State of the Blog: I’ve Got a Big Ol’ Idea
Published by Joel May 31st, 2007 in Announcements. Share ThisThe Modern Man’s Guide to Life, now tragically out of print, was the primary inspiration for Dethroner. So much so that I have forced myself not to consult it while working on the site, lest I rip the content right out of the book and slap it onto the screen.
What made Modern Man (and its sequel) such a useful resource was the variety of perspectives provided, compiled from submissions by hundreds of men, often with conflicting opinion about a topic. It remains, despite a few outdated sections, a useful distillation of knowledge for living life as a human male in Western society. And by embracing the spectrum of opinion, it reinforced that most valuable lesson: think for yourself, stupid.
Another maxim I’ve tried to steer Dethroner by has been “every man is an expert in something, which is the impetus behind our theme weeks. I know a fair amount about some things, but despite my ability to compile sources and write up summaries—that’s sort of what this sort of lifestyle writing is all about—I’d much rather hear from experts. Unfortunately we’ve a bit of a chicken-and-egg scenario: we’re not big enough to woo experts every week, but we’ve drained my pool of talented and generous friends willing to step in to share. So that’s one problem I want to address: how to create a place for experts to pass on their knowledge that doesn’t involve the hassles of posting items in a theme week?
The second issue is one of permanency: I’m not convinced posts in a weblog are the best place for this sort of knowledge to rest. For one, comments get mentally weighted by readers as less important than the content in a post, which isn’t always fair; we’ve had our fair share of brilliant comments. Also, the really useful bits of wisdom are filed alongside silly videos and dick jokes, which could be addressed by a better category or tagging scheme, but still doesn’t get the end product I hope to be able to consult in the future.
What I’m thinking is some sort of guide that will allow user submissions, either a voting-based comment system a la Slashdot or Ask Metafilter, or a wiki with a strong editorial policy. I’m actually leaning towards the latter, although I’m not sure if people will have the courtesy to build out the guide with all the dissent and thoughtfulness that Modern Man was able to do in print. A policy of “edit facts, but not opinions” is about what I’m thinking; I’d love for an entry in the guide to have a section about, say, pick-up artistry, with three or four well-edited, conflicting opinions about the merits of clinical dating techniques, all on the same page. My friend Matt suggested that a ranked comment system would allow the most highly regarded responses to questions to float to the top, but there’s something inelegant about that; I’d much rather have a format that didn’t force everything into a call-and-response format, nor do I think a conversational back-and-forth between commentors is the best idea. But then again, I wouldn’t want to try to create something like this and then just limit it to certain editors. Everyone is an expert at something.
So that’s the idea I’m chewing on this week as I sit on my parents’ back porch and play with their old dog Asimov, whose joints and giving out but not so badly he won’t climb the steps for a hot dog. Dethroner in its current form isn’t holding steady, for reasons that are almost all my fault. In fact, let me give you guys an update on where we’re at with the site.
Basically we’re not making enough money to go on like we have been, because I made some assumptions about revenue and ad sales based on fourth-quarter numbers that haven’t held steady throughout the year. Our traffic was been growing slowly—and hey, at least it’s growing—but it’s going to be a long slog to get to the point that I can even consider working on Dethroner full time. And as I’m easily discouraged, it’s been even harder for me to get off my ass every day and put in the four or five hours the site really needs every day to come together. That’s totally an attitude problem on my part and one I’ve not yet figured out how to work around in my life; I’ve got a history of getting discouraged by less-than-perfect scenarios and then letting myself mope while the problems mount instead of dealing with them one day at a time.
I’m not trying to get all maudlin about it or anything. Life is actually going really well for us right now, except for the fact we’re pretty broke. I’m just letting you guys know where we’re at, because so many of you have been ardent supporters of Dethroner and I think you deserve to get a clear picture of what’s going on. I actually had an offer to sell Dethroner a couple of months ago to a person who would have then paid me to work on the site full time, but it just didn’t feel right. I left Gawker last year because they wouldn’t give me an equity stake and it seemed horrible to turn around and lose ownership of the site I’d built myself, even if Dethroner is penny ante compared to most of the bigger sites out there. Unfortunately that decision also means that Dethroner may fizzle out as I take work elsewhere, but I’ve always taken the prideful option before the lucrative one, even when if it has been less than prudent financially.
