Since I started blogging last year, I’ve regularly used the very helpful social news website JapanSoc to popularize my posts. I might even say 90% of my traffic comes from JapanSoc, so it’s a site to which I owe a hearty thanks, and I give respect to their community.

However, the website administrator recently began enforcing a policy that, as he stated, a lot of people probably didn’t notice before. Essentially, JapanSoc will now enforce this policy:

  • abuse the privilege to submit links to your own content, e.g. multiple, back-to-back submissions from your blog, submitting the same content from multiple sources, or re-submitting the same story multiple times

This enforcement will supposedly clear the clutter from the latest news story page and prevent “ego-socing,” the practice of users submitting multiple entries from their own website or blog. In order to prevent these violations, users must submit a story from a non-related source. I addition to preventing the above problems, I also assume that such a practice would “encourage” users to find new materials.

I disagree with this new enforcement, and will break down why this practice will damage JapanSoc over time.

Usability

As far as websites go, the most important factor in gaining and maintaining readership remains quality of content. If the New York Times reverted to a Geocities page, it would still be widely read because of its quality content. Following content, of course, is form. Especially with social news sites, it is of the utmost importance to have easy registration and effortless submission of stories. Dmitry Fadeyev says in an article at Smashing Magazine:

  • User participation on your website is affected by how many barriers there are. Removing barriers such as registration will almost certainly increase user participation. Indeed, once users start using your website, they will more likely sign up, because they’re already involved.

However, JapanSoc has now inserted a barrier, not in registration necessarily, but in submitting. This morning I finished a rewrite of an article to help people prepare to return to their home country, and when I went to submit it to JapanSoc, I was informed that I would need to find another article from another domain in order to submit my own work. This barrier stopped me from submitting a unique article (unique in the sense that I am the author and draw from my own experiences). And now, to submit this article, I will have to hunt something, anything, down on the internet and submit that before I can submit this statement.

So, if content is the most important factor in running a webpage, you can be sure that more people will post uninteresting articles in order to get around this barrier. And if it’s important that your users not have barriers to submission of content, then it’s obvious that JapanSoc does not meet this requirement now.

Knowledge: Creation and Resources

There are all kinds of blogs about Japan out there. There are people who write life stories and provide insight into living in Japan (Locohama), there are people who write in-depth articles on a number of subjects (Gakuranman), and people who, for whatever reason, think they can write about Japanese science (ahem…that’s me…or at least *was* me until I got hacked in December). These blogs create knowledge. Locohama often weaves a story, and by the end the reader has learned something. Mike at Gakuranman, for just one example, lets us experience his haikyo adventures. I am currently working on compiling Japanese news sources to bring a Japanese response to worldwide news stories. This is all the creation of knowledge, and should be encouraged at all times, at least in my opinion.

Then there is treating knowledge like a resource. Finding an article on the New York Times and reading it, that’s using it as a resource. You can share it on JapanSoc and let other people read it, and that’s great. But what’s been lost is in this step is the realization of Web 2.0–the creation of user-generated content. There are people reading this right now who are so knowledgeable and qualified that they could write for a major newspaper. But they can no longer submit their own articles to JapanSoc, at least not until they’ve spent their time looking for other resources.

There’s a difference between ego-socing and having an author freely share their knowledge with JapanSoc. Egos require people to pay attention to them. The free sharing of information requires freedom from barriers. Why not just ignore ego-socing and take down the barriers?

So Why Don’t You Just Soc Something Else?

Speaking just for myself (but maybe others would agree with me), I spend a fair amount of time on my blog posts. Sometimes, I’ll spend days finding resources and articles, and by the time I write something and include all of my own content, another person has soc’ed on the same topic. That’s what happened with my recent article on whaling. While the community decided my article was clearly unique, I was still flagged for duplicating content.

There are clearly some people who are awesome at finding news articles, and you can see just how successful they are in the main page side bar. There are also some people that are great at creating knowledge. So, why is it that a user who submits every article that runs down their RSS feed gains rank in JapanSoc and has the freedom to post whatever they want, while a blogger who spends a day or two crafting an article cannot have the same freedom to share?

I don’t “just soc something” because it would be an obligatory submission. You’ll notice that there will be an obligatory post before this one, because I want this message heard. There will not be an obligatory soc after it, however.

Want Some Cheese with that Whine?

So yes, I could just submit something and be done with it, but as I’ve demonstrated here, it’s just bad practice. Doing an obligatory submission will lower the quality of JapanSoc, support the barrier to usability that’s been installed, and take away from being a creative blogger. Of course, there are people that discover JapanSoc and then submit their entire archive about feeding bentos to their cat while dressed as pikachu. That’s their problem. Warn them, ban them, do whatever you want. But to put a barrier in front of me offering advice to returnees because nobody soc’ed the article I wrote last week on the death of Nujabes? That’s just bad usability in my opinion.