questions for the editors

If you want the problems to go away

Click to expand...

They aren't our problems. If we get tired of webmaster complaints on this forum, we can close it. If we get tired of accepting suggestions, we can turn them off. Neither of those actions would prevent the ODP from growing.

As it is now you are too important to take the attitude you take. Perhaps you are similar to an athlete who, thrust into the mainstream must modify his behaviour as he has become a role model. He never asked for that but the money comes from somewhere.

Click to expand...

But we are not a commercial venture. Just because someone else likes what we do and uses it for a commercial purpose, doesn't mean that we suddenly have to modify our own goals to serve someone else's purpose. We don't owe anyone anything.

You get exposure and traffic b/c of your commercial importance.

Click to expand...

We existed before we had exposure, and will continue to exist after. We aren't trying to generate traffic. Some believe that the commercial exposure is a detriment to our goals. If the perception from SEOs is that Google is lessening the ODP's importance, and the result is that we get less spam, great!

I honestly don't understand how review of submitted sites can not be an important piece of your job. Lets use a restraunt analogy. I come in and place my order. When I ask the waitress about my dinner, she says they're working on it, and to ask again in an hour. Well, that simply won't do, so I get the attention of a higher-up and ask them. They say I don't need to know and tell me to sit down. When I press for answers, he finally tells me that some cooks work on orders, some randomly take meals to people walking by the front doors, and some don't come to work at all. I'm then told that making orders for the people sitting in the dining room isn't the cooks real job anyway, it's to make dinner for anyone walking by who may or may not be hungry. Why do you think tee patron might be mad?

Click to expand...

The problem with this analogy is that in theory the restaurant is in business to make money and the patrons are the customers. The ODP isn't in business at all, and the site suggesters aren't our customers.

To rephrase the restaurant analogy in our terms (the terms of the folks running the restaurant), the customers are the web searchers that use their results. The restauranteurs set the menu, customers make their choices from what we offer, and they instantly served and are on their way. As restauranteurs, we want to have as complete a menu as possibile, filled with the best product possible, and as free as possible of spam and other undesirable junk food.

Site submittors are not customers, but are the food venders that show up at our back door offering us new dishes that may or may not belong on our menu (or may be the same as something already on the menu). As operators of the business, trying to keep our customers happy, we reserve the right to take the offerings and add them to our menu, or decide that we want to offer something else and go looking at a market. The restauranteurs get to select what's on the menu, not the food vendors, but we may take what they offer.

Kind of a stretch. The library analogy (the ODP as a library, searchers as patrons, and submitters as media salesmen) works better -- Foe

The restaurant analogy is good. Let's see how it would really work.

It's mid-evening Friday, and the chefs are all as busy as one-handed potato-peelers; the waiters are scurrying around filling CUSTOMERS' orders as fast as possible. The kitchen staff is carting in pallet-loads of produce. Suddenly a salesman bursts through the door, knocks down the porter (sneering "elitist lackey of the drone classes"), and stumbles through the tables toward what he presumes is the kitchen. (The porter mumbles unheeded, "all salesmen wait in the large conference room.") Eventually, after bumping into with several waiters, knocking their trays of food onto the floor (necessitating immediate extra work for the chef as well as the cleaning crew), he finds his way to the kitchen door. There he's met by a small sous-chef with a large butcher knife.

"Where's the chef?" he demands. "I have to see the chef RIGHT NOW! I NEED to see the chef. I won't make my sales quota if I don't sell 500 pounds of rancid irradiated beef per week to this restaurant starting today. And I need to know, right NOW, how much you're going to buy. I don't care what the chef is doing, he couldn't be doing anything without food producers, so his most important mission is buying food. So why isn't he buying my food! This restaurant is too economically important to worry about cooking food, all that matters economically is that they buy it. From Me. Now. So why can't you tell me when you are going to pick up the food from my warehouse?"

What's reality here? This was the hundred and thirty seventh salesman to crash the door -- that evening. Ninety-seven of them are from the same three warehouses. (And, by the way, all three warehouses are well known to be completely vermin-free, because rats are picky about what they eat.) Ninety-two of the ninety-seven claim that they offer unique combinations of blasts, molds, blight, and mildew; the other five really don't know that the warehouses hired all the inmates when the local asylum closed down, and don't realize there's a possibility that they might not be offering unique goods.

Three of the salesmen really don't realize that in this hemisphere of planet earth, Friday evening is a busy time for restaurants. On their home planet, Tuesday morning is the socially approved gluttony hour. The rest really don't care -- they got fired from their part-time dinner-hour telemarketing jobs for being too pushy -- and they figure the one time the chef is sure to be in the restaurant is Friday evening.

