Svbtle is hiring to build the future of news and opinion on the web
blog.svbtle.com
blog.svbtle.com
It's.. a curated collection of blogs? Why can't you just have a blog? I've probably been linked a dozen or so blogs inside that network (always from HN, I've never noticed traction anywhere else), but at no point has there been any cross promotion, so the fact that it was inside svbtle barely seemed to matter.
On 'barely': so far the fast majority of posts that have come out of svbtle have not actually been very good, and the curated 'we are the cream of the internet crop' pretentious feeling you get is not that positive.
Basicially, for me, a blog being inside svbtle seems to have negligible effect, and that effect is a negative one.
Maybe I'm missing the point though.
Dave McClure posted a really thoughtful post about late bloomers recently, and the general reaction was "Wait...Dave McClure wrote that?" Yeah, you can't tell, because his blog looks exactly like 20+ other ones! This is the same pet peeve I had with WPTouch...everything looks the same and it destroys branding. (Not hoity-toity Fortune 500 company "branding"--just your picture on the blog, or something that indicates your blog is written by, you know, you, and not some anonymous random person. Especially when you are Dave McClure.)
To add a constructive point to this: http://jobs.problogger.net/ is a way, WAY better place to hire writers than a Hacker News post. We posted a job opening for some writers on there and got back some amazing resumes, including people who had media credentials galore and who had written for top newspapers and magazines. This seems like it'd be right up Svbtle's alley.
You're supposed to id a successful blogger by his writing style, not by the looks of his blog.
Did people have trouble reading Roger Ebert or H.L Mencken, because they wrote in a newspaper in the same type and pages as other people?
Plus, with an RSS reader, all blogs look even MORE the same.
My question to you is, has the fact that it's on Svbtle changed anything about it? Do you know follow everyone on that network because you presume they will be good?
So: if I was a great writer and I made a site that looked as nice would I be better or worse off compared to if I was under Svtble's umbrella?
It's a judgement the individual has to make: do the potential discovery/cross-promotion benefits (which do not seem to be clear just now) of Svbtle outweight the potential issue with getting buried amongst a sea of other great writers?
They get a UI which is custom-designed to focus on writing and little else. Dustin Curtis explains it here - http://dcurt.is/codename-svbtle
(the style of those blogs as a reader is OK, I've seen better and I've seen worse. If a blog has good content but is hard to read there are plenty of ways of fixing it, so design is not a big deal).
When it was first shown, there was a common feeling in the posts of not being picked by a kid at school to play in the lunch time soccer team. :P
The internet, and I guess I'll say life in general, needs more curation and less dumping. We speak of design and other wonderful things yet we encourage mindless undesign dribble in apparent content creation, relationships and other ways—it strikes of me being partial whores.
That is not to disparage the platform itself -- I like the style and the emphasis it places on content -- nor Dustin, who I find pretty fascinating, but the blogs just aren't good. I don't mean 'not good' in the sense of 'oh, this is poor writing', but in the sense of 'the consumption of this content was not worth my time.'
A few examples: - Dave McClure, who I admire and respect, writing a ridiculous blog post about 'hoping to be a late bloomer.' Dude, you have a Wikipedia article about yourself.
- Dalton Caldwell, who's proved himself time and time again to be prescient (his 2010 YC speech is wonderful in its truths), has been blogging about the importance of app.net. If I'm a developer, a tweeter, and a general tech enthusiast who, after three pretty lengthy blog posts, still doesn't understand what a "decentralized real-time feed" is -- let alone why its important -- then something is wrong.
- Dozens of fluff pieces which serve as little more than porn for the SV crowd.
I want Svbtle to succeed, and honestly think it will. I don't think that success is going to come when its definition of 'curation' involves what it currently does.
I agree with you—there needs to be a lot more than just curating who posts or at least the seemingly main prerequisite being well known in an area.
Yeah, over time once the network matures, Dustin improves upon his idea, etc, it will be much better.
