Is VOX hurting the community dynamic and other assorted flavors?

UPDATE: I began this post @ 10:20 p.m., Wednesday evening, I see it's now 2.56 a.m. Thursday morning, and this has obviously turned out to be a much longer effort than I originally expected to expend. I do warn you that this is also a longer post than usual, but I also hope it's still an easy and fun read and gives you some food for thought as well. And remember, what's below are only my opinions, analyses, interpretations and experience, with maybe some feelings thrown in, nothing more.

* * * * * * * * *

Well, this has been a mucho busy day for the boomr, and tonight I was hoping to just relax with my wife on a night out. But then I remembered promising to publish my thoughts about this VOX system and how it may or may not affect us all, so we actually cut the evening short and I am now reconstructing my thoughts and notes from last night, because some revisions were needed.

First up, I want to thank all of my VOX neighbors who posted comments on this, and who, once again, were nice enough to contribute their thoughts and always keep vigorous and enlightened discussions going.

Now, let me tell you what my VOX Neighbor Irma said that both changed my opinion matrix and added fuel to the fires of frustration:

I'm posting as often as ever, although I have to admit, I post to groups more, to private groups as well. I've also been posting slightly more to friends only.

Since I never once considered posting on BoomerNation/VOX for any other reason but public consumption, as an entirely open discussion that encourages return dialogue, Irma's answer gave me more argument ammunition than I originally had, but as I said, it also provided significantly more frustration with the counter-productive rules and capabilities of blogging on VOX.

And yes, I actually did forget those private options of posting only to friends or family or now to groups, even though I do see the drop-down list of publishing choices with every post I publish.

What can I say, the occasional brain fart.

So let's now temporarily park what Irma said, and allow me to go back to the basics of my original thoughts and then weave it all into a matrix of consequences.

To do so, I will block quote what I wrote last night, to save time and to make it easier to follow the progression of my thinking:

These past few weeks, I've noticed a number of my VOX Neighbors not posting anything or posting much more infrequently on their own blogs. Some had a history of posting daily while others posted multiple times in a day, so I started watching for a trend and I sure enough found one.

One lady actually made BoomerNation one of her neighbors on the very same day she cancelled her blog with VOX.

And yes, I've already taken into account holidays, vacations, back-to-work, work overload, family obligations, the lot of it, but something else is afoot when this many very smart, very articulate, very willing to share VOX Neighbors suddenly slow down or stop posting after, again, posting so regularly.

Opinion Reason #1: Visitor Counts

But then I came to what I thought were some of the primary reasons/causes for this:

Well, here are a few of my opinions as to the possible causes for this, based upon, as I see it, the strategic failures VOX has engendered/propagated through their decisions about how to develop VOX:

I can only speculate, but one of the primary reasons may not be just the blogger's realization as to how much work and time can be spent on blogging, but how fruitless it may sometimes seem if no one makes any comments on your blog. But if no one comments on your post, you can only assume - - - and too often will incorrectly assume - - - that no one has read what you had to say.

It's then pretty easy to develop a what's the use kind of an attitude . . . or you just quit altogether like two of my Neighbors have in just a very short amount of time.

At WordPress, something so simple as a visitor count is offered for free, along with its blog service, and quite clearly tells you who's been around and which posts they happened to visit. You even know where your visitors came from and how many are actually RSS-subscribing to your blog.

What's been holding VOX back from providing any of that data to us?

Whether they even want us to know that data could also be a question to ask further down this post.

Anyway, and IMHO, not having a visitor count option was a significant launch mistake.

Opinion Reason #2: Non-Members Can't Post Comments

A variant of the strategic mistake mentioned above is excluding non-VOX readers from commenting. I've been told by a number of visitors to my site on VOX how much they resented being forced to join VOX in order to be allowed to comment. But I only discovered that pov after I set up an open-to-anyone-to-comment sister site on WordPress.

VOX has strategically missed an incredibly important part/aspect/nature of those who like to comment on blogs, but who don't want to blog themselves [even if it is free] and strongly object to being forced to just to be able to post a comment.

After reading this second point above, you can then see how dead-on my VOX Neighbor Christopher was with his guess when he said:

i'm guessing that one of the rules you think Vox needs to change is their requirement that only registered users can post comments. i've had a few friends who have visited my blog, but don't comment because they don't want to register.

bloggers thrive on feedback, on knowing that someone out there is listening. so anything that diminishes the likelihood of feedback is a BAD THING.

