Why Facebook can't match Ravelry, the social network for knitters.
1–10 of 31 posts
Re: Why Facebook can't match Ravelry, the social network for knitters.
#2So Facebook has a big graph(on school peers and acquaintances.) Not too interesting, and even becoming a burden. Niches will grow in this next phase of interaction. The web is still so young.
Re: Why Facebook can't match Ravelry, the social network for knitters.
#3So Facebook has a big graph(on school peers and acquaintances.) Not too interesting, and even becoming a burden. Niches will grow in this next phase of interaction. The web is still so young.
I don't think there's anything wrong with a big or small approach to social networking, as both are necessary and useful in their own way. I think it's all about how well the site caters to their audience.
I used to feel that Facebook was just as necessary as Ravelry is to me (I am a knitter) until they started adding so much extra cruft and decided I want to read things like friends' comments on posts written by people I don't even know. So much extraneous information forced into my news feed and into the site in general made me stop using it as often. That doesn't even begin to address how anemic friends lists and such are for addressing how people really interact with the people they know.
In that way I'm really loving what I've experienced of Google+ so far. The idea of communicating in circles is so thoroughly baked into the product that it feels effortless to share one thing with, say, my coder friends, and something totally different to my family, without the other group needing to see that stuff.
Re: Why Facebook can't match Ravelry, the social network for knitters.
#4Ravelry is a fantastic social network. It has a load of innovations worth copying. Two examples:
- On Rav anyone can create a new discussion forum, and the creators are responsible for moderating it. It allows the community to continue to grow and embrace a wider range of people who could not otherwise coexist.
- Rav has a like button for ages. It also have agree, love, and disagree, IIRC. Disagree might be mistake. It generates quite a bit of heat. If you've ever had your HN posts downvoted without comment you'll know how annoying it is.
It's worth signing up even if you don't knit just to check out the tech.
Re: Why Facebook can't match Ravelry, the social network for knitters.
#5"Casey says that hobbyists of all stripes are constantly asking the company to branch out into other domains. The couple refuses to do that, in part because they don't have the resources (Ravelry makes enough money for them to live on, but not enough to hire a second full-time software engineer), but also because they believe that cloning Ravelry wouldn't work. Instead, they say, each pastime should have a social site that's built carefully to meet the needs of that group, and it should be built by people who are active participants in that group"
I found this really interesting since StackExchange took the opposite view and raised a ton of cash. OK, it's not quite a social network but they did take something that was wildly successful in one domain (Q&A for programmers) and try to apply the format to other areas. I'm inclined to think that Ravelry's approach could be applied to other areas (e.g cooking) but it's their choice.
Re: Why Facebook can't match Ravelry, the social network for knitters.
#6"Casey says that hobbyists of all stripes are constantly asking the company to branch out into other domains. The couple refuses to do that, in part because they don't have the resources (Ravelry makes enough money for them to live on, but not enough to hire a second full-time software engineer), but also because they believe that cloning Ravelry wouldn't work. Instead, they say, each pastime should have a social sit…
Has StackExchange they been successful yet beyond technology?
Re: Why Facebook can't match Ravelry, the social network for knitters.
#7Ravelry is a fantastic social network. It has a load of innovations worth copying. Two examples: - On Rav anyone can create a new discussion forum, and the creators are responsible for moderating it. It allows the community to continue to grow and embrace a wider range of people who could not otherwise coexist. - Rav has a like button for ages. It also have agree, love, and disagree, IIRC. Disagree might be mistake.…
There are a LOT more buttons than that, and I enjoy how descriptive they are. There is educational, interesting, funny, agree, disagree, and love for each post.
I have to say I really appreciate Ravelry having so many options for voting. I used to post a lot in one of the tech forums on Ravelry, especially in reply to one person that kept posting information that was secondhand and wildly inaccurate. Unfortunately, she would have her own groupies (for lack of a better term) that would vote her comment as educational/agree/love. I would also have people that backed me up in the same way. If you didn't have any disagrees (for which I had far less than she did) you wouldn't be able to easily tell who to listen to. Nor is a straightforward up/down type voting system the best in a discussion.
I think that system is fabulous especially for forums and discussion mediums (see also: slashdot). Not so much for something like reddit or twitter where only one or two options is probably the only sane option to provide for many reasons.
Re: Why Facebook can't match Ravelry, the social network for knitters.
#8"Casey says that hobbyists of all stripes are constantly asking the company to branch out into other domains. The couple refuses to do that, in part because they don't have the resources (Ravelry makes enough money for them to live on, but not enough to hire a second full-time software engineer), but also because they believe that cloning Ravelry wouldn't work. Instead, they say, each pastime should have a social sit…
Has StackExchange they been successful yet beyond technology?
Math Overflow is very popular
Re: Why Facebook can't match Ravelry, the social network for knitters.
#9So we have a popular social website, 1.4 million registered users, huge amounts of content, innovative discussion and a fanatical userbase, and it's all been coded and maintained by one person? Awesome!
Re: Why Facebook can't match Ravelry, the social network for knitters.
#10"Casey says that hobbyists of all stripes are constantly asking the company to branch out into other domains. The couple refuses to do that, in part because they don't have the resources (Ravelry makes enough money for them to live on, but not enough to hire a second full-time software engineer), but also because they believe that cloning Ravelry wouldn't work. Instead, they say, each pastime should have a social sit…
>I found this really interesting since StackExchange took the opposite view and raised a ton of cash.
I think it's good that there are some successful people out there who are questioning the dogma that ambition is the superlative human trait, that it is somehow wrong to not grow everything as much as possible, or that this should be an end in itself. Good luck to them.