Ditto Blog

Posted tagged with 'changes'

  1. What we’ve done… and why

    OK. So we’ve moved the focus of the site away from voting hundreds of things up and down on huge public lists to crafting much more personal lists of favourites - which then go on to create huge public lists!

    So instead of ‘voting’ you now ‘add your list’ to an existing topic. So if you want to create your own list of ‘My favourite 60s albums ever’, you just find the topic that says ‘The best 60s albums of all time’ and add your list. The language and focus has changed, but just like before we’re adding up everyone’s favourites and aggregating the results on to a big public list - so in effect you are still voting (but only up), and still affecting the ‘chart’.

    Once you’ve created your own, personal list, and clicked the ‘done’ button, you can just drag the items into the order you want, annotate and explain your selections, and even write a little intro that anyone looking at your list can see.

    You can also email it to a friend, or get one of Pat’s quite splendid widgets that let you embed your list on a blog, Myspace page etc.

    So why have we done it? There’s a variety of reasons, and, since we’re being frank and honest with each other, some of the choices we’ve made in the past few months have been commerically driven. However, that said, we do honestly think the site in its current form is the best yet, and, though nothing’s ever perfect or ever really finished, we think this is the site we’ve been working towards, and what we’d have built first time round if we knew back then everything we’ve learned in the last 15 months. In fact, if any of you remember the original Ditto Alpha product (and 5Things before that!) you can see that the current model is somewhere between what we did back then and the Ditto Beta site. It’s all very Hegelian… ;)

    So, over to you. What do you think? Let us know below, or, if you’re shy - or planning on being particularly nasty, email us at feedback@ditto.net

    John

    Posted at 3:54 pm on 30/09/08

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    Comments: 3

  2. Create a list, RIP…

    Ok, one of the major, and we’re guessing more controversial changes we’re making is to remove the ability for users to create their own topics. 

    I’ll take some time to explain why… 

    Frankly, the vast majority of the topics people were creating were one of two things - either duplicates of topics we already had, or ‘my favourite somethings’. 

    We hold our hands up; they’re both our fault. In the first case the thing that was supposed to tell you if similar lists already existed on Ditto was, well, a bit rubbish, and in the second case, we obviously didn’t explain ourselves well enough. If you wanted to create a list of ‘My favourite movies’, the idea was you voted on ‘The best movies ever’, thereby creating a list of your favourites whilst at the same time contributing to an overall list of everyone’s favourite movies. 

    The new site - hopefully - is much more explicit about this. You can read much more about our reasons here. 

    We think by making it much clearer how to create lists of ‘my favourite movies’, we’ve removed the confusion that was behind well over half of our user-created lists.

    Now we don’t want to stop people creating new topics, but now, if you’ve got a good idea for a new topic, please email us at feedback@ditto.net. If you do have a good idea for something that’s not there already, we can create it for you (you’ll still get the credit), or possibly even give you special admin rights to create it yourself. 

    Thanks for listening. Any moans, questions or complaints, leave ‘em below, or if you prefer privacy, email us at feedback@ditto.net.

    Posted at 3:53 pm on 30/09/08

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    Comments: 1

  3. Big changes are afoot…

    OK, as promised, here are some of the big changes we’re going to be introducing to Ditto… 

    •  Negative votes are going. 
    •  Member’s profile pages will be simplified and integrated with the rest of the site better.
    •  We’ll be launching some smaller, more focussed sites using the new look Ditto technology

    Today, we’ll talk about negative votes… I know a lot of you will miss them; there’s always a bit of an evil thrill to be had giving something the big thumbs down - we get it too. Which is why we agonised over ways of keeping the concept of negative voting on Ditto Mk II, but after much thought and deliberation, it was clear that it just wasn’t going to be. 

    The best case for having negative votes is that, on a list like ‘Greatest Movies Of All Time’ you might find a movie you’ve seen and thought was an utter pile of absolute crap - so you vote it down. Fine, no problem. That’s kinda what they were there for. 

    But a lot of people are using the negative votes as a tactical option - I want my favourite movie to go to the top, therefore I’m going to vote everything else on the list down, whether I’ve seen it or not. And that’s perfectly reasonable and understandable. Unfortunately, it does kind of devalue the carefully thought out positive vote, and makes it harder for ‘rare gems’ to make it to the top of some of the smaller lists. 

    There are other reasons too. Removing negative votes simplifies and streamlines the whole experience and it fits in with our new (in fact, original) focus on crafting lists of personal favourites. For many other small but significant reasons, it’s a decision we’ve made. Hope you like it, or at least hope you don’t dislike it too much.

    Please, if you’ve got any thoughts, questions, moans or ideas, please let us know below, or if you’d like to ask us something in private, it’s feedback@ditto.net

    Thanks, and come back tomorrow for more! 

    Posted at 3:01 pm on 23/09/08

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    Comments: None