patrick.net

Here's one example of a problem with this new forum format. The following makes no sense to me:

Needs title (wikipedia.org)
Submitted by HRHMedia 22 hours ago 300 comments Share 16

Click on "Needs title" and you're sent to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy?source=Patrick.net

Click on "comments" and the first and highlighted comment is about global warming.

FunTime says

I love the option to get rid of pictures. Thanks!

That was by popular demand. Glad I could do it.

wbblair3 says

Needs title (wikipedia.org)

Yes, that's that same bug where I couldn't find a title. I will fix it to allow any user to add a title to a link that doesn't have one.

wbblair3 says

Click on "comments" and the first and highlighted comment is about global warming.

Another bug I will fix. The problem there is that the "comments" link goes back to the top of the thread, not to the specific comment where the link was posted.

How do you get rid of pictures? The pictures drive me nuts.

I like coming to Patrick.net for the curated links to news and other "interestingness." If I remember correctly it used to be forums on the left, links on the right. I would like to see a separate section for external links.

justinah says

How do you get rid of pictures? The pictures drive me nuts.

Just edit your profile:

http://patrick.net/includes/profile.php

It's the last checkbox.

Why is it when you click on comments for a thread, it dumps you towards the most recent posts by default? But not necessarily the most recent post. ie. if there is 100 comments, the first one I read under the OP is #68 and then the next 31comments

For awhile I would be so confused as to how the first person posting under the OP was quoting someone, when it seemed they were the first person to respond.

Imo it should be chronological one way or the other. Either the first response under the OP, or the most recent one,,,,,don't mean to sound whiny, just my .02

The discussions show the 40 most recent comments by default. I agonized about that, but it just made sense to have the most recent comment directly above the comment submission box. So everything reads top-down, starting with the Original Post, in chronological order.

You can go back in chunks of 40 comments with the "Previous comments" link.

Comments are all numbered and timestamped to give you a little more orientation.

It's just like Facebook really. You have the original post, then some skipped comments, then the most recent comments, then the comment submission box.

I just don't see the utility in having the middle of the thread being the first post you read after the OP. I don't use facebook, so I dunno

On that chart you posted of your comments traffic, it seems odd that your biggest trough was when TSHTF, is that just from the wordpress blog? Was it less because we had that other forum at the time?

True, it is slightly disorienting at first to see the first comment after the original post refer to some earlier comment which is not visible. I don't see a better solution though, since the most recent comments are the ones most people want to see.

errc says

On that chart you posted of your comments traffic, it seems odd that your biggest trough was when TSHTF, is that just from the wordpress blog? Was it less because we had that other forum at the time?

Yes, could be because we had that other forum taking traffic away from this one. I'm glad there's just one forum on Patrick.net now. Much cleaner and easier to explain.

CL says

And if RE isn't generating the hits it once was, broaden it to emphasize the economics.

That is a good point. But keep it as part of the Real Estate forum, the last thing we need is another fragmented forum.

Here's a graph of comments per day (and remember there about 20x as many views as comments):

Impressive increase in comments, but I just don't have the time nor desire to read them all. I think comment quality is much more important than comment quantity, and I think the quality is on a decline and has been for a while.

What about the number of unique users per day? I think that is more important than both the number of page views and the number of comments.

justme says

What about the number of unique users per day? I think that is more important than both the number of page views and the number of comments.

You can see that number in the top of every page. 19,015 unique users yesterday. I don't have a graph, but it doesn't change much, except that it's lower on the weekends. Must mean people read Patrick.net at work.

I agree w/ many comments that the quality of the links (the main reason for me to visit P.net, the forums are secondary) is not working for me either. I used to come every day for those curated links, and now it is more work to go through what's there than it is worth for the most part. I also understand the lots of work and not much reward part, as I have a similar situation. However, if enough visitors are like me, then that is bad news for this site's traffic. Also, something that is key for me as far as your site, is the trust that you have built over the years. The trust, comes for me, from the type of links you provide, and not so much the comments you post on the forums (which are also good in that regard). But since you are not providing the links any more, trust may be slowly eroding. Could you not possibly 'sell' your links to a news outlet of some sort? I mean you have the traffic, if you sold your links, the people that come here of that could get them from a source that can monetize them (e.g. via existing advertising)...and if they stuff whatever adverts on their pages (e.g. Realtor ads), that's their call, and does not compromise your trust. Dunno, it is a tough pickle, but for me the links were 'it', and 'it' is no longer here...

I get that Patrick is trying to offload some of the work onto us, so I've been voting for links and stories from sources I want to read. It seems to have been slightly improving over the last week as more vote. It does take me a bit more time, but I figure that's the time I'm saving Patrick.

Thanks!

Patrick, please return to the old site format. I echo the cries of distress from the OP. This site looks and feels like a toilet right now. There's a reason no one uses Digg anymore. QUALITY over quantity, please. And user-voting does not ensure quality.

How about a link on the bottom of the page, to return to the home screen?

dannybsmith says

QUALITY over quantity, please. And user-voting does not ensure quality.

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

How about a link on the bottom of the page, to return to the home screen?

Sure, no problem. Done.

dannybsmith says

QUALITY over quantity, please. And user-voting does not ensure quality.

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

How about a link on the bottom of the page, to return to the home screen?

Sure, no problem. Done.

But are you making (or expect to be able to make) a living on the forum??

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.

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.

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...

The discussions are thriving though! There are more daily comments on the discussions than ever before.

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.

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.

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.

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.

tts says

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...

Uh oh. That's a bug. Will fix.

OK, fixed. If you mean the bug whereby clicking "Comments: " would show you a list of all the comments you made.

As a web publisher of sorts, maybe this lecture inspires you for some ideas...

http://www.youtube.com/embed/R7uJFdeP4_M

Dsdf4 says

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.

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

if 1/2 pay the fee

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

then what is the harm in implementing the pay scheme

Because then I have to put in the time no matter how few users I get.

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.

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)

from my previous attempt

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...

I find it very addictive

Sounds like a hobby gone wrong....

Seriously, no one pays for anything. By far my biggest source of income has been donations.

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).

tts says

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...

Uh oh. That's a bug. Will fix.

OK its working now.

Can you put back the "trollishness" stat page too?

tts says

Can you put back the "trollishness" stat page too?

Trollishness is still where it ever was, on this page: /users.php

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.

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!

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?

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.

justme says

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.

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.

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...

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! :)

Dsdf4 says

thus specialized sites would be expected to eventually take over Craigslist,

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.