Newsvine Sucks

by Jack Humphrey on Nov 18

EDIT: I am keeping the discussion in the comments below from now on. They are keeping at it over at Snoozevine and I am now, apparently, a bottom feeder and several other things. God if they only knew who they were actually talking about! So much for doing your homework citizen journalists, lol. No wonder the establishment takes shots at people like these as “quasi” or “hobby” journalists. How are we to believe in their version of the “news” if they can’t be bothered to find out about the people they attack?

EDIT: At least I drew out the person who did the axing. They are in the process of covering up the truth and manufacturing a story about how I so badly spammed their stupid speck of a snooze site. Check it out here.

Hey guys, here’s a MASSIVE freakin’ hint for you: Spammers don’t complain about their accounts getting shut down. They EXPECT it. Spammers don’t have high traffic sites and use their real names. There isn’t a single spammer on the planet whose site you can pull up by just typing his name in your browser bar. Stop acting so freakin’ incredulous and face the fact you’ve screwed with someone of account and been drawn out in front of tens of thousands as a hack site run by overzealous people who lie to their members.

Oh, and to the person who implied that I went back in under another name to post the above, Calvin knows full well he banned my IP so I couldn’t come back in as easy as that. Although I AM in there, I’m not the one who posted the thread above.

For the sake of clarification I am not mad about getting banned from Newsvine because I needed to be there or it was some source of traffic. I am pissed about the lies going on over there and the people in charge of what everyone else thinks is a respectable site run by respectable people. It is neither, and the web should know about it.

–

So I go to log in to my Newsvine account to give them more content they can make money from and come to find out I no longer exist.

I just kept getting referred to their main page. Went to comment on a post about Sesame Street, since it’s on pretty much all throughout the day in this house, and find that I wasn’t automatically logged in. That I was unable TO login as if I never existed there.

I had put up videos for Newsvine to profit from. Articles. All helpful and all added to the value of the community. (Which is what sites that have gone to shit call it. What it really is is getting people to build your site for you so you can advertise and make a killing in Federated Media and Google Adsense.)

Newsvine is dragged around by the neck by “Social Community Prima Donnas.” These are people who claim the site as their own. They are just members, but very powerful ones. They think everything is spam and they want everyone in the site to know who they are and that they call the shots around there.

They can, and do, have people zapped if they rub them wrong. And admin just does what its told by these people.

The Decline of Social News Communities

Letting your Prima Donnas police your social site for you is the beginning of the end for such sites. They don’t care about anything but having more power than they’ve ever had in the real world and wielding it over people they imagine that beat them up in high school. They start going Columbine on new members as soon as they sign up and start contributing.

That’s the death blow for your social news site.

I will be watching out for “dead communities walking” from now on and posting them here so you know not to bother contributing to them. You’ll just get zapped.

The irony of all this is my most recent post on how to behave in these communities. Follow the rules. Post good content. Don’t seed your own stuff.

Then just hours later the dipshits at Newsvine close my account. I know why too. And it wasn’t justified under their own holier-than-thou altruistic “sounding” code of “honor.”

There’s one word missing from their code of honor at the bottom: Bullshit!

Newsvine is clearly just a money-making scheme for its owners. Writers and others do all the work and Newsvine cashes in. And they let the crazies run the place and run off good content producers.

They aren’t the only ones. I’ll rant about the others later.

EDIT:
Check out the new #1 result for “newsvine sucks.”

I warned ‘em. lol

Thanks everyone for your emails and thanks to the zealots at Newsvine for sending me so much traffic. Several subscribers were generated from this fiasco and, although not worth the trouble, it is a good start. I’d still rather the whole thing not happen and be able to help people over there who are interested in my topics. But the people who aren’t are the ones controlling the flow of information and memberships.

The thread over there is an amazing look into the minds of the anti-marketer. One comment talks about how “did you see his blog? All blog marketing and seo stuff.” As if that was supposed to be flat out evidence of my “evilness.” They hate marketers people.

