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Hi gang - it's my pleasure to announce that Ed Fry (http://twitter.com/edfryed) will be taking on the position of general manager of Inbound.org. As you've likely noticed, Dharmesh and I don't have nearly the time to devote to this amazing project/site that we should, and thus have hired Ed to help. As part of his new tenure, Ed's hoping folks will take this survey: https://docs.google.com/a/seomoz.org/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dHhwUFF1REZlSWpXaXpvOXBGZzRPc1E6MQ#gid=0 to help guide the next steps for development and expansion of Inbound.org. Really appreciate your participation to help make this community even better. Cheers! Rand (and Dharmesh)
I'd like to have a "favorites" list, or even just show me a list of what I've up-voted =D
+1 to see my up votes
A favorites list could be useful, I could use it as a bookmark function for all these interesting articles.
Look at all the upvotes/Inbound.org love so far! This is secretly just a ploy for Rand to try and knock Jason off the top spot of the leader board, isn't it! ;-)
No offense meant but I don't believe an 18 year old intern can run a community like this effectively. Does he have experience running a community at all?
If you meet Ed, you'll undoubtedly change your mind.
Well, unfortunately I am in Germany and I rarely visit the US. I hoped for something like "he ran an SEO forum since the age of 5" but apparently Inbound is his first gig as an community manager.
At age 18 I was a moderator of a forum with over 50,000 members, managed two separate forums that I had built (totaling around 20,000 members) and ran an IRC channel. Frankly, my community management skills were far superior when I was younger. I was enthusiastic, had nearly unlimited amounts of time (compared to now, where I have a few short hours after work) and, frankly, managing communities is something that younger people seem to do better. I don't know anything about Ed, but I know that his age is probably the last thing I would consider in a resume.
Sounds great, why didn't you apply for the job instead?
@Ted: Because I already have a job?
Zach: My name is "Tad".
http://www.yourteenbusiness.com/ (and that's two years old now) http://www.distilled.net/linkbait-guide/ 'nuff said
So a static site without comments and linkbait expertise makes a great community manager? Sorry, I am not convinced.
Tad you're a great guy, but honestly: why you hatin'? Just give him a chance. I understand your concerns, but I don't think Rand & Dharmesh hired someone they thought was incapable for the job.
Jon, I'm not "hatin". It's even strange that you think that. Also you know that I'm very supportive of people new to the Industry no matter their whereabouts or age. I do not have a personal problem with Ed either if you think so. A community is like a ship though, you join it because of the captain, not only the route or the destination. So when the captain jumps ship and declares the shipboy the new captain it sounds strange.
Hi Tad, I'm glad someone brought it up :) Generally, I think there is a false misconception and correlation around age, ability and experience. I haven't seen any 5 year olds managing online communities (can't wait to meet one though), but 16 year olds can sail around the world and win Gold Medals in the Olympics. In our industry, I know of a 16 year old in Dublin trying to reverse Googles algorithm in python, an 18 year old who bought out another SEO agency in Minneapolis, and then of course there is the legend than is Jon Cooper @pointblankseo. 18 years is a long time too… you've got to fill your time somehow! Sure, I haven't managed a several-thousand-strong community before. But you, me and everyone else here started what they were doing from somewhere... What I have done though is manage plenty of people before. Aged 14 first business venture was managing friends to sell cakes at school. Some days I didn't even work the stall I just left them to it, collecting the money at the end. The linkbait guide mentioned below was my project in Distilled. I organized interviews with the SEOs (much to their delight: https://twitter.com/paddymoogan/status/93998032416288768), managed the team of designers and managed all the outreach on the project. I've captained school rugby teams and have been Principal Trumpet of Hampshire County Youth Orchestra for the past two years ahead of Uni. Whether that sounds a lot or a little for managing a community, I agree I don't have all the answers, no, but I'm not a completely blank slate either. I have other things on my side. Working with Distilled I get to see first hand what effective management looks like from Will and Duncan. Rand, Dharmesh, the moderator and dev teams are all awesome guys and gals and are a pleasure to work with. And I'm in the UK, not the US. We ought to meetup sometime, especially with various awesome events in London. At the end of the day, the big positive with this is having someone dedicated to making Inbound.org a success. Rand + Dharmesh are both actual machines when it comes to getting shit done, but they both have said they don't have the time or headspace to really make this take off with everything else they're doing. I've big plans for Inbound.org, and I'm excited for what's in the pipeline. But I agree, I'm not an @jennita ... yet ;)
Holy shit did he just say I'm a legend? Yep, I'm liking this new move Rand. Bravo.
I have no doubt that you are a skillful and promising young man. Also I have no personal grudge against you. It's just that it's the very first instance I have ever heard of you. Let me ask you one thing too, would you want an 18 year old as the president of the United States? Probably not. A leadership role needs some extent of experience. An online community is a very fragile entity so when the impression arises that the founders are abandoning it it's not a good sign for the future of it. I'm just the messenger, so don't kill me.