So, I give up. You make the call. You volunteered to be a sous-chef to learn how to make biscuits. You don't want to be a bouncer, and you don't have the physique for it. In fact, the restaurant doesn't have bouncers. All you have is a big knife and the positional advantage.

What do you tell this disruptive peremptorily importunate salesman for a potential supplier, who seems to be operating under the delusion that he is not only your customer, but in fact your only customer?

"The chef has a long list of suppliers to investigate. In fact, we can't guess when we'll next need a supplier for radioactive beef. In fact, the last ten potential broccoli suppliers were really selling radioactive beef spray-painted green. No, we don't actually know your beef is radioactive, do we? We won't know until we assay it. And we won't assay it until we need possibly-radioactive beef. No, the chef won't talk to you more quickly if you claim to be selling broccoli spray-painted gray. No, the chef won't talk you more quickly if you bring in another half-dozen disruptive salesman next Friday night. No, I don't know how many pounds of beef we'll need next Friday night. The chef won't select the menu until Wednesday. No, there's no way to strong-arm the chef to get him to put more beef on the menu."

All of which is true and relevant, but ... so long as he doesn't hear what he wants to hear, and doesn't see an immediate risk to his body parts from the knife, it's not going to get any biscuits made.

I don't know what you'd do. We sometimes use the knife. We keep hoping that if the first hundred and thirty-six salesmen are seen leaving the restaurant with carry-out bags filled with bits of themselves, the others will get the message: just send your price list to our business office and we'll check out your produce when we need it.

We call that being mission-oriented. You can call it being careless with knives; but there's more than one way to use a knife on a mission, and the way not to get cleft is not to look like a cleavable impediment. Is that so hard to figure out?

lissa said:

The problem with this analogy is that in theory the restaurant is in business to make money and the patrons are the customers. The ODP isn't in business at all, and the site suggesters aren't our customers.

Click to expand...

Then lets go with a similar analogy: a soup kitchen. Coolk come in to both make the soup and to give a bowl to whomever they deem hungry enough. Eack cook has his own recipe. As it turns out, the recipes are simply the best around. Everyone in town wants one of the recipes.

The sign in front says that you can come in and get a recipe. If we com in, and take a number, you will eventually draw the number out of a hat and give us the recipe. The problem, you say, is that too many people are taking too many numbers in the hope of getting the recipe quicker, so you don't like to pull numbers.

I understand the ulturism in wanting to give the soup out for free. You have no problem with the fact that a great many restraunt owners use your recipes and sell the soup. You just fail to understand the impact your soup kitchen has for the restraunts. You wish that only individual households used your recipes to make dinner for their families.

You insist that you still only run a soup kitchen, and, out of sheer principle, that that's all it is and ever will be. That, however, is not the reality of the situation. While some can still get a bowl of soup, the prime reason for it's current existence is to give out recipes whick will be used by the restraunts to make a living. You voluntarily blind yourself to the reality, continuing in the original (and good) intentions the soup kitchen was founded on. Again, while I understand, it's just not realistic anymore.

greenmonkey said:

You have unfortunately become too important commercially to take the attitude you take.

Click to expand...

Who died and appointed you the Godfather?

"Nice little business ya got here. Wadda ya call it, 'ODP'? Dassa good name, good name. Nice food ya do, too. Be a pity if something were to happen to such a nice restaurant.

Say, where you buy your cabbage? If ya wanna buy a rutabaga here, or a head of celery there, for like personal consumption, Mr. Big don't have no problem wid that, see? But if yaz starts shipping whole pallets of comestibles in, Mr. Big says it gives a bad impression if you don't deal with him. And you don't want to give Mr. Big a bad impression.

Here, I'll make you a deal you can't refuse. You can buy fifty pounds of beef a week from Mr. Big, and he won't ask where the rutabagas come in. Or you can close the restaurant down, and if you wanna invite a few close personal friends over for dinner, Mr. Big don't have a problem with that, see. Take-a your pick. But you don't want I should hafta tell Mr. Big you have a bad attitude."

I really didn't see those two posts before I wrote mine -- it's just the hive mind at work.

Random thought: Are trolls immune to African killer bee venom?

The problem with Hutchenson's version of the analogy is this: you're treating the salesmen who are waiting in the conference room with the distain that should be reserved only for the ones bursting through the kitchen. The majority of us wait in the conference room, occasionally peeking out head out the door, hoping to get someone's attention as they run past. You then berate us like we were one of those storming into the kitchen.

Is a little courtesy so hard to return? If we get nasty, then THAT"S the time to be rude to us, not when we're waiting patiently and saying 'excuse me, sir, is my table ready yet.'