Once again, though I can’t prove it because they took my stuff down, I didn’t post overly promotional content. I offer into the evidence the posts I have made here at FTR regarding how to act on social networks and how to follow the rules and become an authority on such sites. Written well before I was ousted from Snoozevine.

“Calvin: The user in question was posting one press release after another, linking back to his site. End of story. The CoH & ToS are quite clear. The guy made a choice…a poor one.”

Boy they love their leaders over there. All Calvin had to say was I posted press releases (which I absolutely did NOT do) and his flock appreciates the opportunity to blindly follow and backs him up.

I am responsible for thousands of marketers and SEOs who would otherwise (intentionally or unintentionally) spam social networks seeing my message that this is not cool and not a good way to interact with these communities. And for that, I get ousted for trying to play by the rules.

Anyway, so long Snoozevine! And thanks for all the traffic!

  • http://www.robsblog.co.uk Rob Taylor

    Great post Jack! My feelings entirely. I had a non-commercial account with Newsvine, posted links and vids, with zero posts linking back to any of my sites or even linking to other web20 sites like hubpages etc. that then linked back to my sites. Strictly a “fun” account. Nothing dirty at all.

    And guess what. The Newsvine fools bombed my account. Go figure. Must have been the subject matter I was posting about. Yeah like emergency preparedness is really contro. Heyho. Thanks for the great content you put out all the same.

  • http://www.howtospoter.com Alex

    Hey Jack,

    At least you manage to contribute :) They zapped my account after first 2 submits and funny thing was – the content wasn’t mine …. I was just trying to work on building my profile and create presence.

    The idiocy just never dies and power hungry wimps who never manage to accomplish something on their own will will always kill innovation if permited to do so.

    Alex

  • Nat

    “Although I AM in there, I’m not the one who posted the thread above.”

    No, you’re not the one who posted it – I am :-)

    I thought it would be interesting to see what kind of discussion came out of the story if it was posted to Newsvine itself. I’ve never used it before so I guess my having a new account seemed suspicious to them.

    It’s too bad they removed all the stories – I would have liked to have seen them for myself. Now it’s your word against theirs, and I suspect your readers will believe you (as I do ;-) ) and theirs will believe them.

    Oh well, plenty of other social news sites out there, and I’m sure there are many with a much higher readership than Newsvine.

    Nat

  • http://www.jackhumphrey.com/cd Jack Humphrey

    Nat,

    I was starting to think maybe I was schizophrenic and had a dark side lol. You can plainly see how desperately people need to feel like they are part of a gang by reading their responses.

    If you click on the Vickie Babbles Gonia link (one of the uppity responders on your thread) you will find this story that she clipped:
    http://prompt.newsvine.com/_news/2007/10/31/1061814-we-the-users-the-new-newsvine

    That little ditty says it all. They are intensely proud, they have turf on the web, and they are empowered. They don’t welcome anyone new unless they cow tow to the royalty ensconced there. They have dug in deep and feel as if they are attacked all the time.

    What I find most pathetic is that, out of all the places you have to call your “home” on the web, that anyone chose a site like Newsvine.

    Their pride in being welcomed into the mainstream media, also in the article above, about made me cry. Who the hell wants to be a part of freakin’ mainstream media? Who in the world thinks that’s “cool?”

    This is the dark side of the social web. Why I am spending time on it so it can be brought to light. New social sites are where it’s at. The older ones almost all seem to have trolls like these who have pissed on their turf and protect it, even when no one cares or is trying to take it away from them.

  • http://www.jackhumphrey.com/cd Jack Humphrey

    Oh yeah – here’s a noteworthy outcome:

    So far I’ve gotten about 50 hits off of your thread Nat! Thanks! As we know all too well, the ones spending time patting themselves on the back are the minority to the ones who came here and found a resource outside of Newsvine that they probably liked by and large.

    New social marketing tactic: bring out the trolls in a social site, get kicked out, and tell all your readers about it so they can post it and send you a ton of traffic. lol

  • Nat

    I was actually surprised at the first few responses – they were relatively calm & balanced compared to what I usually see on sites like that. It didn’t take long for it to deteriorate though.