So I really don’t know where Dethroner is going. I’ve got another job lined up that I will likely take simply because it sounds like a fantastic opportunity, but it will certainly affect the amount of time and energy I have to spend on Dethroner. We’ve gotten far enough with this site that I hate to just shutter it, but I’ve also got to do some honest analysis of my ability to persevere against the reality that Dethroner isn’t going to be an instant success.
What is very likely is that I’ll have the summer months free before I take another full time job, so I want to continue plugging away at the site. I’d like to at least try to hold on until the fourth quarter of this year, because if we can keep building the traffic out I may be able to afford to hire more help or do something that will make it possible to keep the site chugging along. I think there is still potential for Dethroner to be a fun and useful resource for people, but it may involve a focus on the “Guide” idea I talked about earlier instead of trying to post eight to twelve original content pieces a day. I really just don’t know what to do and if this is just a rough patch or a sign I should shut ‘er down.
Fortunately this trip away from Brooklyn has been good to help me get some perspective and a little breathing room to consider the next steps and I remain confident that everything will work out. Worst case, I took a stab at running my own site and realized I’m not able to do everything on my own and that I’m not quite the workaholic powerhouse that I imagine myself to be. It’s just difficult to parse the difference between being lazy and being realistic.
So there you have it. I’m going to be back in New York next week and we actually have a really awesome pair of guest bloggers lined up to do a theme we’ve been excited about since we first started the site, so it’s not like I’m saying you should never check back. You certainly should! But it helps to let you guys know where I’m at and I think it’s only fair to do so when you have been such good sports and daily encouragement.
What do you guys think about the guide idea? Is that something you’d be interested in working on with me? What do you think the right system is?
Seems like a great idea to me. I can sympathize with your difficulty.
I’ve been reading Paul Auster’s “Brooklyn Follies” of late (I can recommend all his work), and one of the main characters is compiling a (excuse me if I flub the name) “Handbook of Human Folly”, in which he catalogs and classifies all the idiocy and mistakes he and others around him made in their lives. I could see that meriting a section in your guide.
I’m all for learning new things, and teaching others what I know (which isn’t much).
James Surowiecki wrote a decent book, The Wisdom of Crowds, that gives examples of how smart a group’s aggregate knowledge can be…save for mob mentality.
If you can build Dethroner to be a base for dudes/guys/men who want to actually think better/smarter, and help each other to do the same, I imagine only good things would come from it.
“Knowledge is power, for real!”
- Heat Vision and Jack
What’s the deal with Alex? Did you sideline him?
I’m a huge fan of this site, it is on my list of sites I visit before work every morning.
Sites like this really help me out because my father died when I was very young and had no male role model for any of my formative years, so I had no one to go to for advice or suggestions, so I had to figure out a lot of stuff on my own and make a lot of mistakes along the way.
I wish there had been something like this back in the early 90s when I had no idea what I was doing. (I always wished there was some kind of handbook, and now I find out there was!!)
Anyway as I stated I like the idea of a handbook and would be willing to contribute whatever knowledge I may have painfully acquired through the years.
More pictures of lions, please.
my only real opinion on this matter is that i hope it doesn’t turn into a wiki.
Well, assuming that the site should be kept up and running somehow, an obvious change in format (based on what you’re saying) would be a re-organization, with better grouping of information by category/topic. Maybe that’s more a design problem than a content one, as in an interface that clearly shows where to go to read about “What Guys Like You Think About X”, where X is tools, cars, broads, whatever.
