I suppose Joel could ask someone from his trusted stable of experts to weigh in on specific questions too.

The biggest problem is differentiation – the GQ style QA page, for example, is pretty comprehensive in terms of breadth, perhaps not so much with depth. There’s an awful lot of things to focus on, and there are probably a good number of resources for most of them. A user driven site seems to be a good way to get everything together, but it’s going to take a lot of effort on your part to get that going.

Good luck – I know I’ll stick around and contribute what I can no matter what form things take.

So with that in mind, it seems to me like it’s more realistic to expect someone to ask “What’s the best way to shave my back hair?” and, thus prompted, for other guys to weigh in, than to expect unprompted contributions to the site.