WatchAre you trying to drive people AWAY from your site? The new layout/format sucks. Big time. A "forum" should feel like a forum, right now, your site feels like a cesspool of links.
Any chance you can revert back/fix it? Personally, I used to visit your site atleast a few times a day. Since this new layout, it's become a few times a week or less.
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How about a link on the bottom of the page, to return to the home screen?
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dannybsmith says
If I could make a living at it, I'd do it. But I tried for years, and I can't.
Your votes would help ensure quality!
errc says
Sure, no problem. Done.
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Patrick says
But are you making (or expect to be able to make) a living on the forum??
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No, but the forum is growing in usage while the news links were stagnating. If the forum keeps growing, advertising or some kind of premium subscription thing seems bound to work.
Even more important, the forum is much less work for me, just some system admin and spam deletion.
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So is the forum something you love to do? (i.e. Steve Jobs passion level)
What would be your long term vision for it? Currently it seems a bit of a mess (constructive feedback here).
And also, if it frees up time, is this extra time you want to dedicate to another project, or family? If you expect it to be your main source of income, it would be hard to imagine that monetizing it to that level would be easy.
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Patrick
Any particular reason you took away the ability to see the threads you've commented in by clicking on your handle?
That was a very handy way to follow threads...
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Patrick says
Man, the only thing I've noticed thriving is my ignore list. It seems like everyt discussion devolves into a back and forth of personal attacks like "you're a selfish uneducated jew-hating bigot!" and "you're a lazy socialist Obama dick-sucker!" Some kind of moderation is needed because when given free reign, civility goes right out the window and the end result is a Youtube comment section.
I agree the links are pretty bad now, but they are getting marginally better as more people vote.
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Honestly Patrick? How long can it really take to throw up links? You must have your go-to economy and real estate feeds/sites. You can scan the headlines, read the first or second paragraph of interesting ones, and discard the others. Plus, you could accept headline suggestions from readers (by email). I'm pretty sure I could throw up some plain HTML links in about 15 min. each morning. I'm not bragging - I certainly don't have your eye for quality - I'm just trying to give a realistic assessment of how much time I think it should take. But maybe I'm wrong.
Perhaps if you just focused on 5 selected headlines per day (instead of the old 10-15?). That really couldn't take that much time. And it would keep all of us old-time readers happy while you continued to grow your forum business.
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And just as a further bit of anecdotal evidence - I used to readily send people to this site if they were new to the whole housing bubble idea and needed some good info. I do not feel comfortable recommending this site anymore. What would someone find here? They would not know what they were looking at, and they would almost certainly leave before they learned anything useful.
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I know this is probably just too simple to work....but....why not charge $10 per year per user for the links?
If you have about 20K unique users as per your counter, if 1/2 pay the fee, you are making $100K gross...getting about 2x median Bay area salary for doing something you truly enjoy...(if 1/4 pay, you are at median salary)...if you provided the avg. 10 quality links you used to (5 days a week) which I used to look forward to daily, I would certainly pay that amount for it...the rest of the people can keep the free forum (w/ premium features also available to subscribers)...just put the mess of the homepage out of its misery...please...also maybe you could do a NYTimes type of deal where new/anonymous users get to click 10 links per month (not sure how to keep track of this even when clearing cookies...ip address?), and after that the links do not work (they can see the heading but can not click it)...if the links are good, 'the path of least resistance' will be the $10 per year (as long as you make it dead simple to pay), vs. people googling each link that seems interesting to them...
Another point - if you say that the links 'are not the future' for you, then what is the harm in implementing the pay scheme for them? Other than your time, give that a shot for 6 months, and if people don't pay go back to the wild west of ratings...
As a completely unrelated note, I would like to report that the spelling dictionary for Google Chrome (my browser) does not recognize 'googling' as a proper word...how about that.
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tts says
Uh oh. That's a bug. Will fix.
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OK, fixed. If you mean the bug whereby clicking "Comments: " would show you a list of all the comments you made.
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As a web publisher of sorts, maybe this lecture inspires you for some ideas...
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Dsdf4 says
Yes, I find it very addictive and would like it to be a channel to circumvent the MLS. Long term, I'd like to replace the MLS, crazy as that sounds. The time I'm freeing up is so that I can get a real job.
Dsdf4 says
That's a nice thought, but from my previous attempt I know the reality is more like 0.5% (half a percent, not 50 percent). So about 1 hundreth of what you suggested.
Seriously, no one pays for anything. By far my biggest source of income has been donations.
Dsdf4 says
Because then I have to put in the time no matter how few users I get.
