trendpreneur

Sometimes the behaviour of the masses is all you need to get some fairly solid recommendations. The example I’ll use is World of Warcraft addons, but it really holds true for any sort of platform where there are a vast number of third-party modifications — you could use the Xbox Live Arcade, even, or web widgets. However, addons are an interesting case for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, the addon space is pretty crowded. An addon is a Lua-scripted modification that’s written by a third-party and enhances one or more aspects of the game. Thus plenty of enterprising hackers have put together things they specifically wanted to code, with the upshot that there are several options to choose from in pretty much every category. “What’s the best addon for…” is a common question, and in certain categories there isn’t a clear winner.
[...]

By relying on the power of the masses, popular news-ranking site Digg experienced immense growth, but with its meteoric rise to success came a number of problems.

This article over at Mashable is a really insightful, top-down piece on the problems suffered by Digg. As is inevitable in many Web 2.0 social-based business models, ‘the power of the masses’ all too easily becomes ‘the power of the few’ as the site’s top users, due to factors like influence and time spent on the site, end up with a lot of control. We’ve seen Digg users capitalise off this concept, too, by selling their accounts or charging high fees to submit guaranteed front-page links.

Of course, the advantage of Web 2.0 is that you can tweak and tune the complicated algorithms behind the scenes to try to compensate for this, although Digg’s attempts at doing so met with more criticism from users than praise. Fundamentally, people like being recognised, and being hailed as one of the “top 100″ users of a site is something many strive towards; Digg’s failure to provide many features users have clamoured for, while spending a long time releasing those they did provide, also helped antagonise its userbase.

So many sites revolve heavily around users as a way to get content, popularity, even to make their algorithms work; having a strong community is a true hallmark of a successful Web 2.0 venture, and a consistent userbase bringing in tons of pageviews, adding content every day and keeping the site running is crucial to many of these sites’ business models. So, learn from Digg; if your users are your lifeblood, be very very careful when tweaking the site, implementing bans, and dealing with users in general. Negative feedback about you can be incredibly powerful when it comes to social-driven sites, and a competitor that has a gentler touch with its customers might suddenly steal yours away.