Gather is rich in content, so rich we are beginning to be buried in it. The group idea, the tag ideas are all great tools to allow us to access and filter content. The trouble is, to be noticed through all the content, authors are spamming groups with their work and peppering their articles with tags.
We have become blinded by content.
Why is the Sustainable Living Group choked with poetry that has nothing to do with living a sustainable life?
Why am I buzzed by the "Sandy/Liz" fiasco on a Family Law Group?
Why do I have to page and page to find the content promised by the group name?
I have no problem with the practice of publishing the same piece to multiple groups, after all the purpose for publishing on the web is to be read and appreciated by the greatest number of people. There are many groups on Gather that are open to everything and everybody, but these are generalized groups. The beauty of groups is supposed to serve the reader and the author by identifying a specific interest, not by becoming another box to check on the Publish Page.
For an owner of a group, content patrolling is becoming a major investment in time. Here are a few modest proposals for cleaning up the groups.
Categories
I propose authors be required to select a category from a List Box for each article they publish.
The categories would include things like:
Article
Chat
Essay
Everything
Humor
Musing
Poetry
Story
Group could then filter in or filter out which category the group is willing to publish. This would reduce a great deal of the workload that Gather currently shifts to group owners.
For instance, a Good Morning Gather group might require the category of Chat, whereas the Political Essay group might exclude Chat.
Create Multiple Group Roles:
The current Gather group structure places too much of a burden of time on group owners. Let's give them some help by letting owners delegate the responsibility to others. One of the problems I have noticed with Gather is that there are many abandoned but active groups. Often the Featured Articles have not changed in almost a year, yet these groups attract scores of articles on a daily basis. Editors are sorely needed.
Each group should be able to assign the following roles:
Owner - the person who starts a group.
Editor - can share the work of the owner by editing out the fluff.
Contributor - can publish to a group
Member - can publish comments to group articles.
Reader - a subscriber to the group.
I hope Gather would consider these ideas and to enrich our shared experience.
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Comments: 31
But, yes, there are a lot of things posted to groups that have nothing to do with the group's intent and tags.
However, doing this also upsets those like yourself and even myself at times, that have to wade through the things that aren't the content they joined to see and read.
The tags should work. The groups should work. It's not a bad design, in my opinion. I would like to see people be more careful.
Look at the group Living a sustainable life. It is one of the more popular groups on Gather. Roughly half of the articles have nothing at all to do with the topic. Even the Gather Editorial Team has posted articles about the State of The Union Address on the site.
Now maybe one can honestly suggest that a poem or a discussion on The State of The Union touch on the topic of Sustainability.....but then you read the article and there is nothing at all that references sustainability.
With 1,818 members culling the articles becomes a chore that someone has to do on a daily basis so the group can serve the people it was created for. That task should be made easier and should be shared.
I think posting an article to a hundred groups with a wide variety of interests wipes out the entire purpose of having Groups. People in general should pay attention to what groups they are in, and what the groups represent. If write a poem on how much you love your cat, it obviously should not be submitted to political, photographic, religious or Groups that have been set up for dog lovers!!
I've said all of this before, but it continues to go on. I thing some feel it will increase their readership, but it turns me against reading anything by these people!
Sorry for the typos!!
Marsha, I completely agree - on both counts. Yes, it increases readership (it has to, because that's the only way to explain a boring article posted to a thousand groups making the "Most Read" articles page), and yes, it turns those readers against you in the long run.
I like Greg's suggestion to create group categories and give other members an opportunity to share the responsibility for keeping groups on topic.
I think you bring up some very important points and it's a topic that I am very interested in addressing at Gather. I'm very concerned with the practice of tag/group spamming.
We must rely on the community to tag and classify content, but we also need some level of safe guards to ensure that readers can find the content they are looking for. Groups are central to gather and we have to ensure we are providing tools to help owners buld and manage the "brand" of thier group.
I like the idea of some form of automated (or semi-automated) process for qualifying content published o a group. Perhaps this should be based upon the tags that the author has established istead of a category? We could use the group tags setup by the group owner to verify that content being published to the group is permitted? So if your group is tagged only with "dogs" and someone publishes content tagged with "cats" to your group, the content is rejected automatically or perhaps requires manual approval by the group owner.
Finding good quality content gets harder as the quantity of content gets larger even if we have perfect tagging and clasification. It's a topic of stong research here at Gather that we have been exploring. Even if everyone published and tagged content "perfectly" we would still have a problem with finding good content given the exploding quantity (this is a good problem!). In informaion science it's called precision and recall. You can read more in my article on that at:
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976725099
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John Mihalik is Gather's CTO
The reason that I suggested "category" rather than "tag" was to mandate an either or choice. I fear if we allow group selection on the basis of tags, that spammers will be tempted to load their article with key tags.
As for tags, why not allow searches combining multiple tags? For instance if my readers would like to find my stories about cars, they could enter "Story, car, memory". This would be a very powerful tool.
Combine that with drill down on members and groups too, like "cars -> radio -> Greg Schiller" (in any order of course). I think it provides a limitless exploration ability.
I moderate most of my groups and I can tell when I get emails for many groups in a row that it is something that will be off topic. There is no way an article will fit my child birthday parties group and my auto reviews group, but they keep posting.
I have deleted people from groups who continued to do those things. I also noticed that the gather editorial team posts in wrong groups. I did get an email from the gather content team recently to see if it was okay to post a business guide to one of my groups, so that was good to ask beforehand.
I think the way they are going with the channels they listed under the gather corps is how they will be categorizing the site eventually? I agree about tags since I find so much off topic under education and then some articles have like 8 lines of tags and I think that gather needs to set a limit to how many tags an article will take.
Everyone who sends their off topic articles says the same thing that it is for a good cause or blah blah, and these are the same that send spam emails to read all their articles.
I love the title of this article as well - they should feature this article in the group. Nice to see someone from gather leave comments and now off to read his article.