What happens when you let a social network go fallow
Some experiments are more fun than others; this one was fun because we always hear how spam, spammers, blog spammers and others are using social networks to try to sell their stuff. About a year ago I started an experiment using Pligg just to see what would happen if we started it, added a whole pile of real content, and then abandoned it, much like someone would do if their product did not meet the “critical mass” of users that they need to become successful.
Meet Yasvs, Yet Another Social Voting Site at http://www.yasvs.com. The site is safe for work, but I would seriously worry about visiting any of the sites that are in the social voting system.
Yasvs is just such a site, and in a lot of ways what the marking folks, spammers, SEO folks have done over the last 170 days to the site is somewhat funny. From Savings rates to Art Degrees, to Indian stars and their biographies to education, to hotels and on line fund raising, just about every kind of “must sell you stuff” advertorials are in there.
While the site has not been slammed with stuff, and the traffic to the site has been slow. One of the folks who posted on the social web site actually succeeded in getting the web site shut down because of their spamming activities as well. We had almost no recourse other than to beg the ISP to allow the site to function as it would with assurances that “this will never happen again”.
We do require that people who sign up and make an account provide us with a real e-mail address to send their login credentials to. Without the e-mail address, they will not get their site credentials, while some probably used throw away e-mail addresses, those that posted had to provide a real email address. The comparison to those that provided real versus fake e-mail addresses is somewhat on the order of 5 to 1, for every five people who signed up, only 1 provided a real e-mail address to get their password.
The other interesting thing, almost no porn, we only blocked one key word, teen. Most of what is on the site is all about selling something rather than plugging something else. Now if that is a function of the password credentials or a matter of the blocking of the key word teen, or some other issue I don’t know. But surprising because most of the spam I get at Techwag is nothing but porn, on the order of 50 porn spams a day at times. Usually they perk in at about 10 per day. But none at Yasvs, so that is an interesting thing to note, for the social network, porn does not seem to be a big thing here.
So if you want to see some very low yield amusement over what happens when a social network dies and is “abandoned” check it out, at least it is interesting to see how it is being used for SEO purposes, even though it has a low page rank, or how the folks approach the key word idea in the process.
Tags: social network, dead, who, uses, uses it, yasvs, spam, seo, marketing, experiment
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