June 17, 2013
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Open Letter to the Xanga Team
*** I’m Calling on the “Xanga Community” to Rec this if you agree ***
Dear Xanga Team
I want to start by saying I don’t mean to be seen as a Negative Nancy or pessimist, but we are at the two week mark, 1/3 third of the way done towards the deadline and there are some things that must be addressed now while there’s still time if your intent is to really save Xanga.
1) How is that it’s been over two weeks since your initial announcement of Xanga’s need of $60K by July 15 to keep it alive and fund the upgrade to 2.0, and there have been ZERO updates or live Q & A sessions from any member of Xanga Corp? @edlives has done an outstanding job of informing people to the best of his ability and seeking to keep enthusiasm and morale high, but as he has stated on more than one occasion, he is only a volunteer and doesn’t work for Xanga.
Where is the direct voice of Xanga? This is a company in crisis and at least one of you need to be stepping up and updating the community on a regular basis from the time you made the first announcement until the actual deadline of July 15.
If you are working hard behind the scenes, you need to keep us informed directly- otherwise it looks like you just dropped a bomb in the lap of the Xanga community and are expecting them to do all the work with no help from you.
Some immediate questions about the fundraiser come to mind:
A) Are you also actively seeking to get funds to meet the pledge amount, or is this entirely on the backs of the Xanga community?
B) We were told we’d see some beta prototypes of 2.0, what is the status of that?
2) There are a lot of angry people right now because they keep seeing the term “Community is important” at Xanga, but your actions to date say otherwise.
If you really respect and appreciate the community, why weren’t we informed of the financial problems you were having before it became such a critical issue? From the response of the community, it’s clear that a lot of folks are ready and willing to help as they are able – you could have taken advantage of that with relaying the problem to us for a brainstorming session.
If you had done that you would see why so many are up in arms against ending the free blog model and doubling the rate for premium. These actions alone have put the continuation plan in serious jeopardy.
Right now the pledge drive has about 260 backers, with several purchasing multiple year memberships. When you compare that against the tens of thousands of Xangan’s currently using your services, that’s just a tiny fraction of the current community. The glaring reality of that number begs the question- is that small fraction of total users the face of the “new” Xanga community?
What’s going to draw people in to a new Xanga with such a small amount of people, and on top of that pay $48/year? Even worse, your decision has already driven away many of your current users who stayed with you through the years. I see blog after of blog of people saying their final goodbyes and giving out their new blogging location. What is your answer to this growing problem that only gets worse by the day? What good is an upgraded site if the majority of folks, the bulk of the community, are gone?
Adding to the problem, you’ll be erasing the blogs of non paying/non premium members, so that those who have left really have no reason to consider returning.
Why not at a minimum transfer over all the users that qualified as “True”. Doesn’t that user loyalty badge count for anything? If it’s a matter of not wanting to transfer over splogging/spamming sites to save space, you can use the “True” gauge to determine actual users from spammers- 60% “True” or more should easily pass the test as an adequate filter.
3) Why has there not been a direct email to all Xanga members regarding the current situation? There are still active Xangans who don’t visit the front page who don’t realize the potential last days of operation….not to mention the less active users. This should have been done one the 1st day of the announcement, or shortly thereafter. That this has not taken place two weeks later and counting makes no sense. It doesn’t seem as if you are serious about getting funds if you aren’t reaching out to all your members.
Anyone who is currently away from Xanga is going to have a rude awakening if they don’t return until after the July 15 deadline.If you truly think the community is important, you need to start showing it by having an actual employee for the company communicate DIRECTLY to us and field questions. @edlives should NOT be the main voice when he is just a volunteer and not part of Xanga management.
How would you feel about a company that said they were on the ropes, requested funds from its members, but kept to themselves and the biggest presence stepping in to try and help was a volunteer not directly employed by the company?
Comments (70)
You should have made this a Monday post. Friday-Sunday is traditionally dead time on Xanga.