@Tad Sure thing - I don't see it as a personal grudge, and I'm mostly glad that someone has picked up on it! :) Face-to-face, I've never had a problem with the age-experience thing, but I can see why being online and being objective about the facts it's harder to swallow. 18 year-old US President? It's an exceptional example, but if they proved themselves time and time again, I don't see the problem? The same for any 18... 17... 16 year-old CEO, entrepreneur and manager. RE: Rand and Dharmesh, I must stress that they're far from abandoning it. Looking at the numbers, both of them are investing substantially in the Inbound.org going forward. Both are very active members of the site. Both are evangelists to the industry (Rand's averaging ~100 days on the road per year?!!). Both care deeply about the sites success and I'm still reporting to them both. What they don't need so much is the managing individual moderators, member questions, filtering spam, managing uptime etc. To say they're jumping ship isn't fair on the shear investment of time evangelising and money into this project.
Cheers Rand :) Hi all - I'm excited to see what we can do with Inbound.org. There's a lot of great ideas floating around between the team of mods, Rand and Dharmesh, with many more from the survey. Big thanks for filling that out :) The aim is to make Inbound.org the go-to an incredible resource for our industry to help it grow and sustain itself. We'll actually be rebuilding the site with help of the folks from Tailwind (the guys behind the jobs board: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/rand-and-dharmesh-told-us-no-but-we-did-it-anyway) who are so incredibly full of hustle and up-for-it... each and every call or email from them has left me grinning ear-to-ear with excitement. Look out... this is just the beginning :) If you have any questions, you can find me on Twitter @edfryed Cheers, Ed
A mobile app for the iphone!!!! Please that would be amazing!!!!!!!!
Congrats Ed! Definitely an exciting project to get hold of and a great young talent yourself too!
Delegation FTW. Congrats to Ed, and a word of advice...jump in with both feet! What a great opportunity to take the reigns of this tribe and grow it.
Thanks Keith :) I'm excited to see exactly how far we can grow it!
Congrats on the hire Rand - Ed's obviously got a bright future; I'd struggle to turn it down myself - mentoring from you and Dharmesh would make for an epic career start.
Cheers Richard - I'd love to catchup sometime soon when I'm up in Shoreditch? :)
Thinking about all the people who've tried to hire Ed, and probably threw some nice offers his way, this is a huge win for Inbound. Congrats to all.
submitted my input. cheers.
How about "flair"? (I know, it's very similar from what reddit has) Like for example, you are a social media specialist, or a web developer, you could put that beside your username so people will see what part of internet marketing or development you do. I think that would be a great way to find like-minded people in the industry.
Good idea, just as long as "Social Media Expert" is a banned title:)
Hehe... agreed! Maybe some kind of subtitle/tag with usernames or on profile pages is in order. Good catch :)
More like hacker news and reddit. Because of some peoples spammy nature I think we need downvotes. "Ask Inbound", "Show Inbound", and "IAMA ___" might be fun.
Flag basically IS our downvote, just like it is on Hacker News.
Do people lose Karma if they're flagged (in the way that people lose mozPoints over on SEOmoz if their post/comment/answer is downvoted? Just curious to know. :-)
Did not know that. So when you flag something what happens?
Hi Geir, it alerts the moderators that it might be a spammy submission. The more flags, the more likely it'll get removed.
There should be a downvote and flag option for comments. It would help reduce the number of useless "Great post!" comments that show up frequently. HN has a habit of downvoting non-content comments which keeps the main area clear for real discussion.
HN has a downvote button, you just have to hit a certain karma threshold to activate it. There's a difference between flagging and downvoting, flagging should be reserved for blatant spam (automated pharma stuff) or obviously derogatory content, while downvoting is really for non-offensive off topic submissions or posts that don't follow the posting guidelines. The minimum karma threshold is an easy way to prevent gaming for the most part.
I think this is a great solution. Downvotes will keep content that doesn't really belong on the front page off, while flagging will get things actually removed from the site completely.
Won't prevent the "bury" brigade, or the rule of the few and powerful. Both of those are unacceptable to Dharmesh and I, hence it won't exist. I'd prefer that things I disagreed with make the front page regularly rather than making this a place where a singular mentality rules. Also - wow, that threshold on HN downvoting must be high. I've been a member there for 5 years and have 1K+ karma and still no button :-)
If there's enough flags by regular users the article gets removed.
My congrats to Ed! I've submitted my suggestions, which are more usability suggestions than anything else. Keep up the excellent work guys! :-)
Thanks Steve :) Agree, the second iteration of the site will be a good deal more usable. I really appreciated you comments.
Thanks Ed - glad I was able to help. :-)
Congrats! Wishlist: - favorites - thumbs down - follow people - re-share buttons - click analytics for posts I submit - report low quality / spam - tags Cheers
Congrats Ed! If you bought out some nicely designed buttons to "submit to inbound" that I can put at a bottom of my posts that would be great *cough* links *cough*. The down vote already exists. If you don't like something, don't up vote it.
You are in luck my friend. http://www.searcherize.com/add-a-submit-to-inbound-org-button-to-your-website/ If you're not a big fan of code, I believe there is a WordPress plugin somewhere too.
