I Want to Improve the Experience Project
EP Management's Butchering of the Website Did the Website In
Why is EP ending? If you want to believe the noble-sounding explanations given in the Farewell Message, go ahead. The only part of it that rings true to me is the reference to difficulties with advertising revenue. EP died because it didn't generate enough profit to sustain the interest in keeping it alive on the part of its founder, whose heart had long ago moved on to selling use of the Kanj*ya algorithm to corporations with 500 or more employees. What factors diminished the advertising revenue? Certainly reduced traffic on the website, which lowered the rates EP could charge advertisers. Why was the traffic on the Experience Project reduced?
My own EP participation dramatically dropped in 2014. The reason was I noticed a shocking drop-off in comments on my stories, really remarkable. Up till then it didn't matter if I had a new story up--my old stories would get plenty of comments. I concluded that the terrible changes to the website made in the last quarter of 2013, especially the layout, were causing a great reduction in traffic on EP, and it sapped my motivation to post many new stories. It was in late 2013 that the worst part of the wrecking of EP by management took place. The once-beautiful site was made ugly and much more difficult to use. Flaggers were given the right to remove other people's content at will. Soon after was implemented censorship of even perfectly harmless stories before they ever posted by EP's brutal and utterly inept filters. The old effective EP-Google search engine was replaced by an onsite search feature that is so pathetic that it forces us to go to a search engine offsite to find what we are looking for on EP.
See what the home page for this experience group looked like before the dismantling of the site began:
Polls and a cornucopia of other features, including features that increased the possibilities for a user's content to gain visibility on the website. We could even see what were the proportions of men and women in the experience group!
Compare that to what we have now:
For an example of how EP used to be building the site instead of tearing it down, see http://www.experienceproject.com/stories/Want-To-Improve-The-Experience-Project/810196
I had planned in my mind to post hundreds of more stories to EP. But my motivation to continue posting significant numbers of additional stories was sapped in 2014 when I saw that my stories were receiving many fewer comments and apparently many fewer views. Around this time also I noticed that many people were leaving EP, by deleting their accounts or just ceasing to log in.
I said in June 2015 at the time EP management deplorably destroyed our blogs: "I have noticed that on threads of stories and of the now-deceased blog posts, one sees a lot of comments where the author responds to a comment that's no longer there because the commenter is gone.
There used to be a lot of thriving "communities" on EP, circles of people who commented on each others' stories and loved and supported each other. It seems like EP's worsenings have practically wiped out those communities. There used to be real joy on EP, but now the joy is gone from EP."
Before the devastation of the website by the changes of late 2013, it was an extremely common thing on EP to see a story with a comment thread bearing dozens or even hundreds of comments, especially in this group. After that time I would never see such long comment threads anywhere on EP. The people who used to flock to stories in this group quit coming because it was all too clear that EP management no longer cared about us.
There used to be what I called "high activity members", people with so much activity on EP that just one day would fill up their Recent Activity page. After 2013 I never saw any such high activity people. One such former high activity person was Fungirlmm. I used to say "Fungirl IS EP!" In the last few years she was seldom seen on EP. Another high-activity member got disgusted with EP and left to start another website. Others who had been among the most popular and well-liked people on EP, such as Pixelita, Andrew Penney, and womaninbliss, became absent from EP. I was perplexed by how EP Support could seem to be so indifferent to the fact that EP was losing its most intelligent and well-liked members and they were not being replaced by people of remotely comparable caliber. Many people commented in this period that the website seemed to be devaluing meaningful writing, which had been its original purpose.
See the chart on Alexa showing EP's declining traffic over the past year (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/experienceproject.com) :
EP management worked diligently from mid-2012 on to diminish the value of its own product. No wonder it found diminished user support and therefore diminished profitability which led to the long-predicted demise of the website.
I hope that those communities of support and love that EP management crushed with its relentless dismantling of this website will bloom and live anew on other websites.
Why is EP ending? If you want to believe the noble-sounding explanations given in the Farewell Message, go ahead. The only part of it that rings true to me is the reference to difficulties with advertising revenue. EP died because it didn't generate enough profit to sustain the interest in keeping it alive on the part of its founder, whose heart had long ago moved on to selling use of the Kanj*ya algorithm to corporations with 500 or more employees. What factors diminished the advertising revenue? Certainly reduced traffic on the website, which lowered the rates EP could charge advertisers. Why was the traffic on the Experience Project reduced?
My own EP participation dramatically dropped in 2014. The reason was I noticed a shocking drop-off in comments on my stories, really remarkable. Up till then it didn't matter if I had a new story up--my old stories would get plenty of comments. I concluded that the terrible changes to the website made in the last quarter of 2013, especially the layout, were causing a great reduction in traffic on EP, and it sapped my motivation to post many new stories. It was in late 2013 that the worst part of the wrecking of EP by management took place. The once-beautiful site was made ugly and much more difficult to use. Flaggers were given the right to remove other people's content at will. Soon after was implemented censorship of even perfectly harmless stories before they ever posted by EP's brutal and utterly inept filters. The old effective EP-Google search engine was replaced by an onsite search feature that is so pathetic that it forces us to go to a search engine offsite to find what we are looking for on EP.
See what the home page for this experience group looked like before the dismantling of the site began:
Compare that to what we have now:
For an example of how EP used to be building the site instead of tearing it down, see http://www.experienceproject.com/stories/Want-To-Improve-The-Experience-Project/810196
I had planned in my mind to post hundreds of more stories to EP. But my motivation to continue posting significant numbers of additional stories was sapped in 2014 when I saw that my stories were receiving many fewer comments and apparently many fewer views. Around this time also I noticed that many people were leaving EP, by deleting their accounts or just ceasing to log in.
I said in June 2015 at the time EP management deplorably destroyed our blogs: "I have noticed that on threads of stories and of the now-deceased blog posts, one sees a lot of comments where the author responds to a comment that's no longer there because the commenter is gone.
There used to be a lot of thriving "communities" on EP, circles of people who commented on each others' stories and loved and supported each other. It seems like EP's worsenings have practically wiped out those communities. There used to be real joy on EP, but now the joy is gone from EP."
Before the devastation of the website by the changes of late 2013, it was an extremely common thing on EP to see a story with a comment thread bearing dozens or even hundreds of comments, especially in this group. After that time I would never see such long comment threads anywhere on EP. The people who used to flock to stories in this group quit coming because it was all too clear that EP management no longer cared about us.
There used to be what I called "high activity members", people with so much activity on EP that just one day would fill up their Recent Activity page. After 2013 I never saw any such high activity people. One such former high activity person was Fungirlmm. I used to say "Fungirl IS EP!" In the last few years she was seldom seen on EP. Another high-activity member got disgusted with EP and left to start another website. Others who had been among the most popular and well-liked people on EP, such as Pixelita, Andrew Penney, and womaninbliss, became absent from EP. I was perplexed by how EP Support could seem to be so indifferent to the fact that EP was losing its most intelligent and well-liked members and they were not being replaced by people of remotely comparable caliber. Many people commented in this period that the website seemed to be devaluing meaningful writing, which had been its original purpose.
See the chart on Alexa showing EP's declining traffic over the past year (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/experienceproject.com) :
EP management worked diligently from mid-2012 on to diminish the value of its own product. No wonder it found diminished user support and therefore diminished profitability which led to the long-predicted demise of the website.
I hope that those communities of support and love that EP management crushed with its relentless dismantling of this website will bloom and live anew on other websites.
