WatchI've had a bunch of people say the newslinks are all over the place now, not specificially about housing, and not necessarily very good...
Edited on 22 Aug 2012:
In response to reader demand, Patrick will again manually pick the newslinks each day
if he can get 100 paying subscribers in the next week. Those paying
subscribers will then be able to view the links here, or by email.
To bring back the hand-picked newslinks, please subscribe with the button on the home page: http://patrick.net
The subscription costs $7 per week, but there is a one-week free trial period,
so you won't be charged anything until a week goes by. If there are 100
subscribers by Monday August 27th at noon, his manually picked newslinks will
get published that evening, and your subscription will start charging you.
If there are not at least 100 subscribers, Patrick will cancel your
subscription and you'll pay nothing.
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joelnpayne says
I agree. But I also know that updating a blog every day with quality content is a big job, esp. if you are not getting paid for your time.
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Patrick says
I think I gave you a spot ten spot but it was a 4-5 years back at least. FWIW I remember that I paid you according to the value I felt I received and was comparing to that of a magazine subscription. I also have commented but only occasionally and only when I felt like I really had something to say.
In terms of your request I put actions to suggestions, unfortunately that doesn't align with MY current priorities. I'm a mechanical engineer, I run an LLC on the side of normal employment, and I'm a father of two. That means life is very very full and I don't have time or desire to put priority on being a volunteer (even though I think it's a good idea). To vote properly requires time and attention paid to what good and what's bad when of course I prefer it all to be good. I find the new system to be inefficient and that's a bummer but it is what it is.
1sfrenter says
That's the rub. Patrick has been being paid for his time. Sure it's a hobby and he's not going to make a living on it, but since this has been up an running since what 2005 or so? I know I referred a friend here who bought a house in 2006 after I recommended she not do so. With a low day of donations at $15 and a good day at $50, Patrick's certainly made several thousand dollars doing this, and it wouldn't surprise me if he'd broken 10k. That's better than the vast majority of bloggers who simply want to have a voice.
Patrick, if you've decided it's not your priority, I can understand and relate to that. Time is precious and life goes so crazy fast (particularly with little girls) :-). You do what you need to do, but naturally I'll be doing the same. You wanted feedback on the system and I've given you that.
I do respect the fact that you've tried several things over the years and you listen to others while still thinking for yourself. If I didn't think you cared I wouldn't have spent 15 minutes of my day jotting you a couple notes.
Regards to you and yours,
Joel
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Pacifica, CA
The only problem I have found with the new system is that the comments seem, sometimes, to be feeding from earlier posts, or somewhere else.
So you click a link for a story, and comments seem to be in the middle of a conversation you didn't see the start of.
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My perspective: I don't have the time to surf, submit, vote. I get the email and read 2-6 stories from it, often not visiting patrick.net itself. I appreciate the pnet forum for the RE/economics talk, but less so the political banter. However, I do enjoy the political links (those containing numbers) and the cartoons (probably because they're quick).
I've contributed some to the forums some and have also submitted a couple links, but I'm generally not going to come here before I get the email. For people using email like me, voting makes no sense because it's the voting result that brings us here. If we're here and voting, email is pointless.
Otherwise, fewer but more high-quality links in the email are better. Timeliness is of moderate value - I like the daily option, but I may go through 10 emails at one time when I get around to reviewing them.
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Dublin, CA
karsten says
Perhaps add an option to filter out the images from the links/articles or only show them as a link? Or split the images into a separate section from the links? There seem to be lots of joke images which frequently get voted up.
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San Francisco, CA
I've been voting, but the link results have been scaring me away from the site. A picture for the top link/article of the day? I'm also not comfortable viewing some of the pictures at work. This wasn't a problem before, but now they're on the front page.
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OK, a text-only option is not hard to implement. I will do that.
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What's the criteria for voting Up or Down? I'm assuming an Up vote means the voter thinks it's a valid housing article, and not necessarily that they agree or not with the subject of the article.