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Patrick says
It doesn't necessarily sound crazy, but I am not sure what added value the forum (even if you had the for sale/for rent/wanted sections) would add over existing sites such as craigslist, redfin, padmapper (rentals) & such...and you still would need to monetize it somehow (ads/subscription/post fees...and you seem to think nobody pays for anything anyways)
Patrick says
What did you do? I have been reading for years and do not ever recall a payment attempt...also how did you implement it? Devil is in the details...
Patrick says
Sounds like a hobby gone wrong....
Patrick says
Isn't that people paying for something, after all? I would say that no one pays for anything they can not pay for/afford (except for housing, of course), or for anything not worth paying for (whatever the asking price is).
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Patrick says
OK its working now.
Can you put back the "trollishness" stat page too?
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tts says
Trollishness is still where it ever was, on this page: http://www.patrick.net/users.php
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Yea you used to be able to see it by clicking on someones handle, doesn't work anymore. Now you have to go to that page.
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Patrick, I just had a brain wave:
The incentive to generate lots of hoopla and discussion, AKA. quantity over quality, is that it leads to more page views and potentially more revenue.
But the problem is that it degenerates the site to nothing better than a squabbling tribunal of not-so-bright talking anchor-heads on a TV cable network "news" (and I use that word lightly) program.
But is there not another model? Is there not a way to spread accurate information and thoughtful debate without drowning in incessant and unproductive prattle?
I think something more akin to Wikipedia+debate is the right model. Wikipedia does not have lots of spurious content. But it gets a lot of repeat page views from searches of specific topics.
So why cannot Patrick.net be more of a record of knowledge, just like Wikipedia is? Can Patrick.net be be branded and marketed as a site to be searched for facts and answers and historical records? Can it be a site where people search for facts rather than engage in useless squabbling?
One component of this vision is search. Another is debate and discussion. Another is avoiding debating the same question over and over again (Obama is a racist, because of x,y,z... !!).
More users and page view, but not at the expense of quality!
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I was hoping to increase the quality of conversation by letting Premium users delete comments from their own discussions. Then you could just look at who started a discussion and you'd probably have some idea of the quality of the discussion.
How could Patrick.net be a site to search for facts and answers and historical records? What kind of records do you mean?
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I mean historical records of data (such as your craigslist data, case-shiller etc) as well as historical records of what people knew and were thinking in a certain time period, but with a minimum of noise and blather. And historical records of how propaganda and misinformation was debunked, so that we can look it up and not have to debunk it all over again every day.
I know it is hard to come up with a recipe that works. Wikipedia works, because the content is largely correct and largely static. How to make a "PatrickPedia" I do not know, I wish I knew. But I hope at least I can get people to think about it.
By the way, you always had a bit of PatrickPedia with the editorial page where you listed all the reasons it was a bad time to buy a house. Come to think of it, where is that page now? I can't find it anymore. Maybe you need an EDITORIAL page where you can elevate good threads to editorial status, or solicit editorials from readers. Patrick.net used to have a clear editorial point of view. In the old days it was clear what that view was, now I do not see it anymore.
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justme says
A link to that page is in the footer, labeled "Should you buy a house?"
I think you're right in that one thing people come for is a strong editorial viewpoint, and they want that in the newslinks too.
The problem is that it takes a lot of time to edit the newslinks and do the other work to keep the noise and blather down, but I have not yet found a way to make a living from that.
Subscriptions to the newslinks failed, donations don't provide nearly enough income, advertising just doesn't work on a site that tells people why they should not buy a house, and I can't even do subscriptions to filtered Craigslist data anymore now that Craigslist is relentlessly squashing all innovation that relies on data from its site:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57479344-93/craigslist-sues-padmapper-for-mass-harvesting-listings/
So what can I do, really? I can't keep throwing years of free work into providing that editorial point of view.
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It almost seems like you went FROM: do a lot of work, have a valuable service which you have trouble monetizing....TO: do very little work (relatively speaking), have a service of questionable quality & value which you have trouble monetizing....unless I am missing something, the other approach made more sense to me...finding a way to monetize something of value should have greater chance of success than if the product/service has questionable value...
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By the way, the lawsuit from Craigslist to PadMapper that you pointed to goes to the heart of the matter (which I pointed at in another post): you should be competing with Craigslist, not just leveraging its data. The reason being that PadMapper came to be for a reason...Craigslist, as awesome as it is even for real estate listings, it also absolutely sucks for real estate listings...meaning it is awesome because there is a lot of content, but it sucks because it is very not user friendly nor convenient for real estate listing (e.g. maps, etc...)...because it tries to be a great service for everything, which is likely not feasible...thus specialized sites would be expected to eventually take over Craigslist, as long as they have a good balance of ease of use & cost...develop a very low cost (to the poster...e.g. $1 to post per month...which may also cut on the crap, another CG weakness) Craigslist customized for real estate (maps, etc...) & you have something...you already have good momentum for the right target population...make it happen! this is the second time I am telling you this! :)
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Dsdf4 says
Not necessarily. Founder effects are huge. English, for example, sucks as a language. Very irregular, just doesn't makes much sense compared to, say, German or Spanish. Yet we are forced to use English right now, because that's what we both know.