Xanga 2 has always been more of a suggestion than something they were actually going to do. There’s no law forcing them to do anything, and from the looks of it, they didn’t really have any intention to. Their fundraiser campaign and overall game plan is messy at best and non-existant at worst.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for this. I’m glad edlives is willing to do all he’s doing, but he should not need to be the mouthpiece right now. I know he’s tried to address some of these questions, but his answers haven’t always been satisfactory. I know he said that the xanga team has known about Impending Doomsday for a long time and if I remember his post correctly, this ‘plan’ of theirs was a result of a lot of strategizing behind the scenes and they implemented it with six weeks to go in order to have ‘plenty of time’ to raise the money. Which is frankly a horrible answer on their part because a) their strategy sucks, b) they should have said something MONTHS ago and c) six weeks is in NO WAY plenty of time or enough notice. They keep saying an update is ‘coming soon’ but they’ve been saying that for days/weeks and NOTHING has been forthcoming. Really? No one can take 10 minutes out of the day and post ONE official update on the xanga team page saying this is where we’re at, or even ‘thanks for throwing all this money at us’? Even if I had the money to donate, I wouldn’t give them a red cent, the way they’ve handled (and fucked up) this whole situation.
I like the idea of transferring all True blogs and sending direct e-mails out to all the xanga accounts.
@coolmonkey - I figured the weekend would give folks more browsing free time. It will still catch Monday’s traffic too without aging too much. It seems weird that they say they are all about community, but then do what they want for the most part and keep everyone pretty much in the dark.
@carolinavenger - That’s what I don’t get as well- with all this “planning/strategizing”, we the community should have been let in much earlier than a 6 week doomsday countdown. And the fact that Ed has to go and pass our questions to the Xanga Team instead of them appearing directly certainly doesn’t foster community teamwork when they keep themselves so separated from us, but still require us to make the pledge drive a success. More timely and direct interaction with the whole community should have been part of their strategy.
@randaness - And that’s just an off the cuff idea I had- think of all the great solutions the community could have come up with if they asked for our help and worked with us before this stage. I’m sure we could have come up with a far less toxic solution.
#3 is the one I’ve been wondering about myself. I would also really like to hear from the team more frequently.
Very well put and I agree 100%. The lack of communication from Xanga in this situation is astounding. They’ve never been good at communicating, but this is beyond ridiculous. I have to seriously question their real intentions, because if they’re going to do a fundraiser why on earth wouldn’t they send a notice to every single member?!? I can’t help but think they never had any real intention to save Xanga, they just wanted to make it look like they tried, in which case they failed miserably because the lack of communication shows they’re not trying at all.
You have spoken for all of us. Thank you. I hope we hear from the Xanga team soon.
Hi there,
I’d just like to say that I totally agree with you! I was really shocked when I first found out that Xanga might shut down in about a month’s time and really, if it weren’t for a friend’s post on facebook I would not have come to realize that I might need to download all my previous posts before the dooms day.
I first started joining xanga when I was 13 and to date, that’s 10 years and counting. At one point I thought this would be my online journal for life and so I purchased the life time premium membership…
But it truly angers me that Xanga never even properly notified us let alone acknowledge all of us who’ve paid for the site and who’ve been a loyal user all these years. I don’t blog as often now as I used to but really – I’d like to keep my xanga!
Anyways thanks again for this post!
