Editor’s note: This article was first published in November 2010. It describes Menéame’s karma, voting and spam-penalty system as it worked then and calls Digg a popular US network; Digg lost most of its users soon after and was sold in 2012. Menéame’s rules have changed since, and visit and vote figures are from 2010.
A study is being carried out on social networks in Spain, and I volunteered to take part and check some of the things being said about Menéame.net. I should say that I’ve never been a Menéame user and knew nothing about how it worked, so it wasn’t hard for me to put myself in the shoes of someone arriving at the network for the first time.
First of all, I’d like to make clear that what follows is not destructive criticism of the network, much less of Ricardo Galli, its creator, whom we think highly of because he had a great idea. But like any idea, once it becomes a business it has to be reviewed, adapted and, above all, innovated on to keep it in shape.
How Menéame.net works
I’ll briefly explain how Menéame works so as not to make this article too long. Menéame was born as a way to collect news from blogs and websites: users submit stories and the rest of the community votes on them, or “shakes” them (menear means “to shake” in Spanish).
The most-voted stories reach the front page, and the more votes a story gets, the more popularity the user who submitted it earns, which on Menéame is called “karma”. The more karma you have, the more privileges you get.
There are also negative votes, which can make a story or article disappear. The more negative votes a story receives, the more it hurts the karma of the user who submitted it, to the point where that user can lose all their karma and be blocked from posting more stories.
This is what Ricardo Galli calls “meritocracy”, and in a way that meritocracy is what’s killing the idea called Menéame. Menéame is based on the popular US network Digg, with some changes that in theory were meant as improvements. Below we’ll see how they work in practice.
What the Menéame study involved
We opened 15 user accounts from 5 different places in Spain. It would have been more interesting to do it from the same office, but that wasn’t possible. Besides those 15 accounts, each with its own instructions, JR (a journalist specializing in new technologies) interviewed a high-karma Menéame user; we’ll show the interview at the end.
He also spoke with several bloggers who offered their blogs for the experiment, knowing in advance that Menéame might penalize them. “It doesn’t matter, right now I don’t see any use in Menéame for my blog” was the answer from these 5 bloggers.
We chose good articles from around the blogosphere, including pieces from El Mundo, El Economista, El País, Europa Press and various blogs, this one among them.
To our surprise, as soon as we submitted a Europa Press story it received 3 negative votes before anyone had even read it. It came from a new user, and that alone got it penalized.
On the second try we submitted a story from the blog of one of our contributors, who prefers to stay out of this. I’ll just say he’s a great writer and the article was top-notch. It received 10 positive votes (meneos), and just when it looked like it would be well received, it got 4 negative votes accusing it of spam. To me, spam means pushing the same story over and over or overdoing the self-promotion, which made the spam label irrelevant in this case. I imagine anything that isn’t from Europa Press or a well-known outlet is considered spam.
We picked two similar articles by the same commentator. We gave one to our high-karma “insider”, and the other was submitted by a new user. Result: more than 150 positive votes in under 3 hours versus more than 7 negative votes in under 5 minutes. A new user against an established one. (One way to recover karma on Menéame is to vote for articles by people who already have good karma, so we’re back to a dog chasing its own tail.)
Then it was my turn. I took one of the most-read articles on my blog, which had been very well received on social networks in its day. Result: 19 negative votes, 10 of them for spam. Before I knew it there were comments on Menéame like “Eat a negative.” I pulled the article and submitted one from another blog on a very interesting subject, which, thanks to its topic, got more than 240 visits in under an hour, with some users even subscribing through the blog’s feed. That didn’t stop the negative votes from arriving once it picked up a few meneos: for spam, for being sensationalist and for being irrelevant.
New experiment: a new user submits 3 Europa Press stories, and what happens? Nothing. Our insider has submitted more than 10 stories from El País and nothing happens either. They’re not considered spam. By the second story I submitted from my blog, it was already a penalized blog on Menéame.
In Madrid, two “cloned” users were created, that is, two user accounts from the same ID. One of them resubmitted, from his clone account, the stories from media outlets he had already sent (El Mundo, Europa Press) with no problem. The other couldn’t resubmit his clone’s stories, because they came from “second-class” blogs and the URLs were already penalized.
Conclusions
This is a formula anyone could use to get any blog penalized. In this case we all knew we were submitting articles from our own blogs, but if we had picked someone else’s blog instead, that poor blogger would now find that his blog can’t get stories onto Menéame, because the people already inside have decided they’re in charge. They’ve taken over the network and blocked the flow of normal, natural traffic.