Craigslist is the same. People post there because that's where people look. People look there because that's where people post.
It could perhaps be overcome. I think you have a good idea in that paying $1/month would eliminate a lot of the spammers and scammers, since they don't pay anything as a rule. And look at Apple. No one thought they could compete against Microsoft because Microsoft was so entrenched, but Apple products really were better, and now Apple is worth much more than Microsoft.
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Founder effects are important...so, if I myself was going to start this thing (I have thought about it plenty), I would be starting from zero traffic....you, however have your own founder effect/momentum/relevant traffic...which is why I have suggested this now & before...it would be much easier for you to compete with them than for me...also, from a technical perspective this is something you can easily do I would guess, so the resource investment would not be that huge...your traffic population is the perfect audience...also the people here would be happy to give you feedback w/ respect to features & functionality, so your market research would be free...why the heck not??...could also do real estate for sale & for rent... build it, give it a try...I would certainly also consider investing myself...
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So you would have a place that combines real estate market, news & forum...pretty nice combination...it would be pretty cool to let registered people comment on the postings too...I have a feeling you would get plenty of opinions...since you are competing with CL (free), you have to go with something dead simple, fast, clean and user friendly, and add more value to allow you to charge even the low price...(mapping, better search...)
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Dsdf4 says
I've already heard from landlords that they definitely do not want the general public to be able to comment on their listings.
So there's a conflict already. I'd feel obligated to allow open discussion, but customers don't want that.
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Patrick says
That's a minor point anyways...so you can let the poster choose whether others can comment or not...some people may opt in because they want the additional traffic (e.g. if they price it right, good location, well kept...) others may not...either way if the feature does not work you kill it if it does you keep it alive...just like you do in the forum & elsewhere...
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Patrick - Lemme give you a corollary.
HuffingtonPost
They were and are a "free" content site. They have an attractive layout, provide relatively good content, makes money from ads, and Arianna Huffington didn't make a dime until AOL acquired them for 350 million.
There's your business model.
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Patrick, what forum engine do you use? Doesn't look like any of the popular picks (vbulletin, phpBB, etc)
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Patrick says
In other forums I have used you see the newest comments that you have yet to read. In other words, if you come to a post that you haven't seen yet, and it has 500 comments, you start on page one. Next time you return to that thread, it starts you on the oldest page that you haven't seen. It may do this based solely on dates (last time you viewed a thread) or on what you actually read...not sure. In any event it's a whole lot less confusing.
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lenar says
It started out as Wordpress, but not much of the original code is left now. It's mostly my own creation at this point.
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Patrick says
Thx
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Hey patrick, is it just me or is there something (buggy?) Going on where sometimes when I click on a new thread, I cannot make a comment? As in there's not the usual typepad to type in. Just the OP link and their comment but no means to leaving a comment. Only happens some of the time,,,,off the top of my head, the thread on Obama commenting on Akin, and last week a thread titled "they tried to kill me with my kids"
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Could be a bug.
Can you get a screenshot when it next happens?
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http://www.patrick.net/forum/?p=1215592
Can you post comment in that thread?
I searched for the one title "they tried to kill me with my children" and couldn't find it. Probably for the better, nobody should have to be subject to read news like that,,,,its better left unspoken about
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Ah, that user paid to be a Premium Member:
http://patrick.net/subscribe.php
So he bought the right to restrict the discussion to other Premium Members, and that's what he did with that thread. Dunno why. It was really intended so that any people listing property on the forum could control the comments in that case.
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I think he's a she ;)
That other one I cannot find now was a tovarichpeter posting, and id find it odd with all he contributes that he would have done that with that link, intentionally. Is it something that could be happening by mistake?
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WillyWanker's website
I rarely visit this site anymore. Once, it was the 'go to' place for news and information on real~estate in the US. Now, not so much. It's more closely aligned with The Sandbox at the IMDb forums. Filled with political prattle and flaming over silly things. It appears that the donations have petered out, and how could they not, as Patrick took public political stances which pushed half his audience away.
It was fun while it lasted and it also served as an important resource for real~estate news.
Tant pis.