Additionally, a bookmarks toolbar button like the "Pin It" button for Pinterest would be cool. It could say "Inbound it"
Yes, yes, yes! Gotta love some scalable link building :) Also thinking such a button could do well to link to the comment threads on Inbound? Or will that irritate blog owners? I guess we could make that an optional feature..
I've suggested having something like a 'popular the week / month / ever' - would be useful for when I've been away so I know what I need to read first when I get back. Also some nice icons ot other graphical enhancement so I know what they topic is about - the ability to be able to filter topics too would be good. I really don't need to know about some stuff.
One idea for 'popular this week/month' I had was an email newsletter. It seems many of you have the same idea... Say, if you could subscribe to a daily or weekly roundup of the "best of the e-Commerce + SEO + Content" categories or something? Does that appeal?
I added my suggestions. Ideally we could use a tool like UserVoice or Get Satisfaction to vote for improvements. Anonymous voting up of comments here does not suffice IMHO.
Sure Tad; I know Distilled use public trello boards to allow people to submit ideas and vote things up: https://trello.com/board/distilledu-public-roadmap/4f27ebb65ddaf2d9782e0290 Easy to use, and free.
Looks good but you can't see who voted. So votes by members who only drop in occasionally carry the same weight as core members it seems.
How about, the top three article links on the homepage are 'incoming' and the voted in articles placed below that. My inclination is rarely to look at the incoming page. This might help promote a greater variety of articles to the main section.
This might be a nice experiment. I've always wanted HN to implement something like this. Particularly as a site grows, the number of Incoming increases faster than the front-page can accommodate. Since most people naturally only check the front-page, many of the new submissions on the incoming page are never seen, except by the small minority of people who check the Incoming page. Effectively, this means that the small minority of upvoters become the decision makers of what content is seen. The obvious solution is "More people should visit Incoming"! True, but clearly something that people don't do. Instead, putting some of the Incoming links on the frontpage (top or sidebar) would be an effective way to get more people voting on new submissions instead of simply piling onto the ones that are already on top.
Agree. Driving more people to incoming via a sidebar ("latest 3 submissions") or something would definitely help with more content going hot.
I'd like to be able to change my username or register with something other than Twitter. I used my "work" twitter account, but thought I would be able to attach my own name to it some day.
Another suggestion: I'd like to see the front-page ranking algorithm tweaked. In my opinion, articles "stick" to the front-page for too long. There are several articles that are 3 days old on the front-page but have gained few comments. If there is no discussion occurring, I'd like to see some of these posts fall off to make room for new content.
I did the survey. Although, a thumbs down option would probably be nice.
I suggested a button to see a preview of the post without leaving the hot page. I guess it could help us not losing time.
Forum that is all thankyou keep up the good work :)
Text only posts. Allow us to ask questions etc. and interact on topics that don't always have to have an article on an external site. Should hopefully help build up the community aspect of the site. Also - make access to the archived category posts more prominent! :)
+1 for archived category posts
Suggestions submitted. Congrats Ed!
Without having read all comments here I would like to have a more serialized menu of article types. Also best of week, best of month, best all time. Sometimes I may miss something but it would be nice to know that it is there waiting for me when I get to inbound.org. Tips, tools, commentary, SEO, rants, etc. There are some classifications (Content, SEO, Analytics) so I ask for a bit more thought there... I use inbound as a staple of my daily reading but it would help me cut to the chase. I read many posts that seem self serving and IMO do not belong. Other times I think inbound is on fire for quality learning and insights you just find in any other central location. Out of the box it serves me well. I use my other lists and readers, but is definitely in my "rounds" Thanks+
Three more: -Nested replies more than two deep. -Editing submission titles -Editing comments
Agree on the nested replies - I wish I could reply to some of these comments above more than two deep ^^^ !
The doc told me to kindly head back to the thread on Inbound and leave a comment. Umkay, done!
I second everyone who said editing/deleting comments. Forgot to mention that in my survey.
I suggested at least editing the comments within a certain window of time. Sometimes when people delete comments, the full conversation/thread is fragmented for the reader, and could be more harm than good.
Agree. Comment editing that closes after an hour would be great :)
A widget/iframe of a person's posted article stream could be cool. Something that people could put in their personal blog somewhere as a "this is content I endorse, read it if you are interested" type of thing.
What if Inbound.org allow is to build a network? I think is should be done so we can follow our favorite inbounder.
Congrats to Ed. Survey done as well.
Good luck Ed, hope to see positive change. Suspension for repeated self-submitters?
Did the survey. No sure if this would work so people may spot flaws it in immediately, but an idea nonetheless: I would add an 'author' tag to each post. So if Rand writes a blog post, then I submit it - if it gets 50 upvotes then Rand should get karma for writing good stuff. Encourages good content creation as well as sharing. If a user is not on inbound - no tag. I suppose you may have an issue with people claiming false authorship, but I don't doubt the community would stamp that out immediately.
Something like Digg labs had at one time, real-time display for stories
Just wanted to drop a line and let you know I answered the survey. Thanks for asking, Inbound!