Newsvine Sucks
November 18, 2007
EDIT: I am keeping the discussion in the comments below from now on. They are keeping at it over at Snoozevine and I am now, apparently, a bottom feeder and several other things. God if they only knew who they were actually talking about! So much for doing your homework citizen journalists, lol. No wonder the establishment takes shots at people like these as “quasi” or “hobby” journalists. How are we to believe in their version of the “news” if they can’t be bothered to find out about the people they attack?
EDIT: At least I drew out the person who did the axing. They are in the process of covering up the truth and manufacturing a story about how I so badly spammed their stupid speck of a snooze site. Check it out here.
Hey guys, here’s a MASSIVE freakin’ hint for you: Spammers don’t complain about their accounts getting shut down. They EXPECT it. Spammers don’t have high traffic sites and use their real names. There isn’t a single spammer on the planet whose site you can pull up by just typing his name in your browser bar. Stop acting so freakin’ incredulous and face the fact you’ve screwed with someone of account and been drawn out in front of tens of thousands as a hack site run by overzealous people who lie to their members.
Oh, and to the person who implied that I went back in under another name to post the above, Calvin knows full well he banned my IP so I couldn’t come back in as easy as that. Although I AM in there, I’m not the one who posted the thread above.
For the sake of clarification I am not mad about getting banned from Newsvine because I needed to be there or it was some source of traffic. I am pissed about the lies going on over there and the people in charge of what everyone else thinks is a respectable site run by respectable people. It is neither, and the web should know about it.
–
So I go to log in to my Newsvine account to give them more content they can make money from and come to find out I no longer exist.
I just kept getting referred to their main page. Went to comment on a post about Sesame Street, since it’s on pretty much all throughout the day in this house, and find that I wasn’t automatically logged in. That I was unable TO login as if I never existed there.
I had put up videos for Newsvine to profit from. Articles. All helpful and all added to the value of the community. (Which is what sites that have gone to shit call it. What it really is is getting people to build your site for you so you can advertise and make a killing in Federated Media and Google Adsense.)
Newsvine is dragged around by the neck by “Social Community Prima Donnas.” These are people who claim the site as their own. They are just members, but very powerful ones. They think everything is spam and they want everyone in the site to know who they are and that they call the shots around there.
They can, and do, have people zapped if they rub them wrong. And admin just does what its told by these people.
The Decline of Social News Communities
Letting your Prima Donnas police your social site for you is the beginning of the end for such sites. They don’t care about anything but having more power than they’ve ever had in the real world and wielding it over people they imagine that beat them up in high school. They start going Columbine on new members as soon as they sign up and start contributing.
That’s the death blow for your social news site.
I will be watching out for “dead communities walking” from now on and posting them here so you know not to bother contributing to them. You’ll just get zapped.
The irony of all this is my most recent post on how to behave in these communities. Follow the rules. Post good content. Don’t seed your own stuff.
Then just hours later the dipshits at Newsvine close my account. I know why too. And it wasn’t justified under their own holier-than-thou altruistic “sounding” code of “honor.”
There’s one word missing from their code of honor at the bottom: Bullshit!
Newsvine is clearly just a money-making scheme for its owners. Writers and others do all the work and Newsvine cashes in. And they let the crazies run the place and run off good content producers.
They aren’t the only ones. I’ll rant about the others later.
EDIT:
Check out the new #1 result for “newsvine sucks.”
I warned ‘em. lol
Thanks everyone for your emails and thanks to the zealots at Newsvine for sending me so much traffic. Several subscribers were generated from this fiasco and, although not worth the trouble, it is a good start. I’d still rather the whole thing not happen and be able to help people over there who are interested in my topics. But the people who aren’t are the ones controlling the flow of information and memberships.
The thread over there is an amazing look into the minds of the anti-marketer. One comment talks about how “did you see his blog? All blog marketing and seo stuff.” As if that was supposed to be flat out evidence of my “evilness.” They hate marketers people.
Once again, though I can’t prove it because they took my stuff down, I didn’t post overly promotional content. I offer into the evidence the posts I have made here at FTR regarding how to act on social networks and how to follow the rules and become an authority on such sites. Written well before I was ousted from Snoozevine.
“Calvin: The user in question was posting one press release after another, linking back to his site. End of story. The CoH & ToS are quite clear. The guy made a choice…a poor one.”
Boy they love their leaders over there. All Calvin had to say was I posted press releases (which I absolutely did NOT do) and his flock appreciates the opportunity to blindly follow and backs him up.
