Contagious content: the challenges of memes you don’t want
Content is highly contagious. In my online communities, I’ve learned this over and over and over again — both for good and bad. We all know that content’s contagiousness is what drives funny things going viral on the web. It drives the memes that I eat for breakfast each morning. Contagious content makes corners of the internet feel like one big hilarious inside joke. We’re all infected with the awesome!
The challenges with contagious content is when the infection doesn’t line up with the brand or editorial goals of a given website. LOLcats being contagious is AWESOME for the Cheezeburger folks — less awesome for someone trying to run a community dedicated to, say, ailurophobics.
Here are a few examples of contagious content challenges we deal with on the Empire, and how we deal with ’em:
Clean it up, shut it down: how we know it’s time to close comments on a post
On certain kinds of posts, my editors can get a serious work out keeping up with shitty comments. After doing this for so many years, I’m pretty good at knowing when a post is going to be controversial, and we make a point to schedule those posts for days when that site’s editor can be watching comments like a hawk.
Even so, when the amount of editor time expended removing crappy comments exceeds the number of constructive, respectful comments coming in, that’s when posts get down.
Vendor mistakes when submitting to blogs: when is it worth my time to say “no”?
As you might imagine, we get a lot of submissions for Offbeat Bride. The site’s editors (Megan, Catherine, and Chris Wolfgang), deal with a steady flow of beauty submitted via all the submission channels described on this page: wedding profile submission forms, our Flickr pool, Two Bright Lights, etc. There are a LOT of ways to submit content to Offbeat Bride, all of which have been set up to keep the at-times-overwhelming flow of content organized, and help to save everyone time — “everyone” including the submitter themselves!
Is the name of the Offbeat Bride Tribe “problematic and frankly racist”?
Since monthly readership of the Offbeat Empire sites is over 300,000 people, it’s to be expected that we’d receive a fair number of reader complaints. Sometimes, these complaints are truly educational (I had no idea that the Society of Professional Journalists had voted to replace the phrase “illegal immigrant” with “undocumented immigrant” until a reader emailed me about it) and other times they’re ludicrous (Offbeat Bride’s hilarious “motherfuckergate” comes to mind here). I’ve written about this before, but this last week I had a especially challenging reader complaint.