A few months back I gave some unsolicited advice to Digg after its users rebelled against the company’s decision to comply with a DMCA takedown notice. My point then was that Digg could have avoided relinquishing control of their business if they’d defaulted to greater transparency; specifically they should have engendered a dialog with their customers prior to making their decision. My point was that this transparency and conversation would actually enable them to retain *more* direct control over their business then they could by maintaining an opaque process. As it turned out, they were coerced into reversing their business decision, effectively ceding the management decision to an angry mob of users.
Digg is doing just fine today. In fact, their traffic seems to be significantly up since then. The temptation is to conclude that Digg was well served by their decision. I worry that they’ve set themselves up for unnecessary future power struggles with their own hyper-empowered users.
Last week we saw a counter-example unfold on the Freakonomics blog. This most popular of economics blogs recently moved to the New York Times, and one of the changes was that its formerly full RSS feed had now become a partial feed (i.e. people reading the blog in feed readers were suddenly viewing excerpts rather than the full article). This created a torrent of resistance from many long-time readers: “Please fix the partial feed problem. They’re just plain rude and I’m afraid I’ll have to unsub from your blog if its not fixed.”
The unbridled frustration from readers continued for weeks (albeit with a fraction of the vitriol as Digg’s users), and the Freakonomics writers posted twice in response, explaining that they were examining the issue closely. Via the blog comments and all over the Web, people took the opportunity to express themselves at length for and against the truncation. Finally, Freakonomics’ Stephen Dubner published a post explaining the blog’s final decision: against the wishes of the most vocal users Freakonomics would be sticking with the excerpts. Importantly, he prominently mentions (even links) to the critics:
Are there strong and sane opposing views on this issue? Absolutely. You can read, for instance, what TechDirt wrote about full feeds potentially creating more site traffic, not less. There’s another interesting view at Online Spin and another at Poynter.org.
While I agree with TechDirt that the decision to truncat feeds are short-sighted and silly, I do think that Freakonomics exemplified a winning strategy: they engaged users in a conversation about the issue and then, after due consideration, made the decision that they felt was right for their business. Like Digg, Freakonomics is nothing without its readers, but its owners are also the only ones responsible for keeping the site a going concern. By being inclusive in the process they respected their readers, even if their decision didn’t please them all.
Now I bet their traffic will go up. Just like Digg’s.
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