For example, if someone posts an article about bailing out greedy/dumb buyers who took out a huge HELOC and now is losing the house - I don't like the idea of bailing out the buyer, but I like the article in regards to it being an article about housing.
If this site is going to rely on user submissions and user votes, we might as well just make a new subreddit on Reddit. That whole site is based on that kind of model.
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SoBayDude says
Just whether you think it's worth reading or not.
Doesn't have to be about housing, unless it's in http://patrick.net/forum/real-estate/
Yes, it's sort of like Reddit, but for some reason I find Reddit hard to use.
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Hi Patrick,
I was aware we could submit links, and vote on them, but like JoelNPayne I'm pretty busy too so I haven't been using these features. I just read 1 to 3 links a day that interest me from your list.
The housing bubble is still alive and well in Canada, certainly in Toronto where I live and deflating already in Vancouver (the most overvalued market in the country and possibly the continent). While the story States-side sure provide that cautionary tale people here STILL don't believe it.
I think I'll throw a few links on right now!
TOLurker
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Just tried submitting a link but it threw me into a "start a new discussion" forum box!
TOLurker
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1)
lets remove the images from the front pages. That will clean up the links a lot.
you can start a new section 'patnet images / cartoons'
2) and are the links 'auto detected' and posted on the front page, even if some body is just writing a post?
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TOLurker says
Actually, that's the right behavior. Just paste the link into the discussion box, title it, and submit.
Sorry it's not clearer. How should it look?
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bwdutton says
Request granted!
OK, now in your Profile at the bottom, you can select "View newslinks as text only, no images, both on site and in emails."
Then if you save, you won't see images in the newslinks or the emails by default.
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Patrick,
I realize some of the difficulty in running a site like this day-in, day-out, as you have. However, can I suggest that instead of simply allowing visitors to determine what gets sent out that you do some sort of light 'triage'? Let the voting happen, but still try to curate some of the better links. I'm sure there are some hidden gems in there, but there's a lot of nonsense lately. Have I been sleeping through all the links to LIBOR scandal discussions?
$0.02
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I do that a bit already, but OK, I will pay more attention to them, deleting obviously bad links and promoting good ones.
Please also help by voting!
I guess pure democracy doesn't get you the highest level of content.
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Hi Patrick,
Pure democracy is generally regarded as not a good thing, however I'm not sure I know how to vote. I tried just so I could say I'm doing my part, but I don't get it.
On the front page on the right column are up/down arrows. The highest rated link already went out in this morning's email. Why is it still there?
The stuff in the left column looks like it might be interesting, but how do I vote for one of those?
And why is a picture of a bank upvoted 6 to 3, and a picture of a movie character upvoted 8 to 5? Because the second is a link to something about Romney and Limbaugh?
I think you need to steer the conversation towards housing and the ancillary topics of banking fraud, economics, regulation, &c. Your byline says "Advertise your house to a relevant audience," but based on the daily emails the site is starting to feel rudderless. You've put a lot of work into building a core but once the trolls start upvoting themselves that's all you'll have left...
Alrighty then, </soapbox>
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cc0 says
Up arrow means "Worth reading".
Down arrow means "Not worth reading".
I'll add that description to the home page. OK, done.
cc0 says
That was a bug. Someone included the same link twice with slightly different URLs. Deleted. Thanks for telling me!
cc0 says
If you click "Like" at the top of a conversation, it also gets an upvote in the link voting.
cc0 says
That's a mystery to me.
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Patrick says
I'm not quite that dense, but ok.
Patrick says
That is helpful information. Suggest 2 things:
(1) Use the arrows and like/unlike (on stories only, I presume) consistently, so it's clear that 'liking'/'upvoting' and 'dislike'/'downvoting' are the same thing.
(2) Consider framing stories and providing a p@net vote bar. This can be two ways, I think:
(2.a) Traditional: vote bar at top, link content in IFRAME below.
