Hello,
As the subject implies, this isn’t a rant. It’s just honest feedback.
When I first started writing here, I was excited. I also went around and talked to a number friends who are very well established bloggers and they all said the same thing. They said they didn’t write on DK. I tried to encourage them to come here and they just kept passing. When I tried to pin them down as to why all I got was “doesn’t fit my style”, “doesn’t help me move towards my goals” and other such things.
Pretty vague, eh? I thought so.
Well, after a while I think I now know what they meant.
1) There is no comment control at all. When someone started making comments on one of my articles that included referring to another commenter as an “f’n retard”, I went to pull the plug. I wanted to delete the comments, flag them for moderation, something. You know what support eventually told me could be done?
Absolutely nothing. They said it was just part of the way the community worked, as part of voting things up or down and commenting. I disagreed so strongly that I left the site for a long time before coming back to give it another try.
I do have to admit that when this happened I was already noticing that I was getting no referral traffic at all from DK, despite putting over a hundred hours worth of writing up here for free. That second point why I think many other bloggers aren’t posting here. That they just aren’t getting anything in exchange for their work.
2) The readers not only expect it for free, many actually did complain today because I expected one little click of web traffic as part of letting them read my work for free.
You see, I realized that I had let this site use hundreds of hours worth of writings over several months and hadn’t gotten so much as a little web traffic out of it. So, instead of giving it all away for free, I put the stuff above the more tag here and then used a link to the article on my site instead of a standard more tag.
In other words, all I’d get is one little click. That’s all. Not any subscription money or ad revenue like DK gets, just one little click per reader.
You would have thought I’d shot a puppy or something.
My friends who have established blogs don’t blog here because DK doesn’t send any traffic to their sites at all and the readers here demand whole articles but refuse to even visit the sites of the authors.
Sorry, but no. There is an idea called FEE. Fair Energy Exchange. It means that that both sides get something out of the deal.
DK takes in subscription and ad revenue thanks in large part to those of us who share our work here but the writers deserve, at the very least, some web traffic from those people who are interested enough to click through and read the whole piece.
It saddens me to say that readers here at DK seems to think otherwise and, like many other bloggers, I’m just not willing to give away hundreds of hours of work and get nothing in return.
I wish the site the best of luck, but I shall not be participating in the future.
