Plime - The unfriendly news aggregator
Now that Digg is dead to me I need to find a new home for social news and bookmarking. I do still use Netscape and StumbleUpon for finding things of interest but I need something that is social aside from Netscape.
I enjoy commenting on articles and finding people with similar interests, does such a site exist?
In the spirit of my quest I took some time today to look at Plime.
According to the website:
Plime is a news aggregator, wiki (editable by all) and friend finder in one. It relies on the power of online community participation to control it's structure and editorial content. It's also a great place to meet others with similar interests.
I first noticed Plime when I was checking my server logs and I saw an influx of trafic from their site. Curious I took some time to look over their site and try it out.
- Good
- Clean wiki-style interface
- Collapsable category listing on the left side
- Up and down voting is transparent
- All submissions can have an image associated with them
- You can customize your color scheme
- No advertising
- Bad
- Karma system easily abused to inflate a users power
- No FAQ on site
- Aggresive "don't come around here no more" moderators
- Same content you will find on Netscape/Reddit/Digg
I went into Plime expecting a basic news aggregator type of site. I found a good variety of categories and a system designed to help you find people with similar likes. I even submitted two stories to see how the community would react. This is when things turned bad.
One particular user (may be a mod, no way to be sure) I ran into was actively taking the role of a cop. He dropped comments all over the site pestering posters about abusing the system or only posting articles that would result in personal gain.
I can understand moderating a community and looking out for content that does not belong but I got a very unfriendly vibe from Plime. I do not think I will be going back there again.
Don't just take my word for it, take a look at their website and make up your own mind.
- Google convicted in case brought by Belgian press
- Digg hits 1 meeeelion members
- Wii News Is On The Air
- Netscape: Let the Clone Wars begin!
- TechVat is launching
I saw you submitted my Funny Girl post and was slammed down by a user. I found the aggressive stance very off-putting, especially when you responded nicely to one remark which received more bad attitude and then when you explained what you were doing, more nastiness! PLUS, the user accused you of submitting 2 entries for self-promotion which was untrue.
I didn’t bother hanging around after that.
Aggressive moderators is right! As soon as I posted an article they changed the image to a can of SPAM and quickly buried it with several “no spam” comments. I like their fiestiness, but it really wasn’t spam. So yeah, definitely some tough, aggressive moderators.
Hah. I was scrolling through the “deleted” section and came across your submission Steve. That Hoosker is a real dick.
I tried to go back on later in the day and add some stuff that did not “benefit me personally” but my account was knocked down to zero karma and I can’t submit now!
That is what I mean by an easily abused karma system.
Same here. I stopped by this morning but my account is completely locked out. I can’t comment, vote something up, or vote it down. So what’s the point?
I think I’ll be happy to let them keep their little site elite.
That is a real ‘bummer’. Besides the point, there’s always some bad eggs in a basket, so you could just leave them aside and ignore them. For me, I would still be looking at StumbleUpon and well.. ‘Digg’.
On Plime, I found out quickly that you have to argue and spit at the oldest (first on when Plime started) users. Then you have to comment on submissions to get voted up.
They’re not all bad, but there are a select few that I like to call the “Plime Nazis”. When I see them doing the bad things that they do, I vote them down. I would suggest you do the same. If enough people vote down the nazis, they’ll lose their power.
I do submit my own blog postings and some get knocked down and some don’t. My first experience pissed me off and I wasn’t going to head back, but the owner basically said what I was doing was okay, just bad timing.
If you go through the deleted section, you’ll see stuff that even you would have to agree are not worth being submitted. I can see it from both their and my own point of view.
Frankly, I was surprised to see the girlfriend submission get knocked down. Then I read the comments and saw that the guy who voted you down was wrong. I told him he was wrong with a negative vote on all his comments on that submission. His vote was the only one that took it down, but I suspect it’s because others just followed suit.
