What I've learnt not to do on Muti

I’m a huge fan of Muti which is a superb African Social Bookmark site where users can post links to content on the web. The site, based largely off Reddit, has proven to be a great source of leading content within the African continent and generally what appears on Muti is worth the read.

The problem I’m seeing more and more, as the site grows larger and the readership increases, is that many people aren’t aware of the unspoken guidelines that exist amongst users of Muti so I’ve decided to highlight some of them below.

I must also add that I myself have broken most of these guidelines simply because I was ignorant at the time and didn’t know any better. I’m hoping that this post will help the other ignorant people like myself.

Guideline 1: Avoid Submission Spam

Submission Spamming is different to conventional spamming simply because it may be quality content that is being posted to the site however when you submit every story from your own blog or website it is still considered spam.

Rafiq has posted a good article on his blog about why you shouldn’t submit your own content and he provides some assistance on how to get your readers to do this for you.

Guideline 2: Don’t submit content under a different username

This is similar to the above mentioned guideline however it’s much more dirty as people submitting their own content under a different username are blatantly acting in submission spam. Muti is really about relevance and quality and submission spam, on whatever level, is just going against all of the principals of the site.

At some point regular users will figure out who’s submitting relevant items and who’s just spamming the site and it has an effect on your site as people simply won’t visit it. We have various aggregators that will drive traffic to your site and Muti shouldn’t be used in the same way.

Guideline 3: Don’t vote against a story to get a higher ranking

One of the big features of Muti is the voting for or against a content item which in turn ranks the content against other votes on the site. A tactic with some is to give a negative vote on all articles that appear directly above your post in an attempt to make the Hot list on Muti. Users of Muti vote for an article because of its merit and this helps maintain relevance for the users of the site so don’t blatantly ruin it for people.

I know that Neville has done some good work on trying to eliminate this completely and as a result you can only vote on an item once which has certainly helped. To combat this even further though I’d like to suggest making it possible to see who’s voting for or against which stories. Once people realise they could be caught I think you’ll see the end of this completely.