Matrix Megamind. What does the pattern thinking lead to?

No, I'm not quixing. Just a little more than a month ago, one of my failed clients gave me instead of ordering a link to a book about startups, which he said was simply obliged to blow up my sleeping mega brain. After some deliberation, I did buy this book, which is not too cheap by the way , but I am going to introduce those who wish to its content a little later. As a result of the reading process, physically, my brain seemed to remain in place, but the look changed not only at the startup startup mechanism, but also at the many processes surrounding me.

In the good old days, the court jester was given the right to talk about such things, for one hint that the Brave Knight in armor parted with his head. Therefore, assuming the appearance of a harmless and eccentric Sancho Panza, which is much more suited to my today's build, I would venture to launch an attack on the matrix. The matrix of the standard approach to completely different platforms for which Habr was upset. As a person trying to publish articles from all three sites from time to time, I can state the fact that we got platforms with different audiences and different starting resources. It seems to me that the potential of Megamind today is far from being revealed 100 percent, despite the fact that the idea of ​​its creation is excellent! Let's dream up on the topic: whether it is possible to increase the popularity of Megamind by slightly changing the rules of the game for its participants, compared to the parent Habr.

Nothing is as valuable as reputation

One of the main tools that encourages people in this world to perform actions is their rating among their own kind. Megamind in this sense is a copy of humanity. There is also a rating that many try to conquer and maintain by posting their materials. The rules for calculating this rating can stimulate the publication of interesting and deep articles, attracting new users and interesting authors to the site, or they can contribute to the streams of uninteresting and incoherent material, which lose interesting articles. What will be the result of the development according to the second scenario, I suggest that the readers think independently.
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History lesson. Birth of Megamind

For many years of existence of Habr as a whole, the original, but very effective mechanism of encouraging interesting authors and fighting tram rudeness has been perfected. Periodically there were excesses, especially with newbies as it happened once with me, but in general the mechanism worked not badly and after two or three attempts the novice intuitively understood simple rules, made contact with the audience and could write quite rating articles if he invested his experience in them and the soul, rather than trying to do nothing with graphomania, free evening.

However, Habr with the expansion of the audience was waiting for the same process that happened with the Internet. In those days, when I began to use it, the Internet was the lot of a narrow circle of IT professionals. A few years later, mainly due to e-mail capabilities, business began to penetrate into it. Even later, the expansion of communication channels, the simplification of the interface and the reduction in the cost of traffic led to his bosom of adolescents, housewives, POPs, and even politicians.

The high entry threshold on Habré for authors is not too conducive to the invasion of housewives, but here are stories telling how “moon rovers plowing boundless spaces of cold Cosmos” over time, obviously, very interesting articles of narrow professionals began to score. Not everyone liked this process and the most desperate began to propose in their letters to the administration and even articles ways to resolve this conflict.


In the end, an almost ingenious solution was found - the separation of the site. Giktayms separated from Habr - a platform for fans of popular science content, reviews of interesting new products from the world of gadgets and wonders of crowdfunding.

In my opinion, this is a very elegant solution, but as a result of the division, a third platform appeared, which was planned as a place for communication of people to research and use of IT business processes, which received a slightly strange name - Megamind. In order not to offend anyone, each participant’s karma was carefully duplicated on all three venues. The rules on which the rating is calculated, too. Despite the difficult transition period, which many were dissatisfied with, everything gradually settled down. The first two sites began to function quite normally, but with the third one, so far everything is not so rosy.

Megamind Scalpel

The problem is that for many years Habr has positioned itself as a community of developers. People with a mercantile mindset - project managers, marketers, and PR people in his ranks were disliked. For what sometimes not only mercilessly minus, but also got banned, equating their materials with self-praise. As a result, their circle turned out to be significantly narrower than the audience of the two adjacent sites. Not the last role was probably played by the fact that there will be more developers than managers. One way or another, the transition mechanisms to the new three-way system worked perfectly for the two sites and somehow didn’t suit the Megamind. They turned out to be too rough for such a thin structure with a small number of regular readers. It seems that the patient was operated with an ax, not a scalpel.

What am I talking about? First of all, of course, about the rating system.

Green Cat Effect

The pillar of the existing system - the rating can not fall below karma, divided by ten. The system works fine on Habré, protecting the position of regular authors of content high-rating articles from random upstarts. I will explain how. A good analytical article takes a lot of time and effort. Suppose I write average quality articles, but for those of them that score about fifty points on Habré after its rastroeniya takes at least two or three days. I sometimes carry fateful ones in myself for weeks, then I write pieces for more than one day, then merge, correct mistakes, eliminate repetitions ... As far as I know, many good articles from other authors are also born not simply and not quickly. Sometimes they describe the process to which the author has given more than one month and sometimes a year of his life. At the same time, a few lines with a copied photo, commenting on the relevant news, can bring anyone up to hundreds of pluses without any effort. Due to the existence of the lower bound of the rating on the well-established platform over the years, old-timers can occasionally produce high-quality content while being constantly present at the top of the table. Everyone benefits from this and it is FAIR.