Dear Soul,
I don’t recall your username, so we possibly have never met. I came over here on a rec. And I recced the entry right away, after having only read a couple of paragraphs.The lack of response coming from Xanga isn’t anything new, of course, but it pains me to find so many people who rely on this service who will lose whatever community they found here, cause they can’t afford to pay nearly 50 bucks a month.I’ve seen more than my share of online communities morph and change drastically when switching to fully paid models. Sometimes the “backbone” of an online community is made up of people who simply can’t afford other social outlets. Taking another one away never helps.Your points are well taken and pertinent. And need to be stated, More than once!Joel @edlives has been a fantastic cheerleader and a wonderful source of information. He’s been a longtime Xanga supporter, and is possibly right now the only source of actual information we have (through his association with Xanga as editor of the Autistable site. (I probably spelled that wrong.)Way to go.(Come to think of it I HAVE worked for companies back when I was in retail management who kept their employees in the dark as long as possible. I’ll never forget the big company meeting we had for Christmas 1983 (or thereabouts) when I worked in middle management at Gemco stores out here in Southern California. We were given all kinds of pep talks about moving merchandise. Sure they wanted to clear the shelves. The company went out of business the following spring. )Michael F. Nyiri, poet, philosopher, fool
Thank you for posting this. It’s needed. I feel that Xanga as a company overall has been less than respectful or satisfactory in handling this situation. My biggest fear is really, that should they reach their $60,000 goal it will be on the backs of a small group of customers. All of their former free users will be driven away, and I think a majority of their True supporters will be driven away. What will be left after that? Since I don’t have actual numbers I can only surmise that it will be a small group of paid supporters willing to also front additional money after the upgrade — and that amount will be shockingly low. I can’t think of any other wildly popular pay-to-blog (without almost full control to the user) on the market that they will be competing with. It will have no appeal to new bloggers or their former customers. They will not have enough money coming in, site traffic, interest, and customers to sustain themselves over the long term. And this means that within a few months to a year the real bad stuff will occur, and alot of really good well-meaning people will be angry. We were never told what was going on, and when we were it was almost too late. The lack of silence is really shameful and doesn’t help to inspire confidence in this brand. Sadly, I never had enough cash to give them money. If I had the cash I most likely would not do so (bills and real life.. you know?). The features offered to paid users never seemed useful to me personally. And no I will not donate either — not after this behaviour.
We all started out as free bloggers. I hope they keep that in mind. This site would not be here if it weren’t for their free userbase.
What do you suppose would have happened if Xanga had told us there were financial issues and the site might shut down in a year (or even six months)? My guess is that people would have moved away in about the same numbers as they are now, and that the “woe is me” attitude you are expressing would have been just as strong. If the few Xanga corporate people left are truly doing what they can to save the site, 6 weeks should be plenty of time to raise $60,000, and allowing @edlives to provide information and to relay questions and answers is truly appropriate.
*snap snap* Well said.
I do hope Xanga Team responds to this. Not that I think they will, but because these are questions that actually need answers.
I
need answers.
I really appreciate the efforts that @edlives has made to keep us informed and updated. But I agree that it doesn’t make up for the lack of communication from the Xanga Team themselves. Keeping Xanga alive isn’t just the responsibility of the community – the company itself is responsible as well.
@slmret - Six weeks would be enough time to raise the money IF the Xanga team had bothered to send out a message directly to every user of Xanga – I’ve seen far too many people who didn’t hear about this until yesterday or today because the Xanga team made one post on their blog (a blog many people don’t even realize exists) and that’s it. How many out there still haven’t heard about this? If they want people to donate, they have to make people aware of the fundraiser in the first place. Xanga supposedly has *millions* of users, if 60,000 users donated $1 Xanga would be saved. Done that way it would have taken 3 days tops to meet the goal, but Xanga didn’t notify everyone and they overpriced the subscriptions – $48 may not seem like a lot of money to you, but I’d be willing to bet that many Xanga users don’t have an extra $48 just lying around to blow in a 6 week period for a piece of virtual reality that may or may not stick around. Given more notice people could have budgeted $10 or $15 over a few months to purchase a $48 subscription before the deadline. Furthermore, I’ve never in my life seen a fundraiser that tells you the goal, the deadline, the way to donate and then never updates – in fact, most beg every single day for more donations, but we’ve heard nothing else from Xanga.
“Anyone who is currently away from Xanga is going to have a rude awakening if they don’t return until after the July 15 deadline.”