(2.b) With an onClick, open a small window that shows the link summary and p@net voting bar. When navigating away from the page, close the voting window. I'm not sure how you'd do auto-close, but leaving it open is an 'ok' 80% solution, imo.
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Those are good suggestions.
I tried iframes but it was a nightmare, since many sites strongly object and try to break your iframe, and there are legal issues.
But the toolbar thing seems pretty workable.
Can a toolbar know which page you're on right now and do some database calls based on that? I suppose it can.
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I'll refrain from technicals because I'm no JS/jQuery expert, but to be clearer: When I said "toolbar" I meant the title controls at the top of each story. I suggested IFRAME as a good "80%" solution because it's easy to implement, but without that, imagine this topic:
The idea is simply that when you click link above, this exact same block opens in its own window and you can vote up/down from there.
What I hear from you sounds like something in the browser toolbar. I'm sure you could include bookmarklets that do "vote up" and "vote down" but I'm not sure how a free-floating window could grab "previous focus". You could probably have a window open that snoops each page load and has a "share" link (stumbleupon must do something like this), but all that seems much more complicated than an IFRAME. :)
Also, a "share" link should be able to grab a blurb, and be smart enough to not present the same story from two different sources, as went out with this morning's email...
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Sad to say the experiment to let users vote on the news links is adding alot of noise, and also the topics are no longer focused on housing-related news. For example, I don't need any Obama or Romney news / political cartoons on this site, unless it is housing/economy related. There's plenty of other politics focused sites I can goto to read that drivel.
The news was much better when it was a curated list. If Patrick doesn't have time, maybe he should ask for volunteers who would agree to stick to housing related news and let them curate the news by committee.
Maybe Patrick is trying to turn patrick.net into a reddit.com or something. Right now, I'm finding if I want housing related news, I'm better off going to http://www.reddit.com/r/housing than http://patrick.net, which didn't used to be the case.
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OK, so many people have said that they want me to again personally select all the links that I'll do it -- if I can make a living at it.
There are about 8,000 subscribers by email. If even 100 of them will pay $7 per week, I'll do the links again. See the notice on the home page.
I'm using the free trial week to give people a chance to vote on what they want without spending anything yet.
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Rockville, MD
Patrick - This is gonna be interesting. I'm quite interested in seeing the outcome. That should tell you if people put their money where their mouth is.
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Yes, at the very least it's an interesting experiment.
Maybe I should put up a counter on the home page? So far I have seven subscribers.
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Skokie, IL
Why can't you sell advertising for this site?
I know that you mentioned that advertisers don't like advertising against housing prices, but I see all kinds of advertising on the web unrelated to the sites content.
There is all kinds geared to the user, somehow the browser gets user info.
I think if you charge you will lose eyeballs.
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StillLooking says
At its peak, I got about $1,000/month from Google ads, but that declined to about $100/month over time as real estate advertisers decided not to be on Patrick.net, and as real estate advertising in general crashed.
I do have some ads in a little system I made myself:
http://patrick.net/d.php
It doesn't make much, but I really like it because it's so simple and non-intrusive. If I could find a way to target the most relevant advertisers, that would help.
StillLooking says
True, but if even a few of the eyeballs that remain are paying customers, it works out.
Anyway, the Patrick.net forum traffic continues to grow at a good clip. Not sure why, but eyeballs are being added on the left side of the home page even as I lose them from the right side.
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Hey patrick, when it says there was 19,241 viewers yesterday, is that unique users or is that how many times the homepage got loaded? Because if its not unique users, its easy to see why the forum generates more page refreshes as two people go back and forth bickering,,,,relative to when it was mainly newslink traffic, I would open pat.net once and then hit the links (in new tabs) and then be done with it,,,,
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It's 19,241 unique IP addresses.