Follow The Money

Now, following up on the "free" part of this blogger-host relationship and after reconstructing this analysis, I've come to realize that something has been a tad [sarcasm] neglected.

Money.

Does anyone know whether VOX has ever even hinted at sharing their ad revenue with us on our blogs or whether they'll at least be allowing us to independently post AdWords or similar revenue-generating services for bloggers?

Let me know, would you?

Customer Acquisition Costs

And have you asked yourselves how VOX plans on reaching the critical mass of memberships needed to make it self-sustaining amongst its own membership?

There's a business phrase, expressed in dollar terms, called New Customer Acquisition Costs. And although we don't know where VOX [SixApart] is actually spending all [or actually any] of their New Customer Acquisition budget dollars, we do know a terrific way they can do just that with absolutely no dollars spent on the outside.

By encouraging us to post and to bring in our friends, other family members and now groups.

And then think about how both inexpensive and easier it then is to snag a new VOX member when they visit one of our posts, because posting your opinion on someone's blog is both blogging tradition and an unmistakable allure.

It's actually strategically quite brilliant from a cost standpoint and significantly cheaper than spending precious cash assets for online ads or television or radio.

Where's The Vox Community?

Now, with all of these points and questions to ask now considered, if we then add Irma's comments to this matrix of issues, when VOX offers its members the option to blog only for family, or only for friends or only for groups, or for any combination thereof, it unfortunately and automatically just creates a clique mindset environment, which is entirely counter-productive and counter-intuitive to the concept of a community-based website, from a macro perspective, which is what I thought VOX was trying to be.

And you know, I've never personally cared for MySpace, finding it to be ridiculously silly, invasively dangerous and technologically unmanageable. It also appears to be totally dominated by possibly thousands of sub-communities [a.k.a., cliques] and their own privately chosen members - - - that even with the dramatically exponential growth of its overall membership it hasn't hastened any kind of a macro sense of community. As I see it, MySpace is the worst of Junior High in an online incarnation or venue.

But unfortunately, it looks as if VOX may have strategically succumbed to a clique-centric MySpace approach to VOX growth.

Consider this.

If 30%, 60% or more of VOX membership create sub-community cliques, and if these cliques are all private, then how is anyone new let in and where do they then go? Do they simply drop-off the face of the earth because what's the point of membership in VOX if there's no community to join, or do they create their own sub-community cliques by bringing in more of their friends and family?

How clever and convenient that then is for VOX to not only let cliques drive their membership rolls but to increase their company's ad revenue via those higher membership tallies because their ads don't discriminate - - - they still intrude upon all public and private blogs and groups as well.

But then where's the VOX community VOX so likes to brag about?

And consider this, those of you who only blog publicly, if most of the VOX membership ends up like MySpace and spends most of their time within their own groups and friends and family, only exploring on occasion, who within the entire VOX membership will then be reading any of us or even being around to comment on our posts?

The visitors who don't even want to join VOX and who can't post because they're not members of VOX?

Give me a break, VOX, you're killing a great concept!

Turn to Digg: Community Defined

To conclude, allow me to point to Digg.

Digg gives its members the right to privacy or to publicly share, but there's still a master page where all members of the Digg community submit and share opinions on. And yes, they do require registration and membership in order to submit, comment, Dig Up or Dig Down, but that's only fair based on the overall invested interest of every Digg member to submit stories that have, that maintain and that sometimes raise the inherent value of the website.

At Digg, everyone has a vested interest in its success, so everyone willingly follows the rules and polices its own, and all it asks of anyone is to submit to an equality standard that is the essence of the democratization of Front Page news-worthiness - - - and every member's right to accept or reject the value of a particular news story [content] submitted.

And yes, there are cliques on Digg, and certain Diggers are more highly regarded than others, but the point is, that Digg did not set its community up to be cliqued!

Hey, before Irma's comments, I thought I had three of the simplest strategic "cures" for whatever I saw was substantially but unnecessarily interfering with the actual growth of the entire VOX community.

But now, after Irma's comments, I'm seriously reconsidering my time involvement with posting on VOX.

I may be totally wrong, partially wrong, but then again, I may be right in my opinions above.

But if I am right, then that sucks because then I'll be stopping this blog, not wanting to waste further and precious time nor make someone else very wealthy on the sweat of my public [and unpaid] work.