    I should know better than to get involved in those kind of discussions – they just serve to piss me off, but I just can’t seem to get it through my thick head that some things never change.

    And as far as being part of the mainstream media, you’re right – who the hell wants that? I’d prefer to be as far from it as possible and keep my morals intact.

    Nat

  • http://on-line-tribune-front-page.blogspot.com/ Jim DeSantis

    Hey Jack, and all…

    Yahoo Answers is another one that has elite members who target certain writers. My account was shut down, being identified by them as spam. It took an appeal to get reinstated.

    I have several thousand points racked up and many many “Best Answer” in several categories. I always try to give solid and helpful answers.

    Not only that, Yahoo must blacklist Google’s blogspot.com because my answers that contain my blogspot blog url always get an error page when I try to post. When I remove the url, the answer gets through. hmmmmm?

    I haven’t bothered with Yahoo Answers for a while because of the blocked blogspot url.

    Jim

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  • http://raymont.vox.com raymonty

    Jack ~ Good article. Your are a good writer.
    Your friend,Old Dog

  • http://www.jackhumphrey.com/cd Jack Humphrey

    I’m now up to hundreds of hits from Newsvine. Seems their heavy-handedness has backfired.

    Someone is recommending I get sued now, lol. Others reinforce their complete disdain for marketing at all. They say you can link back to your site, but not if you are selling anything.

    OMG! Every link out of Newsvine is to a site selling something!!!! This is how ridiculous these people are. The altruists and hypocrites.

    Let’s see folks:

    You link to CNN, AP, and every other major paper in the world. Those people charge for content and most have so much advertising on their sites it’s hard to find the content.

    Newsvine itself sells all kinds of things and SEO’s the hell out of its site. Newsvine survives off advertising and was bought out by a company run by stockholders who expect profits every quarter.

    Get over yourselves and the holier than thou stance – you work for THE MAN himself idiots. And for free I might add.

    Please do sue me. Would be one hell of a lot of fun exposing all this hypocrisy. At least people like me don’t pretend not to care about making a living and a profit.

    If it weren’t for people like us you wouldn’t have the technology that runs your wee club over there. The software Newsvine is published on was built for a profit by people selling their services on the internet on a site much like mine.

    So please, get over yourselves. I’ve been working online for 10 years, full-time for most of them, and have an actual sense of the history of the web. You are all repeating the same mantra of thousands of quacks who came before you over the last decade hoping for some ridiculous non-capitalist internet where everything is free and there was no advertising to support the web.

    My tirade is against the e-hippies who have obviously found one last holdout on the web and it is Newsvine. Except you are sponsored, no, OWNED by corporate America, idiots. Please enlighten me as to why I shouldn’t find all this anti-marketing crap just a tad ironic!

  • Mikey

    There’s a group of folks based in Florida who lurk on Newsvine. They run this page:

    http://newsviners.blogspot.com/

    It does look like there’s a whole bunch of ego-driven drivel out there.

    Thanks for putting this up. I’m gonna digg this.

    Mikey.

  • http://www.jackhumphrey.com/cd Jack Humphrey

    Now that everyone knows what THEY think of US, let’s show them what we think of them…

    http://collective-thoughts.com/2007/11/22/gilded-crown-of-the-hypocritical-social-media-czar/

  • TL

    Newsvine does suck. I was not aware of the rules initially and seeded articles I wrote. Fair enough. I was given a warning. They also deleted all my seeds. That was annoying. I seeded maybe 10 of my own articles.

    Fast forward a month later. My website which is basically a news publication with a few writers was mentioned in an article on a highly respected News outlet in an article. I decided to seed that article from that News outlet. My account the next day was disabled on Newsvine. I am not sure why that would be against Newsvine rule. It was a legitmate news article which had a reference to my news outlet. I did not write that article nor had any association to this PR5 News outlet with its only televised program that published an article mentioning about my news outlet.

