This post is a “thank you” to Gary Sharma for doing such a great job with AlleyReporter.com. Kudos, Gary keep up the great work. AlleyReporter is an awesome guide to everything that is technology in NYC. If you haven’t seen it, do so now.
Now I’ve been a member of ASW for about a year and am one of the most active people on their forums. For those who don’t know ASW is an elite social network catering to the jetset. It’s a great site where you get to interact with artists, movie producers, hedgies and entrepreneurs. I’ve thrown events for people and ASW and gone to some great parties. I’ve made some good friends from it as well. However the site has serious flaws and every single active user of the site I know is very pissed off at them. Now, they may kick me off the site for this post but they need to hear it or the site will die or someone will listen to me and start a competitor…
1) Police. They police their forums and limit people to starting 3 threads a week. In a real community, moderation should be internal by its members via flagging (ala CL) and active smart members should be given moderator status (ala all the old webmaster forums). Instead they hire forum cops. I have had many threads deleted and almost kicked off the site. This one fact is enough to cause a mutiny. As an active member of the site i am routinely insulted when i should be the person they court.
2) Lack of real events section, sure you can post events and the events are great but there is no rsvp system and no way to do follow up on events. You target the jetset, why not offer event tools?
3) Shit Search. No tagging on the site and the search is the definition of poop in the dictionary
4) Horrible PM system. No search, no folders, no attachments, enough said.
5) They don’t do enough to encourage page views. I can go over this for about an hour. After all I am a marketer.
6) they started a magazine. they ripped off quintesentially and started a magazine. To me this is the sign of death. Worse off its not user generated but professionally written. There are published authors and big time magazine editors on ASW and they professionally publish. Give me a break. They also promote the magazine internally like a cheap hooker. It’s really sickening. Focus on your core competentecy - you’re community first, once you have a community that is working properly then be a publisher and if you are going to do that take advantage of your people.
Bottom line: Great idea, great community but ripe for failure because they do NOT listen to their community and are not community friendly. Still I spend time on it, too much time. What does that say?