TOTALLY WHAT I WAS THINKING! If you’ve never sent out that message.. I would have never known xanga was closing down! So glad I got the chance to download all of my old entries. *whew*
I agree, love the post. well done!
I share your concerns as well.
Yeah.. their communication was very bad on my end. I have no idea where everyone heard of all this, but I only became aware of it from other bloggers saying it on their blog. And after reading the first one, I thought it was a joke. I still haven’t gotten any messages, or read any posts informing me of the situation. If not for me seeing some other people’s reactions to it, I would have never known it was happening… I don’t have friends or really associate with the community, my Xanga is more of a personal memory log/diary… I would never have known if I didn’t go to the homepages and see other people talking about it.
=/
xX Ame ~*~ Hana Xx
well stated
I still have not even been notified if my blog has been archived or not and I requested them to be two weeks ago! Help!
Such a good point about the emails. I remember a few years back, my friends would get emails from Xanga when they had been inactive for a while. This seems like the type of occasion to warrant an email.
Excellent points made.
Who cares, it’s just going to WordPress anyway… so why not just WordPress?
(Your points are all valid and make sense, but it’s been clear for months that Xanga as an entity gave up caring about her people. Why bother with it now?)
Exactly
i’m not sure a direct communication wouldn’t feel like a chainletter damning us for if we didn’t immediately pay up.
I totally hear all the frustration here, and I think much of it is justified. I think the reason people feel so hurt is that they care about Xanga so much, and want to feel treated with the same kind of care and respect. I think the Xanga team are probably aware of their mistakes and will try to address some of them. In the mean time, yes, they’re maybe not handling it super well – but why don’t we give them the benefit of the doubt for now, and help chip in the funds ($1 at a time, if necessary) to help keep this thing alive? People continuing to read and comment about all this reinforces, to me, how much people care about this service, and are interested in seeing how this all pans out. I hope that interest continues to translate into dollars.
110% with you here. It doesn’t make sense.
@FalconBridge - I think we’d all feel better if they were more proactive in reaching out to us.
@Melissa___Dawn - When facing such a crisis, communicating to ease tension or allay fears would be natural. usually when companies are reluctant to communicate, that’s usually a predictor of more bad news to follow.
@ZSA_MD - Thanks- it needed to be said and they needed to be made aware that of what the community was thinking. Hopefully, they will realize these concerns are shared by many and be motivated to respond directly.
@Kathy82tse - Yeah, if just a fraction of all past former users just pledged a minimal amount, that could be a source of a huge chunk of pledge funds. The fact you weren’t notified during such a crisis is mystifying.
@baldmike2004 - I agree that their slow responses are nothing new, but that’s also been an underlying problem. You’d think that with a end of world countdown in effect, they’d be more “motivated” to respond to customer concerns/questions. =) As you’ve experienced- company reticence during a crisis usually begets more bad news ahead.
I posted a Save Xanga image icon on my site that is hyperlinked to the Xanga Relaunch Donation page. You can see it @ http://kwantifiable.xanga.com/
Feel free to copy the image icon and upload it to your site and then hyperlink it to: https://xanga.crowdhoster.com/relaunch-xanga
@Cagey - Thanks. I fear in their zeal to balance the budget, they are setting up drastic changes that will end the community as we know it regardless of the outcome. There really is no true “community” to speak of if the post July 15th landscape consists of 300 -500 people out of the multitude of current users. And not communicating with us directly only raises those concerns.
@slmret - Your positive attitude has been great, and actually shows what “might” have been if they approached us earlier. If you’re willing to support them after such short notice and drastic measures, think of how much more effective that help could have been we were given more time to respond and act. There was someone who even offered possible venture capital like financial assistance through his connections if they had more time. During a crisis, it is natural for a company to step up and talk to their constituents. It’s unheard of that they pass info to a “volunteer” to make that person the “voice” of the company when he isn’t even an employee, let alone management. It’s definitely not a good look.