What happened on the Megamind? At the birth of this platform, all habrazhiteli duplicated the size of karma from the parent resource. To better understand the consequences, let's look at the cherished top ten leaders of Megamind.



The king of the resource is the Green Cat. In general, I have a very good attitude towards cats, and this one especially. He really has a talent for writing about space. He is a pro in this area, plus the erudite to look for! At Giktayme, each of his articles is an event that tens of thousands of people are waiting for. Less often today it is published on Habré, after all, his specialization is more focused on popular science topics. Casus of Megamind is that it consistently occupies the first place there without publishing a single article for it. Okay. Suppose that our king received sacred authority from the administration of the site. There is still the Queen in England. No one chose her, she won her place not for outstanding achievements in politics, science or art, but by inheritance. And they seem to live quite well, and democracy is not like us. In general, long live the king, although, of course, the king, who does not appear in his kingdom and is not interested in the life of his subjects, is nonsense, but let's go further down the list.

The fifth place on the site also does not have a single article. We will consider him the crown prince. But since we got involved in this study, let's dig it deeper. Places 3, 9 and 10 are also occupied by very respected people, but, oddly enough, they did not write more than one post during the existence of this resource. It’s just that some of their rather ancient articles were moved by the administration to the Megamind site during the division.

We continue the study.

Leader number 4. Posted on the site one cool article of very strange content , which gained as much as TWO plus and almost KISS a thousand views!

Leader number three. I earned my place with two really interesting and talented articles about working for Samsung in South Korea, but they were far from increasing conversions, and they mostly told that working on Samsung can live for years without doing anything!



The leader number six was a pretty lady.

However, she just came here not as a top model, because the RocketCallback company blog has interesting and informative articles. They put their soul into them and enliven the seemingly boring topic. And most importantly, the article is the best fit to the stated theme of the site.

Next up is number seven . 13 articles on the Megamind, not to undermine the subject and among them come across very interesting and very useful.

Number eight. A stream of translated articles that elevate the mood and lie on the very edge of the subject matter of the resource and the yellow press. Formally, the rules are not violated, but of course they would be more suitable for Giktime. The goal is to stay in the top and be visible to regular customers. Pragmatic guys.

So we went through the list of our leaders. From 10 places only two participants write really informative and interesting articles corresponding to the letter and spirit of this site. Ironically, one of them has zero karma, and in the second it is equal to one.

At this point, stop making enemies for yourself, but if you continue to research on your own, you will see that a similar picture extends much lower, almost to the entire first hundred exactly.

I have a question, first of all to the site administration. Dear, do you really consider this state of affairs to be normal and conducive to improving the quality of content on this resource?

Megamind or conservatory?

What actually threatens a similar situation? A resource can enter a self-twisting helix from which it will be extremely difficult to pull it out.

By the way, the current state of affairs on the Megamind reminds of the state of affairs in the country. Some respected and honored people took the leading places not because they did a lot of useful things for this resource. They are not too interested in the subject of the resource and they do not seek to develop it. The only thing they are interested in is the conservation of the current situation.

Beginner is very difficult to get up. This is on Habré, in which there are many active users with high karma, it is enough for him to write a good article and it’s easy to get to the top thousand or even a lot higher from the sandbox, having received twenty karma in the karma. On the Megamind today it is much more difficult, due to the fact that there are fewer readers. As a result, many newbies try to take in quantities. Why strain and write a serious article, study the material, do analytics, stay up at night, when you can throw a little news a couple of times a week, or translate a short post of a foreign blogger, not really delving into the content of what you write. Sometimes it seems that they confused this resource with Twitter.



Recently one more type of articles has come into fashion - I took part in the project, it failed, but I got such a rich experience that now I will teach you all here. At best, such publications end with one simple truth, and not always in the correct interpretation, intelligent people have suggested that even a special term already exists for them - “Evangelists” . Surprisingly, the majority of companies that have opened blogs on Megamind are trying to make advertising with them, but they don’t want to put a minimum of effort into reading interesting articles. As a result, the conversion is much worse than it could be. I think they just need to learn from the three companies that have made their way through all the thorns in the top ten. Those really understand what they are writing and why, and do not spare the time and energy to prepare the published material!

