Comment by timg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by timg | Hacker News Reader

No kidding. As much as some people around here hate to hear it, sometimes you have to FORCE your users provide content before they can receive their fill of content from your app. What are the benefits/costs of each approach?

Allowing users to receive without giving content:

1. Good: Maximizes the impact of your PR/ Lets you grow really fast over a short period of time.

2. Bad: Easy come, easy go. Since the users have no role as a content creator, they will be out of there the second your competitor has the slightest feature improvements over you.

Requiring every user to be a creator (edit- to receive full benefit from your app):

1. Bad: The start can be rough. Expect to have to really have to use some marketing ingenuity.

2. Good: Users will be locked in.

3. Good: Your site will (should) be far more valuable if more people are contributing. This, along with #1 will lead to exponential growth.

4. Maybe bad: With this abundance of content, it will be mandatory that you find a way to present the user with the content that is most relevant to him.

5. Good: You are monopolizing access to a lot of content. You can probably charge users directly for this access.

Thoughts?

Another bad of requiring everyone to be a creator, which depends on the sort of site you are making:

-Not everyone wants to or has the skills to be a creator.

I'm not a photographer. My pictures are barely good enough for myspace photo albums. No amount of coercion is going to get me to take and upload photos to flikr. It's only going to make me not use the site at all.

But in your example, the absence of photo albums on myspace is punished quite heavily in practice.

Right up until they were sitting on a billion dollar valuation, you could not even make your photos private to just your friends. Sharing was mandatory.

Note that I am not saying that zero content should be available until the user has made a contribution to the site, just that the site should at least keep something special for people who do. Most importantly, I am not saying that this practice is best for all sites or even the majority.

"Note that I am not saying that zero content should be available until the user has made a contribution to the site, just that the site should at least keep something special for people who do. Most importantly, I am not saying that this practice is best for all sites or even the majority."

I agree. On myspace, for example, much of the value is tied up in the actual user. Quality photos aren't important. What's important is that they are photos of a real person you can make comments on and send messages to. It makes sense for them to encourage participation to a greater degree.

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