Hmmmm, never heard of plime. But I will say that Netscape has been nothing but good to us. I agree, having something other than Netscape would be helpful in finding good info.
I will be honest and right out say that I am a member of Plime. So maybe my comments are biasd. They are fact however.
I think the problem right now is a misconception of the idea behind plime, and that is clear from your post.
For one, you talk about moderators being harsh on the site. This is incorrect, as plime does not have moderators. Plime’s community is controlled and run by the community itself.
The only person that can be called a moderator is the site’s creator. All other users are regular users. By gaining status in the community (thanks to up-votes), they gain more ‘power’ to control the site. Someone who does not follow the rules and who is a bad person in the community will not reach such a level. It takes a lot of members’ votes in order to give members a certain status.
Plime is rather new, and therefore has no set FAQ yet. Of course you can create a FAQ for a website before you launch it, but isn’t that a bit pointless? How can you know what the frequently asked questions about the site are if the site is not even running yet? That is why the creators of plime want the community to compose their own FAQ. This is currently being worked on in the forum, and has quite an extensive list already.
As for the abusing of the Karma system, I don’t see that as a problem. It takes a lot of votes in order to reach much higher levels. Just some random user who’s up to no good does not get to a high level.
The fact that the same information is on plime that you can find on other sites makes sense, since it’s a news aggregator. People post links. Obviously those thinks are going to be duplicate sometimes.
Whether that member is or is not a moderator they are acting like one. With a high karma rating comes an increased responsability.
I was very open and honest about the two submissions I submitted when asked. I was not nasty and at least one of the submissions gained in popularity after I submitted it. I do not feel I benefited from both submissions as only one was to my blog and the other was to a blog that is not run by me.
Why did I not submit other content? Because I did not want to submit dupes!
When I read through the forums and other parts of the site I was given the impression that Plime had no problem with users submitting their own content
7. Post your own articles and editorials
Users can create and edit their own articles. This item is in alpha release.
I submitted this to Plime to draw attention to both this article and everyone’s comments. So far people seem to taking this seriously.
From my experience with any social news site, if you just come it and submit your blog you’re gonna get booed. There’s no problem with self promotion, as long as you’re also contributing to the community in other ways.
Here’s the Plime submission:
http://www.plime.com/l/12646/1/
I would comment on Plime but since I am now at 0 karma I can’t do anything on the site!
There’s definitely a sense of policing there, but it’s not by “moderators”. All users are moderators on the site.
I’ve taken some steps to ask people to be alot nicer in how they treat new members. We’re at an interesting cross roads though… one where a tiny site composed of a group of people from Worth1000 suddenly got noticed by a lot of blogs as an easy source of good traffic. Take a look at the deleted section and you can see why members are cranky. There are so many more spammers submitting their stuff then their used to be. As RTCA said, it’s a case of bad timing.
I’m going to post in the forum again to remind people to treat others with respect and give them the benefit of the doubt (which was already done here yesterday http://www.plime.com/f/657/).
I will say this though: HMTKSteve, you submitted your content to “research” plime. That’s fine, but you should have revealed your intention and you wouldn’t have gotten the same response. Transparency on Plime is everything (it’s why we show you what your voting power is actually worth, whereas Digg, which also has a karma system, does not). And when users (especially journalists) are not transparent in their actions it will upset people.
Jax,
I did read through the forums and I saw the posts where you ask the existing users to be nicer to the noobs like me. That is a good thing.
Yes, I posted two articles as “research”. Part of research requires that you not notify people right away that it is research (they call it a double-blind test) but I still did say what it was when questioned.
I like the transparency of Plime but, now that I have zero karma I can not do anything on the site. I can’t even vote a comment or story up or down! Can you at least reset me back to one karma point so I can become a member of the community?
HMTKsteve, I will vote your comments up to get you back into +1 karma so you can participate.
There you go, Steve. Straight from the horse’s mouth. You can’t get any better than that.
