In terms of how it's programmed and designed, Plime is my favorite of the social news sites.
Most sites have people submitting their own material before fully joining the community.
It's a shame that people do everything possible to drive new users away.

Could you please specify what exactly your problems were/are?

I see some points on that article that are inaccurate. Moderators for example. Plime does not have any. The only person that can be called a moderator is the site's creator. All other users are regular users. By gaining status in the community (thanks to up-votes), they gain more 'power' to control the site. Someone who does not follow the rules and who is a bad person in the community will not reach such a level.

Furthermore, plime is rather new. So the point about the FAQ makes sense. The plime FAQ is being worked on (my the community again) in this forum topic: http://www.plime.com/f/593/

It's not about MY problems with the site. I've already stated that I like Plime.
I just think it's a shame that people are driving potential members away. From the article, it really seems that this guy was looking for a new community to join. If you check out the comments on the stories he posted, I don't think he'll be back.
Moreso, in this article's comments you can see that other people have had the same bad experience.

Sorry I slightly misunderstood.
I posted a reply to his article, and it's a shame he feels this way. The biggest problem with that however is that he has his facts wrong. Other than commenting on posts like his, how else can we correct these people?

I think, what this person fails to see is that if everyone did what he did and posted links to personal sites there would be a ridiculous amount of rubbish (And possibly offensive) content on this site, if i wanted to read someones blogs, i would go to a blog site, which this is not.

I think the good and bad points in the article are fair, Jax is working on a FAQ, and not too much could be done about people messing with the Karma system, but I think it works well. There may be a little bit of "your new, we don't like you" as the people who post and comment tend to be the same group, and am I right in saying a large part of the early adopters are from w1k? So they have history with each other. That said, Plime is my daily used site for all things newsey, it rawks :)

I think his points were dead on for the most part. People were rude to him, not for the sake of being rude, but it felt that way to him nonetheless and the hurt feelings weren't really necessary.

This is the same complaint communities like Wikipedia garner though. There are active users needed to moderate out the good from the bad, and when users who submit bad stuff get moderated, they accuse wikipedia of being arbitrary "content nazis".

The solution I think is to make it take longer to post new links here. Let people comment first and get a feel for what is and is not acceptable before diving right in with something unacceptable, getting shot down and not returning.

I have to agree with teh critters, plime does indeed rock!

I think that this thing is working itself out rather well, with a kind and caring owner in the frey...things can always improve within a community.

I think it would be fair to post his link, If we are to discuss how, in fact, he was treated.

Now that I can comment...

Why not set a user to only be able to submit one or two items a day until their karma goes up?

You also need to do something about the zero karma lock-out. It makes it very hard to respond to someone when you can't do anything!

I'll be reporting on Plime after a month or so. The only problem I encountered was related to a particular user and not the site itself. I like moderated link sites such as Plime. The transparency is great!

Also, if you want to enforce a "don't submit your own stuff" rule why not block all submissions from a user if it comes from the site they registered as being their own?

I'm sorry. You weren't rude at all. I was confusing your comments / actions with another members against a new blogger (which was already discussed in the forum).

That'd be pretty easy to circumnavigate. :)

Plime does have multiple categories for content but there is a need for a single document (the FAQ work in progress) where a new user can go to see just what is and what is not acceptable for posting here.

All on line communities develop biases based on their most active members. Just look at Digg and you can see that they have an obvious left wing, Apple bias. Much of that comes from the 'cult of personality' that has built around Kevin Rose. One day he mentions how much he likes a certain dot com and the next week the site is flooded with stories from that dot com!

If I, as a new user, see a comment from a high karma member I'm going to feel there is more weight behind that comment and act accordingly. The high karma members set the tone for the community. I understand the desire not to see spam and junk links on the site (and that is a good thing) but, if the site wants to grow, you need to have something in place that educates new users in how to act and behave on Plim.

HAHAHAHA! That's why we love him!

True. Spammers can also just make a ton of dupe accounts and use them to spam with.

I've read probably more than I should over the course of the last few months concerning the other sites. What a lot of the entrenched users here fail to understand is that the good bloggers are going to do more for this site than you can imagine. On the flip side, if all they get is a bad experience, they're going to do more damage than you can imagine. The linked blog post is only one example of a bad experience and I'm sure if I looked hard enough, I could find more.

If a blogger is submitting original material, what's the harm of that getting through if the same blogger is helping the system instead of hurting it? Yes, I'm one of those that downvotes the sploggers as soon as I see them. Yes, I've taken a few out. And yes, I've also submitted my own stuff (some of which was rightfully deleted). As a "noob" however, I felt insulted at first and I really don't want other people to go through that. A lot of people don't have the thick skin I have (I'm a retired jarhead).

Many of the good bloggers are leaving places like digg and reddit specifically because of the site nazis. I wrote a post about that earlier on my blog (which I won't link here). I know how to help them, if they want the help, but that's beside the point. Do we want Plime to turn into one of those other sites, or do we want something better?

I look long and hard at a submission before I downvote it, compared to upvoting without looking so hard. I also read ALL the comments and vote on them as well (and some of you may have noticed that). I think this is how it SHOULD be handled or Plime will indeed turn into another digg clone.

That is exactly what was done in lieu of our FAQ's.
Now, while I don't agree with the fact that your comments were voted down until you reached a zero Karma, I do agree with your submission being deleted.
What specifically do you disagree with in the way you were treated?

Aside from being voted down to zero karma?

to be honest it was the way you responded one I replied about the nature of my two submissions. Rather than say,

"Oh, you're doing a review? Why not check out our 'work in progress' FAQ and these few links to help you out."

You came back with a simple statement saying you don't care about why a new user is here but instead you only care about Plim. Which is quite a strange thing to say to someone who has just told you they are doing research for a review.

And how, pray tell, would you know about the blog site? This is why bloggers submit blog articles in the first place. There are a lot of sploggers ALREADY posting a "ridiculous amount of rubbish". As users, we have to separate the wheat from the chaff regardless of the source or else why bother to vote at all? Isn't this the whole argument in a nutshell, not lumping bloggers and sploggers together. When you do that, it's just another form of prejudice.

Yes.

Steve;

I'm not trying to judge or anything - I really want to know. Why do I want to know about a blog site? What motivates people to read or write blogs?

It seems to me this is kind of the point of the discussion. What purpose do blogs serve?