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Inactive members
I have noticed that over the past week, approximately 20% of the members of Liberty.me have been inactive for over a month. Some are surely just busy, but do the others feel as if this is not the right place for them, or could there be another reason?
I am not diving in here as often as I’d like to. Part of the reason is that it’s still so new – there are understandable technical glitches that make it difficult to participate. It’s also remarkably underpopulated – the little blue bar in the corner tells me that there are 63 members online right now – it’s well under critical mass.
On every other forum I’ve been on, the active posters are far outnumbered by the lurkers – those who just watch quietly. I don’t expect that this forum will be different. That’s not any kind of problem at all – the only real challenge is to get enough active people to yammer often enough to achieve critical mass – where there’s more to react to happening often enough that one can spend an hour here without running out of things to look at and respond to.
I can’t say when Liberty.me will hit that critical mass – or even promise that it will. Life is full of uncertainty.
I’m sure that you are right, but I do have this mild obsession with finding out why things happen. I’ve been involved with forums that faded out over a few months, and some which became wildly successful, but none in between.
I find it a bit worrisome that the people who are admins of this site (some of whom, I’m certain are anarchists) are yet trying to control the experience of this site for the users – as shown here.
I’ve seen forums dwindle away to nothing because of well-intentioned efforts to restrain participants’ expression – both online and in Real Life ™ situations, such as what happened to Minicon – after the decision to reduce the number of attendees that weren’t fannish enough, they lost far more membership than they had intended, and struggled against community resentment for years. They’re still not back up to the level of attendance they were trying to get down to.
Quick data point – some forums become wildly successful, and then die anyway – e.g., Myspace.
Network effect? Maybe there just aren’t enough members, and such use patterns are common on various social networks. Slightly over 2000?
I’d have thought that charging a tarriff would keep out people who don’t want to engage, but maybe not.
Group activity seems odd to me also. I made several groups, joined some others. Many people join the groups, but then do nothing. The activism group has 0 discussions, 3 updates. Most of the groups would have no activity in the past week if joining didn’t count as activity. I guess the action is somewhere else.
It’s just been a matter not having the time for me. The time I do have has gone to Facebook simply because of the ongoing debates and relationships.
My FB time is getting cut more and more every day in favor of coming here, and that will continue as I keep forming relationships. I’d much rather spend my time here.
I am hoping the groups improve soon. Apparently the group function is still under the influence of a significant glitch. It is hard to find more than 10% of them at a given time.
I can see their point about a misc. category for discussion, but without one, more categories should be added. Most of my thoughts don’t fit well in the typical boxes, and I doubt that I am the only one.
I’d have thought that charging a tarriff would keep out people who don’t want to engage, but maybe not.
There has always been a wide variance between the number of people who are intensely interested, and the number of people who are interested *and* willing to actively engage. The lurkers always have outnumbered the yammerers, and I suspect that they always will.
I’m pretty sure it’s the sliders.
Personally, I don’t see a lot of interesting information. Then again I’ve kind of kicked the habit of arguing about politics. Become and AnCap and it becomes too easy. It’s like cheating in a video game, it’s fun for awhile, but then you realize there’s no challenge anymore. lol
I can’t download Liberty.U classes and can’t watch them at home because of a satellite connection. I already have over a hundred books on my to-read list and I’ve no interest in the library. There’s not a lot going on in the forums as noted. The articles take time to read, I’ve too much to read already.
I’ve had a website planned for awhile now on a totally different subject, but when I heard about Liberty.me I thought they had come up with the same ideas. I was super excited to see it happen and helped the crowd funding campaign. This site has got a ways to go to hit that level though, if ever. (I’m honestly not sure what direction it’s heading in.)
I don’t know, I keep going back and forth on it, personally I’m not getting much out of Liberty.me, I’ve got a few months to decide on sticking around, I might, we’ll see. =/
I actually think people are in social overload. The largest growing social platform now is instagram. It simple basic and is not convoluted. Largely free of argument and strife.
I am weighing value added currently for all these platforms. I am likely dumping some of them.
I believe that I will be doing the same thing soon. Too many forums, not enough time. I’ll probably stick with the best half dozen.
I am absolutely *livid*. I posted a status update that reflected my reservations about Liberty.me – and now I cannot post any status updates – I get “Are you sure you want to do this? Please try again”. I’ve mentioned it in the Liberty.me suggestion box ,but that’s a place you’ve got to look for – nobody’s likely to see it but me, and the other members who care about this place have a right to know what’s going on.
