Surreal.
I drag my head out of a big SEO audit, throw a glance at Twitter and spot this:
Not completely numbed down by the heat (30 degrees Celsius outside, 250 thousand inside) I thought Todd Mintz must have done an op-ed on the hotly debated one week old decision by Sphinn to have its editors emphasize exceptional content by taking a hard look at voting patterns for crap.
But no.
They really want to stop the voting.
A Spectacularly Bad Idea
There are many things wrong with voting sites. Digg has bury brigades, a term befitting South American countries in the 80s; black-ops, nightly murders, slaughter. Sphinn has voting rings; about as exciting as an Ovaltine decoder ring.
It gets worse " apparently some people just vote vote vote and never even read the stories they vote on. People come to their wisdom of the crowds community news site to read the best of the best and whats voted right up there on page number one? Crap.
And thats just the tip of the iceberg.
Theres spam (Id have to repeat that word 490 times to give you a feel of just about how much spam there is). Oh, and a lot of the crap, voting and spam is all self serving; participants often dont act as United Nations blue helmets of content but want fame and fortune. Tsk tsk tsk. What is the world coming to.
So " wisdom of the crowd popularity contest sites have to come up with ways to make life bearable for their editors and the top content passable to its readers. Digg does this through God knows what kind of weird algorithms. Google does it by hand tweaking search results (oh wait, different discussion). And Sphinn does it by banning voting.
In Dutch wed say that youre taking the corner a bit too tight there, dude. Youre fixing the problems with voting by removing voting? Uh
Just Ditch Sphinn Instead
Look, I get it. Voting is down and the voting that does happen is gang voting.
Besides people share their stuff on Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader; youre just not relevant anymore. Fine.
Then stop. Go home. Thanks for the ride.
But dont take our voting from our community site:
- its not polite
- its not the right thing to do
- you were never meant to be an editorial site
Seriously, what place is there for you without voting, without the community angle? I sometimes have to filter out links on Twitter or Id be reading the best, most fascinating SEO posts all day. I follow a ton of SEO blogs on Google Reader/FeedDemon and have curators their sharing the best of the best.
And you expect me to go to Sphinn to see what a handful of editors (all respect there, all respect " seriously) have deemed to find good enough?
What do you think?
Are you going to use the new & improved Sphinn (now with cleaner content!) or will you get your best of the best fix somewhere else?
Will you miss Sphinn or was the site dead before it knew it itself?