@esprit1240 - @emily_shannon - Thanks.. I hope they will listen and respond.
@firetyger - Yes, if we are all truly in this together, we need to included in the regular updates as partners rather than children being passed info via a surrogate from “The Parents”….especially if we’ve been handed the responsibility of having to raise funds.
You hit all the nails on all the heads!!!
@urbanspringlove - They are also ignoring a huge potential source of pledge revenue by no going to all their members. there are more “former” active members than current ones these days.
@WaltDisneyWorld - @TexasTidbits - @moniet - Thanks!
@ElusiveWords - Hopefully they’ll take notice and respond if they see so many feel the same way.
@Broken_Black_Moon - @Tallman - @bittersweetromantic - I find all together baffling why they didn’t do a global email about this at the beginning. A “going out of business” crisis would certainly justify it.
@Dame_Delirium - It likely won’t make a difference, bu I felt it needed to said and focused on so they couldn’t say they didn’t know how we felt. Sometimes management gets too insulated and isolated from their base. I just feel sorry for the folks who haven’t gotten the “countdown memo” and stand to lose all their blogs.
this may be your most popular post to date.
Evidently they have no idea how to raise funds. Having once been a missionary, and having many friends now engaged in missions or NGOs, I know Xanga has done a very poor job of handling things. I still hope they don’t go under.
Well said. Until Someone who is a direct / and accountable Representative of xanga speaks, we really have nothing. Which has been the attitude of Xanga Team about everything since I’ve been on xanga beginning in 2003, paying beginning in 2004. Xanga are you listening? Xanga do you care?
what if its all just a hoax to get more money…
Yes, why did we not get notified that there is a deadline of July 15?! I am very upset at this!
Omg this is exactly what I’ve been thinking!! Obviously they’ve been having troubles for a while now, for months they’ve had issues with stability and slow loading. I want to hear more from Xanga. I want them to be telling us what they’re doing behind the scenes. You seriously have to look to even find their blog about the situation in the first place. They shouldn’t be leaving it up to us!
If Xanga feels like this is a lost cause they need to just let us know. Obviously they do or they’d be shoving this fundraiser down our throats like PBS does.
Xanga Community = US.
Why not create our own xanga on wordpress?
Obviously the linking of pages is missing right.
What ever happened to web/blogrings? Its essentially what Xanga Groups is.
There’s also RSS feeds to recreate something like the top blog.
Wish I paid attention in the computer programming class, I cant imagine it being too hard to program something that all links us together.
Good post. Reading this and the comments gave me some thoughts which I just posted here. Link
@SoullFire - Their goal is to pocket the 60k say oops we’re sorry and let everything go down in flames.
Completely agree
good post.
I’ve more or less made up my mind on not moving to Xanga 2.0, but IF I should consider it, I’d like to see where things are going. I’d like to have a concept of what the new Xanga will be like NOW, and not hear the promise that it “will listen to its users”, or that it “is similar to how it already is”.
That’s all I’ve heard so far. Livejournal is also “similar” to Xanga, but Xanga has certain feautures I prefer. Also, the community obviously doesn’t have homogenous preferences.
I like the idea with the True thing, because I always wondered what the use of this badge even is.
@coolmonkey - You’ve just said exactly what I was thinking. It’s as though the Xanga “Team” thought the pledge was doomed from the get-go. I contemplated my ability to pledge, not that I have the money, but I would have if there was updates on what was stated in the first post about the potential closure, transfer, pledge, and saving Xanga. Not having a lot of money to pay for something I can, essentially, find elsewhere; I wanted to get a taste of what it was I was signing up for, Prototypes would have done that for me. Apparently, waiting for something promised is the passive way and here with the Xanga team and its ‘community’, users need to be aggressive to see results.
@randaness - Couldn’t agree more. The ‘true’ transfer is a great idea, after all, those are the users…the community within Xanga that could potentially save it from extinction. Why not transfer the ‘true’ and ‘premium’ members and give them each a trial period? A taste of what to expect on the greener side.