(And don't worry, I'm not being inconsistent; I find designers pretentious too, and design fanboys more so)
I'm thankful that there are people making concerted effort to improve or at least find some of the better ones. Maybe the person does have better taste than you in some regards? What's so wrong with that?
Admittedly, I find the notion of someone having better taste than someone else somewhat amusing and it's not something I particularly concern myself with and this perhaps explains some of the amazement I have with the knees of people around here. :)
I see curation as a necessary evil given that museums and galleries have limited space and funds. So I don't see the curators as pretentious; the job has to be done by someone, it wouldn't be feasible to let each viewer choose for themselves. And AIUI the curators are usually hired by a museum rather than self-appointed.
>Do you think all 'designers' are pretentious?
No, I exaggerated; there are good, humble designers out there. But a large proportion of both the HN crowd and designers in general seem to have a very inflated view of the importance of design, and their own abilities. If everything designers said here was true, amazon.com would have about 1/8th of a user.
> Maybe the person does have better taste than you in some regards? What's so wrong with that?
Something about this particular instance seems to cross my mental line between recommending me things to read (which I like) and telling me what to read. I think it's just that the policy seems unnecessarily exclusive; publishing a cool theme for anyone to use would be great, as would "here's a list of good blogs you might want to follow". But the undertone I'm picking up is "svbtle will contain everything worth reading". Maybe I'm reading too much into it.
Dustin has a lot that we didn't - a good sense of design, a large following, writers already contributing, and from the look of this, some cash. We had writers too, but they were checking out the latest fad, not actually writing for their own purposes. We didnt have the followers/brand awareness to bootstrap traffic - I think svbtle does.
I think he's doing some of the things which for us were mistakes, but they might not be in the context of svbtle. For example, we also made our own CMS instead of using wordpress. That was definitely a mistake for us, but I'm not convinced it is here - could go either way.
He's making the branding all about svbtle instead of about the journalist. That was definitely a mistake for us, again I'm not positive it is a mistake here - svbtle actually has a brand (even if some people think its a pretentious one).
He's making it about journalism instead of about blogging. I think that's a mistake. Journalism is a horrible niche to be in and I would hate to be a journalist. It has expectation of journalistic purity and a hypocritical hype machine around traffic. Better to be a blog network - I think it's closer to what svbtle is now and I believe that has the potential to be bigger than just journalism.
We werent motivated by journalism - I've never heard of Dustin being either. I think he made svbtle to be a better blog, so why not focus on that? I could be wrong here - I dont know Dustin well at all.
I think they're aiming for the right level of writer - definitely those who want to make something for themselves. We didnt: http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/why-we-shut-newstilt-down...
Anyway, this looks like it might work. I cringe when I read about it because it brings back the awful memories of a failed startup, but I could see this succeeding. Best of luck Dvstin!
I mean, I fully agree with the premise of the current state of journalism.
This solution does seem awesome - it's one of the reasons I love The Economist.
But as a potential writer, I am not keen on necessarily jumping into something where I don't know what the future might look like.
It's a bold claim/goal with, in my experience, a dearth of successful precedent (in cases where there is non-trivial revenue, of course) and tells me the business model will certainly be interesting.
Still, there is a very clever plan unfolding and it's pretty cool. Look forward to seeing more.
Is there some cue in the writing on this page that suggests that they're hoping to suck?
In retrospect, PandoDaily would probably make me jump to "terrible journalism", too.
I hope it's more like the latter!
I think sites like PandoDaily have a problem similar to the one CNN has: they have a mandate to produce more news content than there is to report. In CNN's case it's because they've commandeered a 24/7 cable channel and entered into a ridiculous competition; in the tech/trade press, it's because they've got such a narrow scope --- and again, because they're in what they perceive as a winner-take-all competition with each other.
(just kidding)
What would you like the terms to be?
BTW, congratulations are in order for you topping the 100k!
a target such as cumulative pageviews, or that the aggregate svbtle website will not become a major source of tech opinion (and will not break into the techmeme leaderboard[1])
edit: seems like everyone can create a bet on that site.
Disclaimer: This was my "weekend" project a year or so back. A revamp is in order!