Incidentally, I just noticed your quote:
“When I read through the forums and other parts of the site I was given the impression that Plime had no problem with users submitting their own content
7. Post your own articles and editorials
Users can create and edit their own articles. This item is in alpha release.”
That’s a fair point. It addresses people creating their own articles wikipedia style, a feature which has since been removed for retooling. I can understand the confusion and I will remove that line.
Thanks for the quick responses. Once I get back to a positive karma rating I will try to become a member of the community. I will not post any stories from my own blog (no matter how good they may be) and in a month or so I will report back on my findings.
When I read this I too got the impression that submitting your own stuff was okay. Then I seemed to get targeted by this aggressive mod / power user / whatever and I really don’t know if I want to be in the same community with someone who likes to go on power trips like that.
There area ways to submit articles from your blog and have it accepted.
1) Become an active member, posting links, stories, articles, etc that have nothing to do with your site. Then when you post the occasional self-article it will be looked on much more favorably. The main complaint, and the ones that caused the problems is those who post nothing but their own material. Posting nothing but your own stuff, turns it from a sharing conversation to a lecture.
2) Some personal posts belong more in the forum than on the news page. These are usually short little snippets of a story such as the one about funny girls getting the guy. The forum is for more personal interaction. A place we can hang out together and discuss things on a more intimate, personal level.
3) If your blog post is about some news story or is an opinion piece, than post a link to the original story or subject and then follow that up with a comment about your thoughts and even include a link to your site.
Those type of posts are especially appreciated by many of the users. We do want to hear your opinion, thoughts, analysis. We just want the aticle that is posted to the front page to be as unbiased as possible than we can engage in friendly conversation.
Dropping in to defend plime here. I believe I am one of the “dicks” in question (specificaly the one wildbluffmatt referred to). I’m not a mod, just a member like everyone else on the site.
Just to clarify, there are no mods. Every member of the site is a moderator in that they can up or down vote the submission. Several downvotes on the same story will result in the story making its way to the deleted page. A user can only downvote an article once.
I am conflicted on one aspect of your review, however. In your list of good aspects of plime, you included “No advertising.” But then you go on to complain about links to your personal site being down-voted. Is joining a site strictly to link to your own site/blog in order to gain traffic anything other than advertising? Or were you talking about google ads?
Anyway, that’s where most of us nazis are coming from.
Also, there is an FAQ… It’s just not finalized yet. This is still a relatively new site.
Hey um, donteatpoop,
You misunderstood the context. He meant advertising BY the site like you see on digg.
I recommend adblockplus for everyone. Google Ads never bothered me, but these huge glaring banners and flash animations that appear everywhere do.
[...] “unfriendly news aggregator”, kinda like Digg. HMTK decided to check it out and had an interesting experience. I followed and had a very similar one. Maybe it’s for you, but it’s definitely not for [...]
I think Plime is like any other area of life, you have disagreements with people but if so inclined you move on and get on with it.
I’ve had a few “disagreements” with Donteatpoop (He’s not a Nazi by the way) and a few others but we get on ok now and in general it’s a friendly, informative place to hang out.
My advice is, if you don’t like it just don’t go there again, simple.
Oh and Wildbluffmatt, Hooskers actually a good guy and I’ve never seen him be abusive to anyone and I’ve certainly never seen him resort to name calling so….
But he has that mean looking avatar. j/k
“Karma system easily abused to inflate a users power
No FAQ on site
Aggresive “don’t come around here no more” users”
Started off ok with my first post. Second post was considered spam (which it wasn’t plus never posted a site of my own) Instantly voted so far down that I couldn’t post a thing. Don’t like it. I don’t think a person should be knocked down so low that they can’t post just because one person thinks it’s inappropriate. It’s kind of “I’ve been here longer so I can censor what I don’t like”.
Cons
*Very hard on new people
*Total Nazi like attitudes from those that have good “Karma”
Pros
*It is a good idea and does have super potential