@edlives has done such a wonderful job. If it wasn’t for his efforts, i’d probably have bailed a week ago.
- Great Post!
It’s kind of sad the time I feel like I should return to Xanga this is going on. I finally snapped with Facebook and I’m tired of encouraging socially ineptness through that voyeuristic claim of an excuse for a “social networking” site. I really hope you do straighten this out because I have no other home to go to start blogging again.
@coolmonkey - 73 recs by seven a.m. Monday morning.
Perhaps the highest rec count of any post ever. Definitely the most I’ve ever seen by a margin of fifty+
…you were saying?
Commenting because in the event that the Xanga Team does stumble upon this blog, I want them to know that you’re not just speaking for yourself here, you’re speaking for many, many users who are VERY dissatisfied with the way this entire situation has been handled.
I, for one, will not be offering up a dime of my money to the leadership that has let Xanga circle the drain for years without doing a thing about it, and has now been absolutely silent after informing us that we need to raise $60k to keep the site alive. I have a free blog on Blogger and Tumblr, and I am completely satisfied with that if Xanga goes under. I’m certainly not going to pay to use a service that is free elsewhere under a team that has really shown very little respect for their community – your suggestion of transferring “True” blogs is a good example. Why would that not be automatic? Why would you not think to reward the members who have proven their loyalty over the years instead of just the ones who have paid you? What about the ones who paid for a “lifetime” membership that was supposed to be, you know, forever, who you’re now asking to dip into their pockets twice more? And to give so little notice, and not even do inactive members the courtesy of an email to inform them that their blog is going to be deleted if they don’t back it up? This entire situation has shown that the Xanga Team has very little consideration for its members, except the few that it is currently using as puppets to push the benefits of the “upgrade” on the community to inspire donations.
WE are the Xanga community, not the Xanga Team. The community will be wherever we decide to go, and from what I can see, that’s not somewhere where we have to pay to blog.
All of these concerns are my concerns as well, which is why I started my talk radio show series in the first place to see how others felt about these issues. I sure hope we get a response soon.
Anyone else find it strange how this post was the top blog by a mile yesterday, and now it vanished from the charts?
These are some hard-hitting questions, SoulFire. Here’s hoping at least one staff member of Xanga takes the time to answer them.
@Tallman - In regards to archiving, if you’ve already requested the archive to be done – then you will need to wait a bit – a lot of people across the network have been archiving their data – so they may be backlogged. If the files are present when you visit the link again – you should be able to download it from that point.
@carolinavenger - @baldmike2004 - @slmret - @firetyger - Thank you for your encouraging words. Much appreciated.
@SoullFire - You bring some good insights to the table. Thanks for sharing this open letter. All aspects of what is going on needs to be openly discussed. We may agree and/or disagree on specific issues, but we’re all in this together and we all must be heard.
#WeAreXanga
@coolmonkey - Posts only stay on Top Blogs for 24 hours.
I recommended both posts lol
@coolmonkey - Yes. Joel keeps telling me “it’s the algorithm”. Really? Is that why the post Dan has been timestamping that had fewer views/recs/comments and was also originally posted yesterday is the top blog? And why day-old posts with FAR less traffic are also gracing the Top 20? It’s the algorithm, it’s the algorithm…
right on, that’s why I’ve already bailed on Xanga…it seems futile to hold out hope
@coolmonkey - it went off top blogs exactly 24 hours after it was posted. That is how it always works.
Absolutely agree! Total lack of a business plan from the Xanga side.
@starmanjones - I’d rather get at least some type of communication rather than dead silence, and it looks like we got an update!
@vickyvix - The main purpose of this wasn’t to condemn, but to raise awareness to them that we have real concerns that they may not be aware of. Management tends to be insulated and the “message up” tends to be filtered….like the old joke that the workerbees said a corporate idea was “crap”..and as it worked up the chain of command it changed to “strong”, “enriching”, “fruitful”, and so on…haha. So sometimes a direct message is best. It’s much better to raise concerns now than to be silent and increase the risk of failure if they are justified. Keeping us all in the loop would be a BIG help.