    It looks like Newsvine is run by a bunch of morons to me. Googling for Newsvine does show a lot of disgruntled users. A news article is a news article. As long as its not spammy or questionable whether its valid news article, why the heck should it matter whether a reader or the author seed the articles? Isn’t it the point of newsvine to help spread the news.

    Stay away from Newsvine. Its obviously going to fail. I hope it does fail. Anyone asking me about Newsvine, I’ll tell them how bad they are and advise them to stay clear. I’m in the news publishing industry and it sucks to be treated like this. No proper communications and just outright nazi type action.

  • http://www.vigilantwatch.info Lisa Wimmer

    Newsvine axed me without ever telling me why, but i found out from another Viner.

    There are two people over there named Tedd Riggs and Bill Harrison who are good friends of admins Calvin and Emily.

    Whoever these two don’t like, they run off to their buddy admins and whine about COH ‘violations’ until the admins cut the person in question off the Vine. But yet, these very same two people are allowed to post inane drivel, outright lies, and try to defame people on their own columns, with no fear of reprimand from either of the elitist admins.

    What a joke and scam Newsvine is. Good writers get the boot, while they hold on to people who can’t put two sentences together, and then promote their writing on the front page of their site! Anyone know of other sites like Newsvine where this doesn’t go on?

  • George feman185 Smith

    I do not consider myself tech savy as I seem to evaluate a technology and then determine if it is worth having. That said I have been on the internet for nearly 13 years, back when is was only dial-up, now and have just recently (within a year) started to blog and use message boards. I have been reading Newsvine for longer than that but had not signed up until recently…maybe within the past 3 months.

    I found it quite addicting but noticed a trend of have to always agree with the author or ‘seeder’ of a story. It is as if you don’t agree with them, then don’t post. If you did disagree with the ‘higher up’s’ you where quickly labeled a ‘troll’. I didn’t even know what that meant until recently. Turns out, a ‘troll’ is considered in short: a trouble maker on message boards. But the more I read about the term the closer definition would be: one who has a legitimate, conflicting dialog to introduce to a discussion but doesn’t agree with the ‘community’.

    I never posted on any story or subject that I didn’t have first hand knowledge on or and interest in. Yet I was still challenged by the ‘author’ for violations of the bogus CoH because of defending myself against the ‘Vines’ cronies. I actually was told I was wrong, and my posts deleted on a subject I had first has experience for over 30 years….my job! To be sure, I tend to use a sledgehammer approach when needed, but my post where nowhere near as inflammatory as some of the others. But since I didn’t agree with them….DELETE!

    I eventually ended up having my account deleted with all of my post and seeds after a censorship war with one of the ‘favorites’. It is a shame, because there are a lot of casual users over there and they introduced some good dialog. It is now clear to me that the staff and the ones who have the control are a bunch of whiners who most likely never worked a hard day in their life and have always gotton their way. That would explain why you always have to agree with the story your commenting on. My guess is thier killin time in college while the wait for mom and dads next check to come in the mail all the while thinking they’re making a difference.

  • http://enusual.com/ Enusual_Murray

    Some nice turns of phrase in this post Jack. I also get the impression that some of the social sites’ ‘Prima Donnas’ (as you described them) seem overly trigger-happy.

    As someone who’s invested a substantial amount of time and money to start a new social shopping network, the last thing I’d want to do is boot good users for anything but a significant infraction.

  • Mikey

    There's a group of folks based in Florida who lurk on Newsvine. They run this page:

    http://newsviners.blogspot.com/

    It does look like there's a whole bunch of ego-driven drivel out there.

    Thanks for putting this up. I'm gonna digg this.

    Mikey.

  • Frank Black

    I concur- SnoozeVine sucks! I recently had a tongue-in-cheek opinion piece removed by the NewsVine thought police. The title of my brief run (one hour?) piece was “Do Conservatives Have Primitive Reptilian Lower Brain Functions?” Who says the liberals control the media?

  • Gin

    Thank goodness I found this, now I don’t feel crazy or alone.

    I recently started a Newsvine account. I hadn’t ever heard of Newsvine before, and the account seemed like a good way to make use of the fountain of knowledge I collect everyday off my RSS feeds.

