The Org Redesign - What's wrong with the org?

[Zarxrax]

Wow, the graph posted by corran really brings things into perspective.
At one point, we had about 300 new videos per month.
Now, around 30 videos a month. A ten-fold decrease in the amount of new content.

To put this in perspective, we haven't had this few new videos being entered into the catalog since the middle of 2001.

It's not only the userbase that is dying. It is the artform. Without creators entering videos, we have nothing to watch, nothing to learn from, nothing to enjoy.
After seeing these stats, I am honestly surprised that we still receive enough donations to pay for hosting.

It's not just the community here that has decreased. How many amv editors were at AWA last year? Of the ones that I knew, maybe 20-25? How many of those had actually made a video in the past year? 10? 15?
I remember seeing 50-100 editors at AWA before. Most of those guys left, but new people haven't been coming. I'm sure there were actually quite a few AMV creators at AWA this past year though. But, I have no idea who many of them were. They aren't part of the group.

[Corran]

How is increasing membership going to fix the code? I don't see the correlation.

It is the other way around. My intention was that, if we are going to rebuild the org, why not try to improve membership and feature sets in the process.

Are you making the claim that we already have a strategy for increasing membership, but it's failing? I wasn't aware we had one, and if we already do, then that leads me back to the original question... why?

I'm not sure if Phade ever had a strategy of growing the site, but he certainly desired to maintain it and he has gone as far as hosting panels at cons pimping the org and having donation drives. If you look at the graph, we aren't sustainable, if we don't have strategy, shouldn't we form one? ...or should we just let the org continue the downward trend to unsustainability?

And no, quick comments are not our demise as tempting as it is to say that based on that image. The full impact of quick comments on opinions occurred over a couple months as people stopped giving three word Opinions and began using QCs for that. Then, QCs and OPs both follow the exact same general declining trend that started after YouTube started to pick up steam.

...I'm not following. The point?

That was directed generally to anyone that looks at the graph in my post.. If you base your deductions solely on the data in the graph without thinking about the larger internet picture, it is tempting to say QCs caused our decline since they were introduced right before it begins. Not directing that paragraph at any single person.

Okay, I think what you're trying to say is that we need to increase membership because we've not been able to maintain a particular rate of released videos. Is this what you're saying?

Or are you saying we need to increase membership because we are losing members faster than we gain them?

Both, I think that the fact that the org is getting less videos posted says that editors are not choosing to use the org to announce their videos because they prefer other sites. In earlier posts you were saying that the org should specifically target editors rather than viewers so I was trying to appeal to that side of your arguement. At the same time, I think the number of viewers and the number of editors here are intrinsically linked together and that you can't have one without the other and still have a thriving community. I believe that membership does need to increase, because I believe that if it does not, this won't be a place for editors nor a place for viewers to actively participate in the a hobby they enjoy but rather a stagnant site (Much more than it has become) where only a handful of people are willing to stick around. That doesn't sound much like a healthy community to me.

I'm not telling you, or anyone else, that we can't try these changes. I am saying, let's be realistic. We're not going to make all these changes and have the membership take off like it did in previous years. That ship has sailed, and we have far too much competition from casual "editors" to ever have what we've lost.

I don't expect membership to suddenly take off, but it would be nice to see a little bit of growth in that graph over a number of months, if it just a little bit.

I think that streams number is quite telling actually.

I should point out that the way previews are counted are based on page loads which was fine back when the only pages with previews automatically started playing the video after page load. The numbers are skewed a little bit now with the front page video. I do however think the front page vid was working since all site stats increased together over two consecutive months before whatever the cause for the recent sharp decline happen. (Edit: Doki notes that this is annual trend and possibly related to students returning to school. This makes sense to me.)

[Fall_Child42]

The star scale scores need to replace the top 10%, as far as being able to find top videos. There need to be many many more options. Top videos in the past 24 hours, past week, past month, etc. Top videos as rated by creators only. Top videos by genre.

I think a really good and really easy indicator for "top videos" and "Hot new videos" would be amount of views. It would be hard to break this system (like you can do with the opinion system) it would be more accurate than a 1 to 5 scale. And well I understand #of views doesn't mean "good" I also understand that good is subjective and a video that nobody likes won't get the amount of plays as a popular one simply because there will be no word of mouth. Hopefully some other things will take care of those "hidden gems" things like Mods video of the week, or some sort of series of review threads on the forums.

[BasharOfTheAges]

The star scale scores need to replace the top 10%, as far as being able to find top videos. There need to be many many more options. Top videos in the past 24 hours, past week, past month, etc. Top videos as rated by creators only. Top videos by genre.

I think a really good and really easy indicator for "top videos" and "Hot new videos" would be amount of views. It would be hard to break this system (like you can do with the opinion system) it would be more accurate than a 1 to 5 scale. And well I understand #of views doesn't mean "good" I also understand that good is subjective and a video that nobody likes won't get the amount of plays as a popular one simply because there will be no word of mouth. Hopefully some other things will take care of those "hidden gems" things like Mods video of the week, or some sort of series of review threads on the forums.

Actually, unless they redesign the code to log IPs, the number of views is the most easily gamed metric we (or any website for that matter) track. Step 1 - log out, step 2 - F5, step 3 - goto step 2. You can even make scripts that do several instances of the same window on each page and refreshes them every few seconds for as many hours as you need to. This is how youtube contests based on views are gamed. It's so common there are tutorials on how to write the scripts so that any moron can do it.