@XxrockxXxgirlxX - Looks like we finally got an update!
@TrainTrack - Just summing up what so many were thinking and commenting on.
@ata_grandma - I agree. Not tapping their entire member base with a global message is a head scratcher.
@SoullFire - yes, we did!
@Blue_Moon1 - Looks like they are listening since we finally got an update! Hopefully the start of many…
@LauraDeLuna - I hope not.
@xjusme - No global notification makes no sense….
@x_tinydreams_x - Looks like we finally got an update..at last!
@VNlilMAN - There’s definitely a need out there for a good social blogging site if Xanga fails.
@musterion99 - @Manbeast - @TheGhioniFiles - Thanks!
@MelancholyxBallad - Haha,..I hope not!
@under_the_carpet - I’m happy to see we finally got another update. Hopefully they will fill us in on the missing details.
@KageOokami - That makes two of us – I’d hate to leave Xanga.
@Lost_In_Reverie - These changes are pretty dramatic to go from a “free” site when you pay for extras, to a pay only blog with double the premium rate. That threatens to drastically change the community and with that, the reason for using xanga in the first place. You are absolutely correct – we are the community and Xanga’s fate ultimately lies with us.
@Roadlesstaken - I’m happy to see we finally got a response! Hopefully the start of more frequent updates and answering of questions. John should have a “stand in” though since an over two week black out during a crisis isn’t good business.
@dw817 - Looks like we got a new update today! Hopefully the start of more frequent info and question answering.
@edlives - Thank you for your volunteer services. Being the “defacto” face of Xanga, you’ve had to deal with quite a bit, including all the firebombs tossed your way, haha. You’ve maintained a cool demeanor and pleasant disposition throughout it all. Well done. I truly hope they have a good plan for community retention as a whole as that is what concerns me the most.
@jennylovve - No harm in doing that, haha. I’m sure people can relate to sentiments in both letters.
@ScorpioInBlack - It looks cloudy for sure, but I’m still optimistic on some level.
@beowulf222 - Lots of questions about the plan indeed. At least now we have a new update..hopefully the start of many!
@coolmonkey - @musterion99 - @Lost_In_Reverie - @TheTheologiansCafe -
I did some analysis and observing and it’s clear that the notion of “Blogs staying on Top Blogs for 24 hours” works better for “some” than for others.
I posted my blog Sunday at 7am PST- it didn’t start hitting the Top Blog list until about 2 hours later. However, my blog was gone this morning when I first checked on it at 6am PST – so not even 24 hours elapsed from the initial post before it went off the list.
Now Theo posted his blog around 7pm Sunday PST and was shortly on the Top Blogs list after that. Theo’s blog wasn’t removed until well after 7pm PST today.
So there may be a “24 hour Algorithm”, but I’m sure there’s also the “Bums Rush” toggle to hasten the departure of less favorable Top Blogs.
@SoullFire - I think the initial problem, funding for new hosting, is the easiest problem to solve. 60k isn’t a lot of money. To me, Xanga “died” based on the lack of any plan. And there still is no plan. Asking people to pay for blogging when other platforms have this for free? Highly doubt. By introducing a pay-wall, you keep new people out and some “oldies” will stay.
@beowulf222 - Community retention in the face of a rather pricey (compared to “free”) paywall is going to be their biggest challenge.
This had happened to the many blog/journal sites I used to know … they are slowly running cold and the responsible admins does not informing the people … *sigh*
@SoullFire - I was going to say this same thing. I took a screenshot of the front page last night with Dan’s post still at Number One when I got home from work – sometime after 11pm, and definitely more than 24 hours since posting. But I must have been mistaken, because there’s no way the algorithm could show bias like that.
Well written!