    I posted ONE link, to a story about commercial truck emmissions not being as bad as previously thought, and came back the next day to find my account disabled.

    The story was not mine, was not printed by any association I am affiliated with, and did not link to any advertising, or do anthing else that might be considered a violation.

    My account is disabled, and two weeks and three emails later, no one at Newsvine has taken even a few seconds just to bother telling me why.

    It’s a good thing, for me, that I hadn’t yet reached the point where I might have wasted some of my own original content on their site.

    Words do exist to describe what I think of Newsvine, but they aren’t words suitable to being published anywhere.

  • ARCADIAN

    Newvine has the worst CoH rules on this planet.
    I dont understand why they even exist, since you make a comment about a certain user or about a certain comment they delete your account, while reading thru all the blogs and comments, I see there were more stronger words on the other post, but they seem to be staying there on the newsvine reports. I knwo they can set there own rules on who can post and who cannot. Once you make a comment againist GOD or a ceratin user like TYLER you get deleted!
    Newvine sucks.

  • Matt

    Newsvine sucks! Love your post. They shit-canned me too for a post that they felt violated their Code of Honor. I am in the midst of starting a news/blogging site. The rules will be simple: (1) No threats/criminal harrassment, (2) No terrorism. Everything else is game. If you want to totally slice and dice an idiot, go for it.

  • grrace

    I am really glad to see Newsvine being boycotted. Their comments are way down…so perhaps they’ll wither on the vine.

    My account was deleted and I had no COH violations. Just a difference of opinion. They use articles like “HATE SPEECH” then get mad when you make jokes about “hate speech.” Boom, deleted. They seed articles about “Racists and Racism,” then get deleted when you use the word “racist” in your post.

    A truly disfunctional site.

  • grrace

    I spoke to my friend yesterday, who also posts on newsvine. She had some trouble as well, without violating any COH rules. She had requested information several times, but had no response or explanation.

    She CANCELLED her account on newsvine yesterday.

    There are many other sites to be a part of, without the intimidation and unusual treatment by this little creep who calls herself “Tyler.”

  • Joe

    I was banned from Newvine by “Tyler” (supposedly for five days, but they never reinstated my account) for “pretending to employ Newsviners.” The article about which I posted regarded the state of Health insurance in the U.S. Of course, the Newsvine comments on political subjects draw the ignorant bigots out of the woodwork. I targeted a few of the most hate-speech-riddled posts with replies in which I pretended to be the posters’ employer, threatening them with firing and the loss of their insurance benefits if I ever caught them posting on company time again.

    My posts were comical, related to the subject of the article, and obvious satire. Even some of the targets of the posts seemed to enjoy it, playing along and criticizing my oversized paycheck and lack of skills as if I truly were their boss. Others just wrote me off as a loon. For that bit of quality satire, Newsvine handed me a permanent suspension, yet they turns a blind eye to all manner of hate speech.

    Oh well, I banned them back along with any site that does business with them. They were a useless time-waste of a site anyway, so poorly organized that following a thread beyond a couple of hours was impossible.

  • http://www.twitter.com/worldhero World Hero

    After less than 24 hours on newsvine and two (2) brilliant articles I contributed, I was given the boot. They claimed they would have considered reinstating my account had I not started calling people Nazi’s, which is a complete untruth. I wrote a satirical article ABOUT Newsvine and their “Code Of Honor” after I had been reprimanded for seeding a link and beefing up the headline for them. I simply compared their Code Of Honor personnel’s actions to that of a Nazi, in a piss your pants humorous way. They did not laugh. I had no idea that I would EVER be banned from a website and because of that I did not in any way save my articles elsewhere, and now they are gone forever. They were fucking blasting straight up the vine and getting Large Votes within only a day! I’m filling full of anger and hatred just thinking about it. Please respond or email me with a site that I can post my articles without a goddam War Hammer coming down on me because the site managers can’t take a joke.

  • grrace

    I think I figured out why we’re all getting booted. Do your comments spur a lot of discussion? Isn’t that the basis for PAYMENT. They don’t want to pay the contributors.

