Palace revolts at Flickr, Digg and JPG Magazine
May 17, 2007 by steve
Filed under Entrepreneurship, Failure
As few weeks ago, I guest blogged on Technosailor and discussed my thoughts on what Digg needed to do in order to survive or it would be dead by 2008.
Recently the HD-DVD debacle almost caused a nuclear meltdown on Digg because they decided to take down the post because it they got a warning letter. Not exactly a cease and desist, but that was coming.
For all that Digg has done, its community needs to understand that it is an open community but not one that supports piracy or it will degrade and no one will come there and worse, it will get shut down.
However, the down side is when the outcome is that we believe to be for the greater good but it is not and hiding behind the guise of “free speech” or “censorship” when there are clear violations of copyright is not the way to go.
Other recent examples are JPG Magazine and Flickr. Eric Eggertson at Common Sense PR covered it very well at this post and to quote him:
“This newfound sense of power by contributors to group-powered sites is not going away soon. Maintaining a good relationship between the company providing the space for people to play in, and the players, calls for a lot of open communication, including listening and taking part in discussions about the terms of service, the rights and obligations of both users and site owners.”
My take on the startup/entrepreneur angle is that we are truly seeing the wisdom and the power of crowds at work in real time.
These “palace revolts” seem to be shifting from the management and employee revolts to user revolts.
Should be interesting to watch how the rest of these sites react and can survive in the future.
Steve: Customer loyalty is increasingly fickle, and we’re seeing that in online communities, too.
While the loyalty to sites like Flickr and Digg seem very strong, the site admins shouldn’t forget that the strongest sense of loyalty is to the community, not the online tools those people use.
Anyone who can find a way to convince a community to move en masse to another site, can turn a thriving site into a struggling site.