Ultimately, the success of liberty.me won’t depend on the forums and articles, it will depend on future features such as a marketplace and real-world liberty-enhancing projects carried out by liberty.me members. But in the meantime, it’s cool to be building the membership through discussions.
Like Ethan says, the sliders are a negative-value feature. For me, they break the “middle-click to open in a background tab” that I like to use for all my browsing. Sliders are for corporate-level “shiny” marketing.
The site speed also needs to be improved. There’s plenty of good research from Google and others showing a strong and direct correlation between web page performance and frequency of visits.
Meanwhile, I’m really enjoying the library. So many great books!
I think we’re on the same page Roger. Much of what exists here exists in other places. Lew Rockwell for high quality writing (not to mention, good authors want to keep their own sites), the Mises Institute for (higher quality) classes, and the entire internet for forums. I appreciate the bringing together of these things into one place, but for Liberty.me to be worth money, it needs more.
Of course, I’m saying that as someone who hasn’t put sleepless nights and a great amounts of investments into it.
If I give it a minute to sit back and think, it seems my greatest reservation with Liberty.me is that I’m not really feeling the community thing. You know what I’d like to see? A pushing for Meetups. Sure it’s up to the members, but if people like Jeffrey Tucker kind of “advertised” the idea of setting up Meetup Groups like Molyneux has done, it could mean the strong community people are looking for. People might even create an elusive “Lifelong Brotherhood.” 😉
Liberty is a massively “open to interpretation” subject and it’s very hard to create a site focused on such a broad idea. I could talk all day on what can be done with a “Liberty Social Network” and things that would attract people and help create a bond between them and the service, but as of now I see the site as a publishing platform (that doesn’t even have full WordPress hosting, and domain support, wutsup with that?) and a place for known authors to advertise with “classes” every night. (=/ Sorry.)
Dan, that sounds like a support problem, putting something like that in a suggestion box (and your comment) sounds like you’re jumping to conclusions. Support is super responsive.
Dan, we’re in the middle of overhauling a large portion of how our status updates are handled and what you experienced is a bug and one that I’ve gotten myself. It seems to be only happening in the sidebar activity feed and being able to post a status from their is brand new (and we’ve removed it from the live site to undergo more testing).
It was not an attempt at censorship, as you’ve suggested in other posts. We’re only concerned if a member begins causing problems for other members, in which case we speak with them directly to address the issue.
@ethanglover, Meetups are on the way. We’re in the planning stages now and hope to be rolling it out in the next few weeks. I welcome any feedback you may have as a Liberty.me founding member about to how to leverage the platform to build a stronger liberty community on- and off-line. ^^
@ethanglover – you’re absolutely right – that’s where I took it to, first. Unfortunately, the Suggestion Box is set up to fly under the radar of most users – it doesn’t show up in anyone’s activity feed, and I wanted the other members to be aware of it. My apologies to all for side-tracking the conversation here – it won’t happen again.
Constructive criticism. Or why, as much as I love this site, feel pressure to not use it:
Biggest one is that my main interest is philosophy and for me, philosophy is about dialog, not about static content. This means I feel the best content will be in high level discussion, not in articles. That said, articles can provide the ideal springboard to dialog. Now, how does Lme address discussions:
1) they have editable discussions which have several very annoying flaws and one huge flaw that is nearly a deal breaker for me: they are only viewable by the Lme community. This means that, in effect, my most essential contribution in content is behind a pay wall. It is obvious that all content generators want the widest possible audience. When I post and engage in dialog on YouTube I get this value, and Lme it is limited to members, which means the impact is both limited and expensive. For example, I cannot link my discussions to friends unless they are members. I agree that allowing the public the right to comment is dangerous and likely a bad idea, but the ability to view the discussions is something that is not allowed bugs me for every single word I write in the discussions area. As for “privacy concerns” it should be obvious that considering the low cost of joining, there is no real privacy. Use encrypted email if privacy is important, that is reality. Also, there could be a discussion section that was marked as unviewable, so folks could post in their if they want an illusion of privacy, or don’t want web-spiders easily collecting such content. Lme admins have informed me that these discussions are never planned to be opened and will always be pay walled from the public.