[Qyot27]

In terms of the graph, the largest rate of decline happened between late 2005 and early-mid 2008. After 2008, the rate decline relaxes - it's still dropping, but not nearly as fast, having turned into a gradual, light slope. The quick bleed-out correlates to YouTube's rise to ubiquity, but I'm not sure if the post-'08 numbers support that continuing to be a reason. It was surmised during that period that what essentially happened were many of the extremely casual viewers and editors were enticed by the streaming aspects of the Tube and jumped ship. There just happened to be a lot of them, but it didn't seem to really impact the forums, regardless of the Tube bashing that was going on. That bashing, as much as this has been reiterated over and over, is part of the perception of the Org as elitist and belittling to newbies, as that's often who YouTube caters to. The hostility towards the Tube wasn't necessarily directed at the newbies as it was the Tube's community trends (describe it as a circle-jerk or ego masturbation if you want) and being way too visible of a target.

Note: how many times have the record companies clamped down on YouTube, versus the what, 3 or 4 notable times it's happened here (with only one or two of those times being rather major)? The problem was that being hostile to those things, which always went against the Org's community culture, was perceived as being not an attack on YouTube's inherent problems from a constructive criticism standpoint, but an attack on its users. That, if anything, is what I think has caused the membership to not rebound even though the Tube is continually removing videos, muting audio, and pissing viewers off. AMVNews can probably get away with their model because they lie outside of the industry's striking distance. The Tube and the Org are inside of that distance, and the only thing that has caused the Org to not bear the brunt of it is our ducking the radar as much as we can manage. When was it that the Wind-Up incident happened? November 2005, curiously also just before the bleed-off started to happen. Did it cause it? Probably not, but it likely did act as another catalyst to the situation. Crack-downs on YouTube weren't as strong back then as they are now.

Forum posting seems to have been far less affected by those other trends, as it pretty much plateaued from early 2004 to early 2007, then reduced a little and plateaued again from early 2007 to late 2008, and dropped a little again and it seems we're still on that plateau. The absolute peak of forum usage occurred in October of 2003, just before OT was removed - it was that area's removal that dropped the forum usage and started the plateau trending seen afterwards.


Take from all of that what you will, of course. I would wager that the 'core AMV community' that the Org caters to hasn't changed over its entire lifespan, and it's practically the same one that frequented the mailing list in the pre-Org days. The members may not be the same (aside from a handful), but the goals of the ones in that community and the forum are still largely the same. Was that the community the Org's main area and existence was being catered to when it launched? If it ceased to be, when did that change occur? The member growth in 2002/2003? The Golden Donut? The VCAs on Local (despite the fact that most VCA winners, Locally-hosted or not, have been forumites)?

[dokidoki]

The quick bleed-out correlates to YouTube's rise to ubiquity, but I'm not sure if the post-'08 numbers support that continuing to be a reason.

I'd like to point out the Google Trends graph for Anime Music Videos again... If you can search for them on YouTube, why search for them on Google? Unfortunately I don't think YouTube has any such graphs/statistics.

Unfortunately you can't prove much from the graph for AMV since it can mean different things, though I wonder what causes the Christmas spikes.

[Fall_Child42]

The star scale scores need to replace the top 10%, as far as being able to find top videos. There need to be many many more options. Top videos in the past 24 hours, past week, past month, etc. Top videos as rated by creators only. Top videos by genre.

I think a really good and really easy indicator for "top videos" and "Hot new videos" would be amount of views. It would be hard to break this system (like you can do with the opinion system) it would be more accurate than a 1 to 5 scale. And well I understand #of views doesn't mean "good" I also understand that good is subjective and a video that nobody likes won't get the amount of plays as a popular one simply because there will be no word of mouth. Hopefully some other things will take care of those "hidden gems" things like Mods video of the week, or some sort of series of review threads on the forums.

Actually, unless they redesign the code to log IPs, the number of views is the most easily gamed metric we (or any website for that matter) track. Step 1 - log out, step 2 - F5, step 3 - goto step 2. You can even make scripts that do several instances of the same window on each page and refreshes them every few seconds for as many hours as you need to. This is how youtube contests based on views are gamed. It's so common there are tutorials on how to write the scripts so that any moron can do it.

Fine, Downloads + streams
(sure you can download your own video 15,000 times but that IS easy to track.)

[Corran]

Unfortunately you can't prove much from the graph for AMV since it can mean different things, though I wonder what causes the Christmas spikes.

Maybe from people opening presents containing video players that use the propeitary amv format. :p


Qyot27: Ah yes, the wind up records incident. I forgot that happened around the same time... Unfortunately the graph can't isolate the specific impact each event in the org's history has had, just the overall picture of how things have been going.

[BasharOfTheAges]

It was surmised during that period that what essentially happened were many of the extremely casual viewers and editors were enticed by the streaming aspects of the Tube and jumped ship. There just happened to be a lot of them, but it didn't seem to really impact the forums, regardless of the Tube bashing that was going on. That bashing, as much as this has been reiterated over and over, is part of the perception of the Org as elitist and belittling to newbies, as that's often who YouTube caters to. The hostility towards the Tube wasn't necessarily directed at the newbies as it was the Tube's community trends (describe it as a circle-jerk or ego masturbation if you want) and being way too visible of a target.

It was surmised as such because most viewers, regardless of how many anecdotes people throw out about people they've talked to, don't go on the forums and have, therefore, never actually witnessed any of those sorts of behavioral characteristics. I'd wager there are more people that have been told we have a reputation for being <XYZ> than have ever actually themselves witnessed it and come to that conclusion on their own. It's a bit of a meme at this point. We need better PR.

[inthesto]

We need better PR.

SOLUTION: Make Kitsuner the literal poster boy of the Org.