It also seems that in your version of the analogy, you put salesmen dead last on your list of those you wish to seat. That just throws your supposed indifference to whom you serve right out the window. It just screams "If you're not non-profit, we'll take care of you when we're darn well good and ready, and how dare you think otherwise, despite our asking for you rinterest in us."

hutcheson said:

Random thought: Are trolls immune to African killer bee venom?

Click to expand...

As far as I know, you need to use fire or acid. They heal up any other wound, including decapitation. At least that's the way it works in the RPGs.

Then I would challenge you to look through the vast majority of site submission requests (that are more than two weeks old) and rethink your position. Just look at the reply counts.

1 reply usually means they submitted a properly completed request (purchase order) and we replied.

2 replies usually means that they took a moment to say thank you.

3 replies usually means we had them reformat their request and we answered.

Beyond that, it is insanity to try and discern a pattern.

Just count the threads and the number of replies. We don't just automatically get into the nasty mode. I won't say we never get nasty -- we most certainly do, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find us getting nasty with no provocation.

I've also seen many, threads where the reply count is in the dozens and the count goes up by two a month., They ask again, we reply.

For us, it would be just as simple to close the conference room down and inform all salesmen that we buy all our produce at the local farmer's market.

[

you put salesmen dead last on your list of those you wish to seat

Click to expand...

No, there is infinite seating for sales(wo)men in the waiting room. The only ones we ask not to come in are those who have a well document history of flatulence.

avengers63 said:

You voluntarily blind yourself to the reality, continuing in the original (and good) intentions the soup kitchen was founded on. Again, while I understand, it's just not realistic anymore.

Click to expand...

Ah, but it is for us.

What I read in your postings is the misunderstanding of who our customers are.

Our customers are the people, organisations and companies who want to use our data either to include it in their own site (we tell them under which conditions they are allowed to do so) or for those who are looking for information.

People (webmasters) who suggest sites to us are NOT our customers. As stated in our guidlines everyone is welcome to suggest a site and we will look at it sometime in the future. That's all we promise nothing more nothing less. We will look at the site at the moment we like. Maybe we will think the suggestion is a good one maybe we will think it isn't. And to be honest in some parts of ODP most sites suggested to us are not good (read: don't conform to our rules).

OK, you're still missing the point.

No, the salesmen aren't "dead last on the list of customers." They aren't on the list of customers at all! They are, at best, necessary tools to get what we need; at worst, obstacles between us and what we need. But the vast majority of the best don't visit the restaurant at all -- some of them don't even send us brochures -- so you mostly see us dealing with the mediocre and the worse.

And no, we don't treat even all of them the same. As we run by the conference room, we shout, "no, you in the loud plaid there -- no not you, the one leaning on the proscenium -- no appointment yet." You'll see a _lot_ of that in the forum here.

But our most important message is not, "you don't have an appointment yet" or "the chef is looking at it right now." Our most important message is always "the chef doesn't do food reviews the way you seem to think he does. You're wasting your time hanging around in the conference room, when you could be out polishing your brochures or spray-painting your asparagus."

I try to say something slightly different each time, but, frankly, one person can only come up with so many ways of saying "There's a rumor that life has been discovered outside the conference room. Pass it on." It's neither germane nor fair to criticize us for lack of originality when our primary purpose is conveying information, and your primary purpose is presumably to gain knowledge thereby.

avengers63 said:

The sign in front says that you can come in and get a recipe. If we com in, and take a number, you will eventually draw the number out of a hat and give us the recipe. The problem, you say, is that too many people are taking too many numbers in the hope of getting the recipe quicker, so you don't like to pull numbers.

Click to expand...

So who are the folks taking numbers in order to get the recipes in this analogy? Your soup kitchen analogy falls apart here. I think you mean to be talking about site submitters, but those are the folks showing up at the back door with soup ingredients they want to give us, and angry that we don't have enough tasters and testers to make sure their contributions are tasty and won't make anyone sick if we add it to the soup pot. We're too busy caring about the quality of the soup being served out the front door to worry too much about the mob at the back door.

We do give out the recipe for free, lots of other restaurants (money-making web sites) use said recipe. There's no line and no wait, but it does take some work and skill to use it, and since we are always tinkering with it, many restaurants use out-of-dates versions.

Yes, we do give our data/recipe away for free, with only minor stipulations as to how it can be used -- Foe

I should mention also that it has nothing to do with commercialism. The vegan activists complaining about beef on the menu, the wild-eyed mullahs shouting "the end is nigh!", the nice old ladies selling girl scout cookies, the fervid poets looking for a captive audience, the conspiracy theorists looking for disguised illuminati -- all freely donate their own contributions to the emotional intensity of the conference room. The main difference is that (with some memorably spectacular exceptions) they don't go back to the conference room with the carry-out bag.