Such articles raise the rating a little, but not karma. The result is to keep afloat you have to write more, more, more. On the site there is more and more nonsense. The trouble lies in the fact that the beautiful headlines and generous promises in the announcement of the article often do not correspond to its content. For junk content, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find rare interesting and informative articles. This is not the best way reflected in the number of readers. Following this, the conversion of the placement of material and the interest of firms leading their blogs on the resource fall ...

What to do? The eternal question.

I was taught since childhood: “Criticize - offer”
I will try to bring my recipe out of the vicious spiral

1. We overthrow the authorities. We launch social elevators.

Clear the way up for those who want to develop a resource. I thought for a long time how to do this, but it seems there is only one way - to encroach on the holy-saints. Karma

Since the advent of Megamind, quite a long time has passed for those who wanted to start active work there, so you can move on to the stern steps:

• For those who have a karma higher than 50, but have not published a single article on the resource during the entire existence, limit it to fifty.
• Those who have a karma higher than a hundred, published articles after the birth of the Megamind, but none of them received more than 10 (15) pluses to cut off the karma to 100.

Such a simple method will allow not too hurt the old-timers from other sites to clear the way upward to the authors who want to write for this site. Break into the lead will be much easier.

The second important consequence of the reform will be the increased dynamism of the struggle for leadership. Leaders will be replaced much more often, since it will not be easy to collect karma that guarantees a constant high rating on a developing platform.

To make the reform even more painless, you can announce it in advance, for example, a month (or three) before the X hour. Those from grants who want to confirm their status will have time to write a quality article. With this move, we kill two birds with one stone - we raise the quality of publications and get rid of the ballast that clogs social lifts.

2. The fight for quality

The easiest step that occurred to me is to introduce thematic weeks. Let's say from Monday we have a week of "product management." And the next week is the hub of crowdfunding. An article written on the topic of the week with the greatest number of advantages brings a double increase in the author’s rating. News materials and direct translations do not participate in this competition. Only copyright and analytical materials. The result - we encourage the writing of quality articles, moreover, in the desired areas that you want to pull up. I would even encroach on the sacred - would add a bit of karma to the winner. For beginners, this will be a very serious incentive.

3. We cut the flow

I think it should, at least at today's initial stage of development of the Megamind, monitor articles that are more relevant to the topic, but are published in GT or on Habré, and transfer them to Megamind by force.

In addition, I would single out the News and Events hubs separately, or make a mark for them, as we did with the training articles. It would be reasonable to charge for them, say, two times less points in the rating compared to the author’s articles. By the way, it would not hurt to do for other sites.

Execute can not be pardoned

Why did I write this article, running over the old-timers of the site, that if they notice this article at all, they face great losses in karma, and try to point out the administration’s shortcomings, which is fraught with much more serious troubles, even to get a ban?

Probably, with age I become an idealist and I want to make this platform better, the idea of ​​which I really liked. I want to read interesting articles on it on how to start up start-ups, how to monetize, the subtleties of crowdfunding, optimize the cost of promotion of a resource, meet interesting people, for example, and look for business partners. In a word, I want to make the site better, more useful and more interesting, and the world is a little more fair.

Perhaps, of course, things are completely wrong, and the book I mentioned at the beginning of the article is to blame for everything, and my brain was burned out imperceptibly? Not a thankful thing, to understand the motives of the actions of the modern Sancho Panso.

By the way, here is a link to it for those who are interested. I think, digging, you can find a free option on the net.
See you again at this site.
And just in case. Farewell!
PS Oh, yes, I have the last wish. So we hold a vote.

The author was forced to change the original title of the article under pressure from the administration of the resource.

Attention. Important addition

In the original, it looked like this: MATRIX. WITHOUT d SMART ATTACK SANCHO PANSY.
This is another example of stereotyped thinking, which, in my personal opinion, does not have the best effect on the site’s activities.

The original heading was replaced by the administration without warning to a completely unacceptable for me, completely distorting the meaning of the article, under the pretext that it " does not comply with the formatting recommendations ." Not the rules of placement, and recommendations. After consultations, I had to give the title the look that it has now.

Afterword. Even windmills can be fought!

Not a month since my publication Today, when I write this supplement, on June 23, and the article was published on May 25. Having entered today in the megamind I found myself in the third most ranked place! Looking at the list of the top 100, I was really surprised. In the first place was already painfully familiar to the eye "Green Cat". Moreover, I did not find a cat on Habré either. This means one thing - my article, which survived a very difficult story, will remind the administration without agreeing with me; replacing its title did not sink into oblivion, but served as a serious impetus to a radical change in the rating policy of the site, it seems even more radical than I expected! I hope this will affect the popularity of our favorite resource in the most favorable way. In general, it's nice to hell.

And now, finally, the promised polls.