2) For articles, the fact that these comments are not editable is so annoying that I can hardly find words. Lme admins have informed me that this may be fixed, which is nice. That said, the commenting options are annoying for articles also… it seems that three levels deep is all that comments can go (not that indentation of this sort is an important feature as YouTube proves). So, once the editing is fixed (if and when) keeping my comments to articles may be a solution for me. The bigger problem with articles is the one-way accountability of censorship. If I understand correctly, the article writer can “disappear” anything with no mark to indicate they have done so. On the other hand, the poster has their member name on their post so has full accountability. I don’t have a problem with censorship, but I have a problem with the idea of putting hours into constructive dialog that can be disappeared both at whim and without leaving a trace of this potentially “very bad behavior” (assuming the deletion occurred for on-topic posts that were deleted due to disagreement, etc.)
In sum, the persistent dialog options on Lme consist of either uneditable and unaccountably censorable dialog, or dialog behind a pay wall. This can’t be very appealing for those who feel discussion is valuable and who want to reach any sizable audience.
I also join in the criticism of the sliders… They have pros and cons, but I’d much prefer a list with a small graphic followed by article name, appreciate count, and last updated by who. At the very least, clicking on “Articles” should present a list view.
Besides this, great site! YouTube is still much better for my purposes, but the added content of Libraries and Classes are pretty darn cool and valuable.
In fairness, pretty much all of the library content is available for nothing elsewhere, and the classes are posted to YouTube the next day. The main role of article-publishing seems to be to get chosen for Facebook shares. To top it all off, the blogging engine is WordPress (available free most other places). In other words, this site is dependent on the mainstream (and free) social networking sites. I’m struggling to understand the ethos frankly. Seems very much the case that members pay negative royalties for the chance of nice things being said about them by people who don’t really think much of their work in any case. Add to that the fact most of the ‘favoured’ content is chosen by willingness to pay (crowdfunders and so on: mostly not so much rich as high-consumption, probably public sector lol) rather than actual love of liberty and it’s a recipe for disaster.
What’s so bad about advertising, from a capitalist standpoint? Except of course 99% of members aren’t actually capitalists. Apologies to those who are (and I’ve enjoyed speaking to a lot of good people), but the ‘progressive’, inequality-fearing, boss-hating, exploitation-believing pinkoes are in a vast majority.
If you’re going to make a social network for a sub-group of society, it’s probably a good idea to not fill it with people who will totally rile potential recruits.
What worries me most though is that the whole endeavour is just one big red light to the pigs, like having a sign on your face that says “looking for libertarians? over here!”
Can’t shake off the feeling that it’s all biased in favour of early adopters, just like Bitcoin, and that the philosophical dimension is *highly* negotiable.
Good luck to the rest of you, but I’m out as soon as the staff will accept my resignation. Tip to the dev team: when a member says “yes I am sure thankyou”, it’s a good idea to deactivate their account there and then.
Have fun adopting every policy of the modern liberals! I think the “top five left-wing pop songs” article was the final straw, though ‘pizzatarianism’ was hard to swallow even before joining. It’s been instructive though: sick as it may sound, liberty’s best kept theoretical, because the second we do finally get a free society, these ****s will just hijack it and reintroduce tax&’help’ in any case.
@konberner I would definitely agree that the paywall has become a major limiting factor, and while there are good arguments laying around, the discussions seem to be pretty boring, dare I say it an echo chamber. (Maybe? Almost… probably.)
I can’t agree with point two though. One, you can actually open your blog to public comments. I was told I’m not supposed to do that and had the setting reset, but I just changed it back. (My site! Hands off!) Just go to “Advanced Mode” on your site and go to Settings, then Discussion and you can change up lots of stuff. (Including how deep nested comments go, or because WP nested comments suck, you can just turn them off.)
Moderation on blogs though is super important to have. I ran my own site hosted elsewhere for awhile and did responses every now and then which often attracted communists. Honest truth, I have never met a communist that didn’t have the most vulgar and vile personality. It’s unbelievable how those people are willing to act under pressure. Point is, after deleting a few bad comments, only then did the site start to attract honest people who were just looking to ask questions about the philosophy, it changed the whole direction of the site for the better. The moderation created a safe and friendly zone and I (as my own moderator) gained a reputation for not putting up with bullshit. Being able to delete comments on your own content is immensely important for creating a positive community. Otherwise, you’re just opening things up to what is now seen on Facebook as “wall spam”. Meaningless drivel that buries real conversation.
@well You’re right, the library isn’t exactly impressive because most of it comes from the Mises institute, author websites, creative commons or things like that. (I’d wager that the percentage of exclusives is practically 0%.) Although you’d have to show me where Liberty.U classes are coming out on YouTube, I’m pretty sure they don’t.
As for the rest of what you said, I can only assume you’re joking.