The health inspectors are always welcome. What they mostly end up saying is "that beef smells like broccoli" -- and come next Friday night, some salesman is going to realize just how much colder a reception can get!

Meant for ealier post:

You have truly displayed your ignorance on a ten foot pole.

I am simply posting on an intellectual basis. Instead of offering any dialogue on my premise you choose to act like a buffoon. Say what you want but this premise does hold some weight. I have not acted like a child in any way.

Projects, radio shows what have you can transcend their purpose into a sort of public good. Now it probably has not happened here and I am just frustrated (and rightfully so) but this does not mean that it cannot be up for discussion. This was a discussion was it not.

Your last post, however, has cemented in me and I'm sure in others who may read this, the very problem - credibility in certain aspects.

Why act like a child, son. Is it not up for intellectual discussion the possibility that something can morph into a public good. It happens all the time in the world. The other editor who chose to confront my points did so in a very logical and insightful manner. She brought up some great points.

You have to resort to defensive bufoonery. I never did.

And now for something completely different: an ontological debate. On the solipsistic side, avenger63 will affirm the position:

Perception is reality.

Click to expand...

And on the realistic side, avenger63 will affirm the position:

You voluntarily blind yourself to the reality ... it's just not realistic.

Click to expand...

Since some issues in this thread depend on the nature of reality, I'd suggest tabling it until that debate is finished.

I personally don't agree with either side. I am persuaded that perception is a mental construct, which may or may not agree with reality, but does not create it. Intention, however, is a mental construct which creates reality.

The ODP is real; it is an intentionally created artifact. It doesn't preclude anyone, either editors or salesmen, from other creative actions. What puzzles me, though, is why people think that their own creativity, although obviously insufficient to affect the behavior of ODP editors even for a few minutes, is yet sufficient to alter the intention that caused those editors to behave that way?

Well, I know less psychology than philosophy; for that part of the discussion I'm just a fascinated observer.

What's fascinating is this:

You hold submitters in contempt. I would guess b/c to you they are all submitters and some have annoyed you even though each one on their own is an idividual they are still lumped into "submitters" or salesman or webmasters and recieve contempt.

You have said that you can serve anyone you please and deny anyone you please, more or less.

Now these two thought patterns together have caused a great many problems in the world and still do. This is, off course, not one of them. But it is interesting that these two patterns of thought seem to be related.

greenmonkey said:

You hold submitters in contempt.

Click to expand...

What is more contemptous: the attitude that says, "anyone who doesn't do what I want when I want it is an elitist pig", or the attitude that says, "you are free to develop your own vision of public good, or to help with ours; and if your vision at all corresponds to ours, we'll freely give you assistance?"

And which attitude is more contemptible?

We know that many submitters are simply trying to help us, and that is what submittals are for; most most submitters are trying to help themselves by taking advantage of our vision -- and that also is OK, but places us under no compulsion. And a few are rabidly trying to subvert, distort, and destroy our vision -- we cannot control how they take rejection, but we have the right to reject them.

It is really only a small percentage of submitters that gives the whole roomful such a foul odor. It's only a few that gnash their teeth because they can't send the stormtroopers in to drag all the ODP editors down to the salt mines.

We know that. And we will do our best not to allow their blatant greed, hypocracy, and arrogance to color our dealings with the thousands of helpful or at least harmless submitters.

In All Honesty

I would like to ask a question of the editors and to receive an honest answer. I would love to have the answer come from Lissa as I find her responses excellent.

You have all made your points, some very, very good ones. I still think you have done little to dismiss the feeling that you don't take a "tone" when dealings with us pions but, what can you do.

My question, and it is related to my personal experience (and alot of others), is this:

Let's us say everything I am going to proffer below is a "truth", for the sake of discussion. And let us say that by truth we mean that a juror of peers, editors, whoever, would agree by some significant margin that it is so.

Say there is a site that exceeds every other site in a category in content, design, usability, uniqueness, relevance etc. And that in this category are Page Not Founds, sites that don't belong by a stretch in that category, sites that don't offer things for sale (if it was a shopping category), sites with little of no unique content, and a collection of sites that sold barely related crap. Let us say there is not one site that exceeds the initial site (that would like to get listed).

Now this one site does not get listed. Then on top of this the site owner is belittled and held in contempt for the audacity of wanting to suggest a site to this category - an action that would be mutually beneficial in a relationship that is admittedly at odds.

What would you like someone to do after this?