What if we teamed up? That’s what we did with the blog of my friend Gregorio, who didn’t know what we were planning. A new user submitted a very interesting article, «Los negocios de nuestros ex-presidentes» (“The business dealings of our former prime ministers”), from the MyFinanzas blog. It should have gone straight to the front page, because honestly it was the best story of the previous 24 hours, and Menéame had never covered it.
See also: The war between Facebook and Google heats up
As soon as it got 10 meneos in 2 minutes, the “I vote everything new down” crowd piled in, although this time they didn’t get their way, because 15 of us were making sure that article wasn’t penalized. And it wasn’t, although once you get negative votes you no longer reach the front page. Some of the negative votes were for spam, even though Gregorio knew nothing about this and his blog is certainly not mine. If our former prime ministers’ business dealings aren’t news, maybe Belén Esteban’s new lover is (she’s a Spanish gossip-show celebrity).
So, far from how Menéame is supposed to work, the conclusions are clear:
- It doesn’t collect news from blogs, but from sites that have already made a name for themselves.
- There’s an enormous lack of respect for new users.
- Bloggers aren’t respected, even though, while less important than national media, they offer a very different point of view that is often worth reading. As we all know, a newspaper leans right or left, while a blogger can take a neutral view.
- Anyone can ruin another person’s blog within the Menéame community; all it takes is having that blog submitted to the network by two clones.
- You can get 250 visits in an hour with an average visit time of 30 seconds, so very few people are actually interested in reading an article. They spend their time working out who submitted it so they can keep it from rising.
- “Meritocracy” is all very well, but when those who earned their merits early on have settled in at the top, it becomes a “dictatorcracy”. They can submit garbage to Menéame without getting a single negative vote, except from the odd clueless user who doesn’t know it’s mandatory to vote them up, and who pays the price later.
And the most important point: so what on earth is Menéame for?
If a network born to promote blogs treats a user who submits a single story from his own blog as a spammer, what’s the point of submitting stories from media outlets that don’t need promotion? When I want to read the news from El País, El Mundo and Europa Press, I don’t need to go to Menéame; I’m already subscribed to their feeds.
Of course, our insider explains this to us:
Journalist: Why do you use Menéame?
Insider: I use it to get visits to my blog.
Journalist: And don’t they mark you as spam? How do you do it?
Insider: It’s very simple. Once you have good karma, you pick a few high-profile stories and submit them. Users who have lost karma know they need to vote for articles by users like me to recover it, so you’re practically guaranteed the meneos. Out of every 5 or 10 stories, you send one from your own blog, and it works. To avoid being accused of spam, we usually agree with other users that they’ll submit a story from your blog and you’ll submit one from theirs.
Journalist: And is using Menéame worth it for your blog?
Insider: Not at all. The average Menéame user doesn’t really read the stories; they’re just trying to do the same as me, promote their blog. But since Menéame’s system often requires you to open a story before voting, they have to click through. I can get about 2,000 visits in 3 hours, and sometimes I’ve gone over 10,000, but my advertising income from it is practically zero, which shows they barely look around your blog. They only come in for the sake of it, although those visits do help me climb the rankings in some directories. That’s the only thing that makes it worthwhile.
Journalist: Is it true that you sometimes vote down a good story that could reach the front page simply because the user who submitted it is new?
Insider: Not sometimes, almost always. I have to say I don’t agree with that practice and I don’t do it myself, but I can’t speak for the colleagues who do. And it’s not because the user is new, but because they’re competition, and nobody likes that.
No comment. Today we can say that Menéame doesn’t have gaps, it has oceans, and it ought to fix them; I know it has received several complaints asking it to improve. I’ll say it again: as an idea and as a way to promote a blog, Menéame is excellent. But it should take measures such as stopping long-standing users from voting down a new user’s first article, or simply tracking negative votes and penalizing anyone who votes everything down with the sole aim of wrecking someone else’s story or good article.
This has been pointed out to Ricardo Galli several times, but he has ignored it because, for now, he has the wind at his back. So let me remind him that the Titanic was sailing with the wind at its back and at full steam one minute before it hit an iceberg.
Success is hard, Ricardo, but staying on top in the world of internet fads is very complicated. Improve your system, because in the long run users reward and punish.
P.S. I had planned to submit this article to Menéame just to see how it was voted, but I’ll have to pass, since this blog is one of the “non grata” on that network. I have to admit, though, that I enjoyed this little experiment.
This is a small preview of an article that will be published in a few months in a national outlet, so I’ve only been able to publish what I was allowed to. It will cover all the social networks, with their advantages and disadvantages, so if it follows this line, I’m sure it will be well worth reading.
Featured image: Pinerineks, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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