I am responsible for thousands of marketers and SEOs who would otherwise (intentionally or unintentionally) spam social networks seeing my message that this is not cool and not a good way to interact with these communities. And for that, I get ousted for trying to play by the rules.
Anyway, so long Snoozevine! And thanks for all the traffic!
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Humphrey! Thanks for visiting!
Great post Jack! My feelings entirely. I had a non-commercial account with Newsvine, posted links and vids, with zero posts linking back to any of my sites or even linking to other web20 sites like hubpages etc. that then linked back to my sites. Strictly a “fun” account. Nothing dirty at all.
And guess what. The Newsvine fools bombed my account. Go figure. Must have been the subject matter I was posting about. Yeah like emergency preparedness is really contro. Heyho. Thanks for the great content you put out all the same.
Hey Jack,
At least you manage to contribute
They zapped my account after first 2 submits and funny thing was - the content wasn’t mine …. I was just trying to work on building my profile and create presence.
The idiocy just never dies and power hungry wimps who never manage to accomplish something on their own will will always kill innovation if permited to do so.
Alex
“Although I AM in there, I’m not the one who posted the thread above.”
No, you’re not the one who posted it - I am
I thought it would be interesting to see what kind of discussion came out of the story if it was posted to Newsvine itself. I’ve never used it before so I guess my having a new account seemed suspicious to them.
It’s too bad they removed all the stories - I would have liked to have seen them for myself. Now it’s your word against theirs, and I suspect your readers will believe you (as I do
) and theirs will believe them.
Oh well, plenty of other social news sites out there, and I’m sure there are many with a much higher readership than Newsvine.
Nat
Oh yeah - here’s a noteworthy outcome:
So far I’ve gotten about 50 hits off of your thread Nat! Thanks! As we know all too well, the ones spending time patting themselves on the back are the minority to the ones who came here and found a resource outside of Newsvine that they probably liked by and large.
New social marketing tactic: bring out the trolls in a social site, get kicked out, and tell all your readers about it so they can post it and send you a ton of traffic. lol
I was actually surprised at the first few responses - they were relatively calm & balanced compared to what I usually see on sites like that. It didn’t take long for it to deteriorate though.
I should know better than to get involved in those kind of discussions - they just serve to piss me off, but I just can’t seem to get it through my thick head that some things never change.
And as far as being part of the mainstream media, you’re right - who the hell wants that? I’d prefer to be as far from it as possible and keep my morals intact.
Nat
Hey Jack, and all…
Yahoo Answers is another one that has elite members who target certain writers. My account was shut down, being identified by them as spam. It took an appeal to get reinstated.
I have several thousand points racked up and many many “Best Answer” in several categories. I always try to give solid and helpful answers.
Not only that, Yahoo must blacklist Google’s blogspot.com because my answers that contain my blogspot blog url always get an error page when I try to post. When I remove the url, the answer gets through. hmmmmm?
I haven’t bothered with Yahoo Answers for a while because of the blocked blogspot url.
Jim
[...] Jack Humphrey recently wrote couple articles where he shares his outrage on account been suspended, apparently due to someone reporting him. Since he is a well respected blogger he managed to draw the person who marked him as bad user and now he is trying to justify himself. Funny how that works …. [...]
Jack ~ Good article. Your are a good writer.
Your friend,Old Dog
I’m now up to hundreds of hits from Newsvine. Seems their heavy-handedness has backfired.
Someone is recommending I get sued now, lol. Others reinforce their complete disdain for marketing at all. They say you can link back to your site, but not if you are selling anything.
OMG! Every link out of Newsvine is to a site selling something!!!! This is how ridiculous these people are. The altruists and hypocrites.
Let’s see folks:
You link to CNN, AP, and every other major paper in the world. Those people charge for content and most have so much advertising on their sites it’s hard to find the content.
Newsvine itself sells all kinds of things and SEO’s the hell out of its site. Newsvine survives off advertising and was bought out by a company run by stockholders who expect profits every quarter.
Get over yourselves and the holier than thou stance - you work for THE MAN himself idiots. And for free I might add.
Please do sue me. Would be one hell of a lot of fun exposing all this hypocrisy. At least people like me don’t pretend not to care about making a living and a profit.
If it weren’t for people like us you wouldn’t have the technology that runs your wee club over there. The software Newsvine is published on was built for a profit by people selling their services on the internet on a site much like mine.
So please, get over yourselves. I’ve been working online for 10 years, full-time for most of them, and have an actual sense of the history of the web. You are all repeating the same mantra of thousands of quacks who came before you over the last decade hoping for some ridiculous non-capitalist internet where everything is free and there was no advertising to support the web.
