Documenting Success

Community tips from a person behind MetaFilter
Published on May 24th, 2007

I’ve been looking for articles and blog posts with helpful tips on how to build a community, for my fledgling site Octop.us and I’ve stumbled onto this great article by Matt Haughey, a man behind MetaFilter.com.

In the article “Some Community tips for 2007″ Matt shares some of the things that helped him turn MetaFilter into what it is now. I gotta say, some of those gave me some pretty interesting ideas for what to do with my website, and I can’t wait to start implementing them. Here’s my favorite one:

If I had to give a reason why most newspaper blogs are filled with cranky screeds posted anonymously, I’d have to say having a generic blank comment form is key. Most every community that I contribute to offers a comprehensive user profile/history page, letting members customize to their hearts content and allow their profile to reflect their personality. When I think of mainstream news, TV, and newspaper sites trying to solicit comments from readers, I’ve yet to find something close to even a basic community site. The New York Times requires me to register to read most stories, but their blog system gives me a blank generic comment form when I want to comment on a blog post.

I’d love to see a large paper like the NYT implement a real community system. Based on my existing NYT login, I’d love if I had a profile page on their site, tied to any comment I left on a blog or any article I wrote for the paper (I’m sure I’m in the minority here, but there are writers for the NYT that would also be active on the site). Let me list my blog URL and track any posts I make about NYT articles on my profile page (the NYT already has a “most blogged” feature on their site). Feel free to show me ads that would actually make sense (example: I don’t live in NYC, but I see NYC ads on the site — you might want to pitch me home delivery or general ads aimed at out-of-towners) based on my profile.

If you gave readers a real profile page on a real community system at a newspaper site, I suspect the quality of contributions would go way up. Of course, you’d still get trolls and griefers trying to game the system, but the remainder of readers would post more often and post better things. Heck, you could even let readers connect to their friends that also read the site and offer tools useful to members (like “your friends liked the following articles”) as well as gain additional traffic from repeat member visits.

This is so true. All of the community websites I like give their users something to customize, their own piece of land on their site, rewards for participation and a sense of achievement (MySpace takes it to the extreme by running a “who can create an uglier layout” competition, but that’s a different story.

I am definitely going to implement that on Octop.us. It’s going to be awesome!