A deceptively small decision about how to handle the monitoring/editing/filtering of content submissions ended up having the largest impact to our approach to the site design, internal operations, and management of submissions.
When we still had the vision of the site being strictly a hobby we’d work on at night and over the weekends, we decided to simply open the floodgates and let all submissions immediately go up. Our theory was to let the user community rate the postings, allowing the users to identify the top quality postings. This idea more or less stuck from 2007 through early 2008. It was tempting from a labor standpoint, but ultimately this approach wouldn’t work for a few reasons.
First, we weren’t comfortable with the branding implications. We wanted *some* kind of minimum bar of quality applied to submissions. This was a decision we waffled on even after development had begun on the site, but I believe we made the right one in regards to providing at least a guiding hand of quality.
Second, we decided to own the responsibility of filtering the content, posting only the best submissions. Besides, we’d have to take down inappropriate content anyway, so why remain reactive in the process?
Third, we consciously were trying to avoid the YouTube model, where the best of the content is buried in a haystack of content. While there are tools and social norms that help the better content bubble to the top (e.g., ratings, word-of-mouth/email from trusted sources, etc.), the reality is that much of YouTube finds a very small audience. I can hear rumblings about Long Tail stirring, so let me clarify that YouTube is a single-media/multiple-subject site, which makes it perfect to analyze under the Long Tail. I imagine that most videos on YouTube have at least one avid fan, even if 99% of the other YouTube viewers hate it. Our site is multiple-media/single-subject, so we’re somewhat self-selecting ourselves out of a large chunk of the Long Tail simply by excluding anything not in fantasy. In fact, it’s even more selective than that: we exclude anything not set in Runes of Gallidon.
This decision also changed the focus and operational nature of the company. We shifted from a user-generated, “anything goes” media site to a more traditional publisher of content as soon as we placed ourselves between the submittors of content and the consumers of that content.
I remain concerned about scalability with such a limited resource to devote to reviewing submissions, but I think the site will benefit in the long term as a result of scoping the submissions.
Next up: Part 5 – Genre