The 12 Days Of Posts – Quality, Traffic And Criticism

On this second day of the 12 days of posts, I want to discuss a concept I have been thinking about regarding quality of someone’s output and the audience/traffic that it obtains.  As internet sites are much more interactive than TV shows, I will use those as more of an example here, but the same is true of TV shows, but it is just that no one interacts with you when you are watching a TV show, so you can’t gauge this concept in that framework.  Let me explain.

Why Are You Here? Said The Internet User

Whether you look on YouTube comments, or in forum threads, or on chats next to video streams, or anywhere on the internet where people can add and see other’s feedback on someone’s output right next to the output, you will often see someone say “if you don’t like this person’s material, why are you here?” at times when the feedback is negative or harsh.  This says a lot.  Since the internet has become so segmented, with people from each niche category coming together to mainly only talk or think about their niche, there are thousands of web locations like this.

To Accept Or Not To Accept Criticism

What this says is that traffic is quite a big representation of quality, or at least what you could call “enjoyed user experience”.  Criticism is not very highly valued, and it is usually taken as someone outside of a niche wanting to attack the niche, so people say to leave instead of taking into account criticisms that people may have.  Since the internet certainly does have a lot of folks that aren’t looking to bring a well-thought out argument to their messages, this view of new people to a niche translates to also ignoring those few that have relevant points to make.

Traffic And What It Represents

Since there is a lot of this “us versus them” mentality in groups that form on the Internet, the audience and traffic in these communities becomes much more relevant than it would be.  Logic is somewhat tossed out the window, and if, for example, a weight training site has a much larger audience than a yoga site, the yoga site will be viewed by the members of that weight training site as not as relevant.

Communities Are Comfortable, But Maybe Too Comfortable

I see this all the time in numerous places across the internet.  When a negative comment shows up on a video, there is often a response that says “if you don’t like the video, why bother commenting?”.  In a forum, someone that shows through their comments that they don’t support the forum’s views is treated like an outsider until they are more accepting of them.  There is a certain defensive tone that niche communities take in order to protect their comfort zone of being in the accepting niche community.  Due to this defensiveness, constructive criticism is much more likely to be tossed out or ignored, and that lowers the quality of discussion around the board.

Summary

I would like to summarize the message here.  Multitudes of communities across the internet are not very accepting of criticisms of them from outside their community, and this lowers the quality of those communities.  Second, since many communities present an attitude similar to “you’re either with us or against us”, audience and web traffic matters much more, since it turns into a battle of who has more people with them against the other group.  Traffic is sometimes all we have to use for comparison, because those who criticize are either shunned, or people are expected to find some other niche instead of criticizing(and so they are expected to never even leave criticizing remarks).

This message is not directed at any specific site or community.  I thought of 15-20 completely different Inernet communities while writing this, and most of them represented these qualities.  An “us versus them” mindset is always one that is narrow-minded, because “they” are actually the same as “us” in most aspects.

Let me know your thoughts in relation to these topics.  I am not immune to these issues of criticism, but I try to accept any that I see.

Tagged as: audience, criticism, quality, The 12 Days Of Posts, traffic