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

[Kionon]

It might be hard to believe due to the amount of people active on the forums, but there are around 1million registered users in the org (1026783 according to the main site) which, coming for a fan-made anime videos is quite amazing. But many have lost the path probably because there were many problems in knowing where to go, or what to do. And now like Corran said there are so many streaming sites that chances are they won't find this or won't think it's appealing (due to uploading process, commenting, or others).

Most of them are probably brief participants if participants at all, and hundreds of thousands of them haven't been back to the org in years. It is very disingenuous to take that number and try to make any kind of argument. It's a false number, representing many, many "phantom" users who do not really exist.

And you probably will be right it won't be the same, there weren't many places to upload videos back then. Youtube would remove amvs in less than a week, it wasn't as known as it is today and as fast, giving this site a little "advantage". But the org still keeps the advantage of having a community where you can learn how to edit, encode, and discuss about amvs.
To me, it looks like this site worked perfectly in the past, but without changes like the other sites, it can't move much further. To you, a little growth in people/popularity seems just fine (to go unnoticed; it's an opinion that I respect), but it's true the org is hardly getting anymore active users on here, and there are at least a few changes that need to get addressed.

I'm not claiming that there are not issues that need to be addressed, and I am not necessarily even disagreeing with what specifically needs to be changed. What I am, possibly, disagreeing with is the philosophy that says we either become massive or take our marbles and go home. We will never be massive again unless other media sites, such as YouTube, start really, really, REALLY pissing off their user base. And even if they do, are we prepared, or can we be prepared, to absorb them? At least, let us have a plan in place to successfully integrate newcomers while still representing who I always thought we were: artists interested in improving our craft.

[8bit_samurai]

I don't think catering to a small group of people would be a good idea. As I said in the State of the Org thread, The only major change in the Org I see is the users. And that's only within 4 years. If we only cater to a small group of people, within a few short years, most of them are gonna leave. And when they're replaced with new members, the Org will most likely have to evolve to change to their liking as it has changed to our liking. And it sounds like having to change to their liking would most likely be a pain do to with the current coding. Hell, I would guess changing it to our liking was a pain as well. With that in mind, changing the sites coding so it would benefit not only the editors and viewers alike, but for the site's coders as well doesn't sound like a bad idea to me.

[inthesto]

What I am, possibly, disagreeing with is the philosophy that says we either become massive or take our marbles and go home.

This is hilarious, because you're the one guilty of creating the false dilemma of "we stay microscopic and dying like we are right now" vs "omg we expand into FaceTube™". And before you try to counterpoint with this:

Do not concur. I do not think that we need to aim for a maximum audience in order to be a useful resource. Nor do I suggest we shut ourselves off into obscurity and limit our ambition to survive. These two are not a binary system. There IS a middle ground.

You have somehow managed to counterproductively define "maximum audience" in your head as "every schlub who uses any social networking site", when I have yet to see anybody even remotely suggesting that. It goes without saying that the rest of us have defined the Org's target audience as AMV fans with a certain level of dedication (i.e. those who are willing to stick around a website/community dedicated to AMVs when they realize that the community doesn't suck ass), but you seem to enjoy whiting this out in your head.

Finally, I really think everyone needs to pay attention to this comment, emphasis mine:

In my opinion, I never seem to interact with more than 100 people at any given time. A good twenty or thirty of those people have been around for several years. While your graph shows a significant decrease in active membership over the last five years, I personally haven't felt it, nor have I seen any impact on the relationships I have with other org members. I do admit that I have detected a slow-down in the post rate of the forums, and I have commented on that. I always felt the 800,000 supposed members was a huge joke. I've never even met 500 editors, let alone thousands. So I'm not really sure what kind of reaction you expect these changes to have.

In response to solid data, you are plugging your ears, closing your eyes, and going "NOPE CAN'T HEAR YOU LALALA THIS IS HOW I FEEL!" Corran's graph clearly shows us that the Org did have its glory days, and it is currently being murdered by its competition. No, we can't crib a bunch of features off YouTube and expect the community to magically expand, but what we can do is figure out what has worked for YouTube and why, and then adapt what will work for the Org and why.

More on that last thought in a separate post.

[Kionon]

This is hilarious, because you're the one guilty of creating the false dilemma of "we stay microscopic and dying like we are right now" vs "omg we expand into FaceTube™".

I most certainly am not creating that. If you think I am, then you have misread me. Period.

You have somehow managed to counterproductively define "maximum audience" in your head as "every schlub who uses any social networking site", when I have yet to see anybody even remotely suggesting that. It goes without saying that the rest of us have defined the Org's target audience as AMV fans with a certain level of dedication (i.e. those who are willing to stick around a website/community dedicated to AMVs when they realize that the community doesn't suck ass), but you seem to enjoy whiting this out in your head.

Again, not true. You are placing words in my mouth and thoughts in my head that are inaccurate. Stop it.

In response to solid data, you are plugging your ears, closing your eyes, and going "NOPE CAN'T HEAR YOU LALALA THIS IS HOW I FEEL!" Corran's graph clearly shows us that the Org did have its glory days, and it is currently being murdered by its competition. No, we can't crib a bunch of features off YouTube and expect the community to magically expand, but what we can do is figure out what has worked for YouTube and why, and then adapt what will work for the Org and why.

Let me be as clear as I possibly can be so you do not misconstrue what I am saying.

I've seen no evidence that the user base that existed in 2005 still exists. I don't think it does. I would be delighted to find out otherwise, which is why, and I will say this again, I DO NOT OPPOSE MANY OF THE SUGGESTED CHANGES. I just hope a year from now or two years from now, you're not all going to be sad and depressed it didn't work as well as you had hoped. Be somewhat realistic.

[BasharOfTheAges]

It might be hard to believe due to the amount of people active on the forums, but there are around 1million registered users in the org (1026783 according to the main site) which, coming for a fan-made anime videos is quite amazing. But many have lost the path probably because there were many problems in knowing where to go, or what to do. And now like Corran said there are so many streaming sites that chances are they won't find this or won't think it's appealing (due to uploading process, commenting, or others).

Most of them are probably brief participants if participants at all, and hundreds of thousands of them haven't been back to the org in years. It is very disingenuous to take that number and try to make any kind of argument. It's a false number, representing many, many "phantom" users who do not really exist.

Specifically, it's probably 10+% bots, 15+% sockpuppets or otherwise duplicate accounts from people that forgot their passwords, and 30+% one-offs of people that made accounts after cons to download a vid or two they saw at that con. I'd venture lots of friends/relatives too... I know i've forced at least 10 people to sign up for accounts to download something from here that wouldn't have otherwise.

[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)?