As for the wiki-esque content-addition idea, it might be a little much to expect a dude to think to himself “I consider myself an expert on X, I think I’ll post about X on Dethroner today”. Maybe something better could be sort of like the Yahoo Answers thing, where people post questions (in the forum?), you, as editor, pick the questions that look like they’ll lead to the juiciest content, and post those on the main site - and let the answers be wiki’ed, edited for usefulness, or at least sanity.
So I guess I’m picturing a three-headed beast here - a section broadly broken down by topic (cars/tools/broads/grooming/clothes), made up of posts that have already appeared here or new ones posted by you or your accepted experts; a section that’s a lot like what’s going on now, with fun links/stories/dick jokes; and a Q&A section, the content of which would be provided by readers and if said content turns out to be cool/useful, it could then be archived in Section #1 under the appropriate category for future generations to enjoy.
I’d visit THAT site ALL day long.
i like mz’s yahoo answers idea a lot, but i think the problem would inlie on people asking questions.
i dont think comment voting should play to hugely, because i think it would turnbe like digg with its comment nazis
I agree that the problem is that if no one asks, then no one can answer… but if no one’s willing to contribute to this site, then it sounds like Dethroner’s more or less toast anyway.
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.
I love the idea of a men’s guidebook, particularly because A.) I never picked up most of that knowledge from my dad, who is barely able to get dressed in the morning, and B.) because I got married rather young, and am now very recently divorced. As a result, I’m trying to figure out a lot of things in order to look good and show some sense of style, which I never really had to do when married.
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.
Well, I guess the depth of answer is determined by the answerer(s), right? And if no one’s going to answer, then the whole thing’s boned anyway, right?
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.
loving this site- in my “start the day” pile after social email!
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.
I think that MZ’s idea is really good, also. I like the site (obviously) and visit it almost daily, often times several times a day, and I would hate to see it go. I don’t think I have ever commented on a site as much as I have here, either, so the content must be at least compelling as it is now. I think if you keep instituting some improvements and slowly building it towards what you want it to be it won’t be such a headache, the people that are slow to accept change will stick with you, and it;ll just keep getting better. that’s my two cents, not that two cents will get you much these days!
I second the anti wiki comment. Whatever you do, avoid teh wiki. It’s a cop out for a site like this. Remember Joel, that your talent is in building communities, every one of your projects that is successful is successful because people identify with you and tend to clump to your ideas. A wiki does little to preserve or promulgate the community feel.
This idea may seem dumb simply because it comes from the World of Warcraft, but I rather like the thottbot.com interface for comments. For instance:
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.
Seems like it boils down to how much of the content you want to come from your general readership.
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?
Being that I have no penis, I guess I’m probably fairly useless here. Unless someone decides you need an “Ask A Lesbian” feature, in which case I’m your man. Er… dyke. Whatever.
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 kinda like the way Slashdot handles all of it’s content. Although there’s tons of sections, about half the stuff (the big news important stuff that is) from each part makes it to the main page thread, but these other sections keep on ticking over on their own with user submissions.
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!).
Alright, much good thought to consider. I will ruminate.
Ok, people love this site.
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?
i like tecs ask a lesbian idea, alot it could be alot of fun/helpful.
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.
There’s also no podcast. I would have thought that by now there would be some sort of coherent attempt at a Podcast or episodic content of that vein by now on this site, but there still isn’t one.
Just something else to think about.
Favorites on MetaFilter are *not* votes.
Screw wiki’s… I need fresh idea’s brought to me on a regular basis… and that’s what I’ve come to expect from you Joel. I’ve been a fan since the tech blog days. The only reason I visit hear is for the unique brand of wit and cynasism that you bring to the table! I say do what you gotta do to keep doing things your way.
Ever since I graduated college and started the grueling life of work, I’ve limited myself to a small handful of blogs. Dethroner has become one of them, and I think the primary reason is I like Joel’s take on things, and I like the articles that he presents. I essentially left gizmodo when Joel left, because the writing got crappy, so I think if the content was all given to readers, dethroner would get crappy as well.
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.
Dethroner without Joel and his writing would be like Irishfest without Guiness and bagpipes…