There were 258,200 total "hits" including images, etc:
grep 21/Aug/2012 access_log | wc -l
258200
Of those, the large majority were forum page loads (which all start with /forum/):
grep 21/Aug/2012 access_log | grep 'GET /forum/' | wc -l
172096
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I used to love coming to this site. Then all of the left wing biased political crap started showing up more and more. Why???? This is supposed to be about housing. Keep it that way and may be you would get donations from people like me.
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Patrick my coffee costs 10 cents a cup
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Patrick says
How many subscribers now?
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jerrypap says
Donations were never enough to cover expenses, even when it was nothing but housing and I was putting in vast amounts of unpaid time to pick the newslinks manually.
Subscriptions don't work either. I've tried low ($5/month) and high ($7/week) price points.
Try the forums. They're free, quite entertaining, and don't take much work to maintain. Wait -- you are obviously on the forums already! Doh.
too big to fail says
I don't think I could drink that coffee anymore, now that I know what the good stuff tastes like.
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errc says
Eleven. So there's still 89 to go in 24 hours. Chances of getting there are approximately 0%. That's fine. It was a fun experiment.
My book will be ready soon, so I'll start advertising it tomorrow.
And I'm thinking of yet more businesses that liberate buyers from agents, like ways to search multiple sites' listings legally, and lists of FSBO forms by states, and lists of lawyers that do flat-fee transactions. Watch the home page for those!
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Patrick says
The pictures are back. Just wanted to let you know @patrick.
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Monterey, CA
Patrick says
Patrick, how bout a yearly subscription? Something like $20-25/yr.
I think $7/week is pricey, but if there were a reasonable yearly fee, I'd be up for it since I've been visiting your site for years.
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FunTime says
Thanks. Is there any point in extracting links from the forum anymore, whether pictures or not? Most people are now clicking on links directly from the forum posts.
joshuatrio says
The hazard there is that I'll get just a few subscribers, and then have promised to manually select all those links anyway. When I was charging $5 per month for a while in 2006 I got only 417 subscribers. Not sure I'd get even that many again.
The forum continues to grow pretty quickly in terms of traffic and number of comments per day, and now that any newslinks posted on the forum have little automated excerpts, it seems pretty convenient to read.
I guess the bigger problem is that I'm burned out on manually picking links and arranging them. I prefer programming solutions, where I can write some code to do something and run it over and over.
It's hard to program something to decide on news link quality (even Google isn't very good at it) but maybe combined with some reader input it's do-able. So for example, now each night I mail out the top 10 real estate forum discussions which have at least 3 comments each. So they are all things that people felt were worth commenting on.
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San Francisco, CA
$7 a week is way to much. I'm a cheapskate, it's true.
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Patrick says
What if you hand pick the newslinks, and post them on your homepage every day?
Keep the forum entirely separate, by using the toolbar at the top.
Have advertisements/sell ad space on your main page? That seems a little more sustainable.
Or, you could sell the domain for a nice price and walk away from it all.
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joshuatrio says
I used to handpick newslinks and post them to my home page every weekday for years. That's exactly what I'm trying to avoid, because it's so much work and doesn't make any money.
Total readers per day dropped when I stopped doing the manual newslinks, but the forum keeps hitting new records for traffic and comments, and it's far less work for me. The forum traffic probably went up exactly because I don't do the newslinks manually and people are just looking for something interesting to read.
Advertising so far has sucked as a source of revenue, but I'm hoping that well-targeted ads for house inspectors and lawyers might work. The idea is to advertise only services that are consistent with the basic message of the site, which is to avoid commision-based agents and to avoid debt (unless you can get a low enough price on a house that you could rent it out to cover the mortgage and all expenses).
Also, if I can advertise directly to people in the inspector's or lawyer's zip code, that makes the ad very valuable to them.
Back in 2006 or so I got an offer of $50K cash for the site, or $100K if I would sign a guarantee that traffic wouldn't fall. Didn't take either one of course.