Generic wrote:But the one feature that sticks out in my mind is that you were only allowed to rate a certain number of songs a day. The idea behind this was to encourage you to be frugal with your recommendations (and also to discourage abuse), but I felt like it had the unfortunate side effect of distracting from the music itself.
First of all, I haven't added features like that. I haven't done anything to the original somesongs. The whole notion of me doing anything with somesongs.com is all completely hypothetical still, which is why I'm interested in what people think about whether it's even possible to resucitate it.
Second of all, that's only one specific detail about how thesixtyone.com chose to implement the concepts I was talking about. I didn't mean that I wanted to implement all the same concepts as thesixtyone.com in exactly the same way, so I think you were jumping to conclusions there. I don't think their site was perfect or anything, but it did seem to be effective in building an active userbase, so I think there must have been something to what they were doing that's worth looking at.
Spud wrote:Even if I WAS into the visual chaos and "come on in, you'll figure it out as you go" mentality that typifies video games, I would find it wildly inappropriate as a direction to take somesongs, which has more in common visually with Microsoft Excel than thesixtyone.
...
I don't think somesongs needs flashy graphics as a marketing device. It never did. t just needs people to use it. If it is made useful again, people will do that.
I didn't say "video game", and I don't think thesixtyone.com was really like a "video game" per se. I think by "game" I just meant something that makes using the site feel like play, like fun, like it's rewarding, like there are goals you can accomplish, some of which are presented to you in an easy to understand fashion. I think it's perfectly feasible to introduce some of those concepts of giving people encouragement to participate without introducing visual chaos or flashy graphics.
roymond wrote:Actually, a lot of people know a lot about why it isn't being used these days. Since the site has been broken, I wouldn't expect many people advertising it. It's broken, it needs to be fixed before finding new users. That's the purpose of this thread.
Last time I checked it was mostly functional again. The period where it was horribly broken was a while back, and I think it was due to a forced database upgrade conducted by Dreamhost or something, or some similar upgrade of a part of the system that involved updating some code. The code updates eventually did happen for a lot of the basic functionality. Some things still don't work, but you can sign up, create artists, post songs, rate songs, comment on songs, use the message board, etc.
jb wrote:I think you're going to have to hire a couple of front-end developers if you want to get it working anywhere close to what thesixtyone had going on.
I have the technical capabilities to implement it myself, I just don't have the time. It'd take me months or years of bits of my spare time here and there, so I have to weigh whether that sort of time investment would really be worth it. I am working on modifying the unofficial Song Fight! archive jukebox site to work like thesixtyone.com and lala.com, though, where you have an MP3 player that persists as you navigate around the site, and that keeps a playlist of the songs you've listened to in that session, etc. I've learned a lot of stuff building that site that I plan to apply to my somesongs knockoff if I ever have time and motivation to do so.
jb wrote:Not that I encourage that, because I think thesixtyone is a little bit ridiculous and rewards obssession way too much.
You and Spud seem to think alike.
That's all well and good as long as your little community continues to hover somewhere between too small and too large. But how would you feel if songfight.org had as little activity as somesongs.com? Would you just give up and walk away? Would you want to try to figure out how to motivate people to use the site and join the community? I don't feel like the people in the "it's fine the way it is" camp have really addressed the current total lack of activity and what could be done about that.
Reist wrote:A whole lot of stuff with screenshots
Reist, I agree with some of your points, and had already made some of those changes in the knockoff I was working on.
I disagree about the statistics page, though, and the extra personel information. I don't think the small "statistics" link in the footer really clutters things up, and I think it is useful to be able to quickly see the size of the community, how active it is, how much content there is, etc. As for the extra personel info, it's completely optional, so people can ignore it if they like. Or if they like they can provide some more info about themselves in a way that may help foster a greater sense of community among the users.
I actually disagree about the "Recent Activity" page, too. I used all three lists to determine when someone commented on one of my songs, replied to one of my comments, or rated one of my songs. There was often back catalog activity that I wouldn't have seen on the home page that showed up there, too, and sometimes led me to songs I liked that I might not have found otherwise.
As for the HTML tags, they are there to show you what HTML tags are allowed in the particular text box they are under. I think not labeling them as such is maybe not very user friendly, but I think it's user friendly to show people what they are allowed to type into the box.
As for the message board, I think wanting to remove it due to inactivity is kind of silly. You might as well remove the whole site, then. I mean, that's kind of what we're talking about here. When the site was active, the message board was useful for discussing the songs and the site, and again for helping to create a community. With no activity, how useful is any of it?
Anyway, I doubt those fairly small changes to the site would do anything to resurrect its community of users, but that's just me.