My tirade is against the e-hippies who have obviously found one last holdout on the web and it is Newsvine. Except you are sponsored, no, OWNED by corporate America, idiots. Please enlighten me as to why I shouldn’t find all this anti-marketing crap just a tad ironic!
There’s a group of folks based in Florida who lurk on Newsvine. They run this page:
http://newsviners.blogspot.com/
It does look like there’s a whole bunch of ego-driven drivel out there.
Thanks for putting this up. I’m gonna digg this.
Mikey.
Now that everyone knows what THEY think of US, let’s show them what we think of them…
http://collective-thoughts.com/2007/11/22/gilded-crown-of-the-hypocritical-social-media-czar/
Newsvine does suck. I was not aware of the rules initially and seeded articles I wrote. Fair enough. I was given a warning. They also deleted all my seeds. That was annoying. I seeded maybe 10 of my own articles.
Fast forward a month later. My website which is basically a news publication with a few writers was mentioned in an article on a highly respected News outlet in an article. I decided to seed that article from that News outlet. My account the next day was disabled on Newsvine. I am not sure why that would be against Newsvine rule. It was a legitmate news article which had a reference to my news outlet. I did not write that article nor had any association to this PR5 News outlet with its only televised program that published an article mentioning about my news outlet.
It looks like Newsvine is run by a bunch of morons to me. Googling for Newsvine does show a lot of disgruntled users. A news article is a news article. As long as its not spammy or questionable whether its valid news article, why the heck should it matter whether a reader or the author seed the articles? Isn’t it the point of newsvine to help spread the news.
Stay away from Newsvine. Its obviously going to fail. I hope it does fail. Anyone asking me about Newsvine, I’ll tell them how bad they are and advise them to stay clear. I’m in the news publishing industry and it sucks to be treated like this. No proper communications and just outright nazi type action.
Newsvine axed me without ever telling me why, but i found out from another Viner.
There are two people over there named Tedd Riggs and Bill Harrison who are good friends of admins Calvin and Emily.
Whoever these two don’t like, they run off to their buddy admins and whine about COH ‘violations’ until the admins cut the person in question off the Vine. But yet, these very same two people are allowed to post inane drivel, outright lies, and try to defame people on their own columns, with no fear of reprimand from either of the elitist admins.
What a joke and scam Newsvine is. Good writers get the boot, while they hold on to people who can’t put two sentences together, and then promote their writing on the front page of their site! Anyone know of other sites like Newsvine where this doesn’t go on?
I do not consider myself tech savy as I seem to evaluate a technology and then determine if it is worth having. That said I have been on the internet for nearly 13 years, back when is was only dial-up, now and have just recently (within a year) started to blog and use message boards. I have been reading Newsvine for longer than that but had not signed up until recently…maybe within the past 3 months.
I found it quite addicting but noticed a trend of have to always agree with the author or ’seeder’ of a story. It is as if you don’t agree with them, then don’t post. If you did disagree with the ‘higher up’s’ you where quickly labeled a ‘troll’. I didn’t even know what that meant until recently. Turns out, a ‘troll’ is considered in short: a trouble maker on message boards. But the more I read about the term the closer definition would be: one who has a legitimate, conflicting dialog to introduce to a discussion but doesn’t agree with the ‘community’.
I never posted on any story or subject that I didn’t have first hand knowledge on or and interest in. Yet I was still challenged by the ‘author’ for violations of the bogus CoH because of defending myself against the ‘Vines’ cronies. I actually was told I was wrong, and my posts deleted on a subject I had first has experience for over 30 years….my job! To be sure, I tend to use a sledgehammer approach when needed, but my post where nowhere near as inflammatory as some of the others. But since I didn’t agree with them….DELETE!
I eventually ended up having my account deleted with all of my post and seeds after a censorship war with one of the ‘favorites’. It is a shame, because there are a lot of casual users over there and they introduced some good dialog. It is now clear to me that the staff and the ones who have the control are a bunch of whiners who most likely never worked a hard day in their life and have always gotton their way. That would explain why you always have to agree with the story your commenting on. My guess is thier killin time in college while the wait for mom and dads next check to come in the mail all the while thinking they’re making a difference.
Some nice turns of phrase in this post Jack. I also get the impression that some of the social sites’ ‘Prima Donnas’ (as you described them) seem overly trigger-happy.
As someone who’s invested a substantial amount of time and money to start a new social shopping network, the last thing I’d want to do is boot good users for anything but a significant infraction.