  • World Hero

    I’ve moved over to Associated Content and posted this article on Newsvine, take a peek…….. http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2640337/top_3_things_not_to_do_or_say_on_newsvine.html?cat=9

    Here’s another interesting note… right before I was banned from Newsvine, the person who runs their Twitter account tweeted me that my article was “awesome”. The same day, Banned by the Code Of Honor toads.

  • http://www.faslist.com ListNinja

    Funny thread. I found this due to being disappointed in Newsvine also. I like MSNBC but got kicked out of newsvine for putting together articles of top lists along with my own.

  • Janet Hunt

    I was axed from Newsvine as well. I am not crying or losing any sleep over it but I am baffled. I was only there a few short weeks, and only posted ten links to news stories. None of them my own, and none controversial! I was strictly doing it for fun. I am a little miffed that I am being accused of doing something (although I don’t know what) worthy of being banned!

  • Waldo1

    Yeah, Newsvine is a clique. If your articles or comments are factual but don’t conform to the Newsvine commununity consensus…slam, you’re outta’ there!

    Bunch of prissy dreamers. They like to dish it out but they can’t take it. Run crying to mama tyler, cling to his skirts, hide behind selective enforcement of their silly “COH”.

    Gutless wonders. True story: A bunch of the uber-liberal dweebs vowed to leave the site unless Eric Albert was re-instated. Result? Albert is still out and every last one of the soppy milquetoasts came slithering back into the clique within days. Back to publishing their fanatic bullshit and complimenting one another as if nothing happened. Spineless shitheads.

  • Hans

    We started a policy several years ago to distribute news articles almost exclusively outside of the mainstream media and through citizen journalism sites and to see how it went and decide on the future some years later. Well, it’s been interesting. There are many fine start-ups out there for alternative media, but sooner or later many are taken over by that mob of undermployed and unemployed that have destroyed projects like Wikipedia and the various Indymedia sites (IMC). We’ve not reached a verdict yet on whether we should return to the mainstream media for news diffusion, but Newsvine was a surprise as it seems to have fallen prey to the mob as well now.

    From what we’ve experienced with the other mentioned sites, they usually die after two or three years at the latest when the toxicity gets so bad that even the few people who are left are infightning. Then they either go offline, become an “archive” or have to re-organize into something altogether different. Whatever the case, it has become evident now that Newsvine has one foot in the grave and we aven see this through the strong decline in its web penetration of “seeded” articles as of late.

    Unfortunately our verdict is that Newsvine is crap and we simply have no further use for it as a medium. Maybe they’ll get rid of the toxic personalities that are harming the project, but from what I read above that appears unlikely.

  • http://viatropos.com viatropos

    Thanks for posting this. I just got a Newsvine account like a week ago and just started checking out the whole social media thing, seeing what works, what doesn’t….

    At first I posted one or two articles from my blog, then quit that and started only posting links with brief reviews basically of other peoples discoveries that helped me out and I thought made good news.

    Without warning, after say 10 articles, boom, done. I’m out. I asked them why, haven’t heard a thing back.
    .-= viatropos´s last blog ..HTML5 Blog Post Architecture =-.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_3NZSYOAG3HNNTULZZQAQMG3QLI Tyrone White

    I was deleted from the Newvine along with my girlfriend that they accused us of having multiple acounts. We both live together and use the same wireles router and so therefore Newsvine is so stupid to realize that some people live together and have their own accounts using the same router. Can you imagine how unpoopular Facebook would be if only one person in a family could log on because the other family members couldn’t use the same router in their home to create an account. My neice has four family memebers on Facebook using one wireless router.
    I hope to hell someone creates a virus for the Newsvine mudderfudders. That site needs to go!

  • Rose Bud

    I hate Newsvine also.  They axed me because they did not approve of my political and religious beliefs.  When I was attacked regarding these beliefs I was not supposed to respond negatively.  When I did they were offended.  First they suspended me, then eventually banned me and my IP address.  They are definitely a rude group of moderators.   

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