To Moderate Or Not To Moderate?

Via TechCrunch comes word of the NotCot network, which wants to combine user-generated content with editorial control:

The NotCot Network: A Study in Structured User Generated Content

Their model is simple enough: get users to upload content, but funnel that content through editors and moderators who look it over, assess the quality (and legality), and "ensure the quality of the content." This is roughly equivalent to what we were doing on my previous gig, where we paid moderators to keep an eye on user actions. So it's from the basis of no little experience that I can say that I know what will happen here.

First, this model is not going to scale easily. The NotCot network will fail unless they have a very active community, with lots of people uploading stuff. Moderating a forum post is pretty easy; moderating a video submission is more time-consuming, particularly if the moderator is responsible for checking for copyright violations. NotCot is going to need to keep a lot of people on staff to handle the content, and those people will need to be paid for their time.

Second, they're going to run into serious challenges with international traffic. First, because foreign-language submissions pose a new set of problems (is that song in the background under copyright? If so, who owns it and how do you check the rights?). But beyond that, there's a time challenge: if your moderators work in North America on weekdays during normal business hours, what happens when someone posts a video from Europe just when everyone in the States is headed home? One thing I learned for certain: users hate it when they upload content and have to wait to see it posted. If it's a predictable wait of several hours, they get really upset. NotCot will probably need to hire second-shift workers, and might even need to find someone to police foreign-language markets (see above about not scaling easily).

Third, it's a lot easier to say that you will "ensure the quality of the content," but when you're actually out there in the trenches, what counts for quality? The only objective standard of "quality" is popularity among users, but that standard can't be applied to the pre-approval of content. Ultimately all you'll end up doing is ensuring that the content isn't illegal, obscene, or pornographic. The "quality" bar will be tossed out the window almost immediately, just by the demands of the job.

The biggest risk here for NotCot? That their editorial review will prove too intrusive. You're already asking a lot of your users when you tell them to capture video, edit it, and upload it to your servers. Asking them to also sit through a submission process that benefits them in no way is a dangerous second step. If that second step isn't almost perfectly painless, what's to stop them from going to YouTube and uploading the video over there instead?

My first job on the Internet was with Britannica.com. Our business plan, back in those days, was to improve on Yahoo: we'd also provide an Internet guide, but ours would be composed exclusively of editor-vetted, quality sites. In the end, our visitors didn't really care. Yahoo made billions by including everybody; we ensured quality and went out of business, because the quality we provided wasn't of sufficient value. NotCot will need to find a way to do what we did better.

The Dead Zone of Slick

Came across an interesting post this morning, which I think contains an important insight for content creators:

The Dead Zone of Slick


"There was a terrific duo playing live music at the farmer's market the other day. They were well-rehearsed, enthusiastic and really good. Being a patron of the arts, I bought a CD.

I hated it.

I've thought a lot about what turned me off, and I think it's the curve above.

Faced with the excitement of making a CD and all the knobs and dials, they overproduced the record. They went from being two real guys playing authentic music, live and for free, and became a multi-tracked quartet in search of a professional sound. And they ended up in the dead zone. Not enough gloss to be slick, too much to be real."

When I read this, a light went on over my head, because it's something I see every day on my job. On the one hand, you have raw, unfiltered comments in forums and attached to blog posts. They're often rude, uninsightful, and repetitive -- but they're undeniably real. On the other end of the spectrum, you have excellent, painstakingly-crafted, professional content. It can be very good. But it's death if you shoot for the latter and come up short, because then you're in the dead zone.

Recently I experienced this first-hand. For one of our sites, we came up with a new content idea: we'd get members of the community to write for us. They were the sort of people who post compulsively to forums anyway, so the thinking was that we could harness some of that energy and polish it up so that it was better and more professional.

It tanked. No one really wanted to read it. These writers were the sort of people who attract a following in forums; people look for their posts and seek their approval. But once we took their thoughts and ran an edit pass, we inadvertently took their material out of the "real" and pushed it in the direction of the "slick." Problem was, we intentionally did not rework their prose extensively. We wanted it to remain "real," but in the process we produced something that was only half-real. And nobody liked it that way.

Web communities are a special kind of beast. They're always producing their own content, often in ways that the site managers never really intended. And there's always a temptation to reach out to that content and touch it up, elevate it a bit into something that you think everyone will enjoy so much more. But the odds are that, in the process, you'll only make it less appealing.

Keep it real, or keep it professional. Don't try for both.

The Dangerous World of Web 2.0

Today's link is to an article on Alertbox, Jakob Nielsen's forum for making dogmatic pronouncements about good website content and design:

Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous

The section on community comes in the middle of an article full of crotchety old man denunciations of what kids nowadays are into. Don't get me wrong, Nielsen makes some good points; if you're being led around by the nose by the latest technological fad, your site will suck, no doubt about it. Good design and content strategy are key, and ultimately it doesn't matter whether it's wrapped up in Ajax or plain ol' HTML. Still, there are a number of points where Nielsen gives in to Angry Old Man syndrome and throws the baby out with the bathwater. For instance, his reason why you should avoid user-generated content:

"On the Web, most people are bozos and not worth listening to."

Nielsen makes a common mistake here: he presumes that people need to be worth listening to. In fact, there are very few circumstances in which the quality of your community's discourse actually makes much of a difference. If you're trying to put together the next Wikipedia, for instance, you'll need to provide some sort of a quality-assurance mechanism. And if your user comments could somehow put your company at risk, through legal liability or other means, then you'd need to do some quality checks. But otherwise? Mostly irrelevant.

Consider forums. A successful forum is one in which people make lots of comments. Doesn't matter if their comments are the stupidest thing you've ever seen, an active forum is a good forum. Same goes for community blogs; with the single exception of comment spam, you don't really care if the blog posts and comments are full of crap, just so long as they're full.

Or consider user-generated content, like videos. Have you seen most videos on YouTube? They suck. No reason at all to watch them. But there's so damn many of them up there that quality is there to be found on nearly any topic, and so the community thrives. I can guarantee that there are just as many bozos posting to YouTube as Nielsen imagines, but that is quite irrelevant to the actual success of the site.

So bring on the bozos. As long as they're actively engaged with other bozos on your site, you have a community that is engaged and drawing repeat traffic.