Over the weekend I found myself checking out JumpCut – a Yahoo! property, perhaps aspiring to be their ‘Flickr for video’…
Anyway, it was my first time accessing the site and as soon as it loaded my eye jumped immediately to a thumbnail of what can only be described as pretty X-rated pornographic video in their ‘recently popular movies’ section.
However, the process to flag this video as unsuitable content left a lot of be desired…
Selfish use?
Now, when you’re building any kind of social software you’ve got to consider the motivations for participation – why would a user want to share that link, rate that cafe or add another user as a friend, etc? In general the best principle is to code for ‘selfish use’; that is assume that the user is only going to do something if he can see that he’s going to get a direct or indirect benefit in return.
However, there are also times when a social app will get it’s environment right and people will go out of their way to do something without an immediate benefit unto themselves. Flagging questionable content in a user-generated environment is one example of such an action.
If you are lucky enough to have a user who is prepared to do something like this for you – without any benefit to themselves – it’s important to bring down the barriers to completion of that path. That is, make it super easy for the user to complete the alert process so that it reduces the burden upon them and increases the likelihood they will actually get to the point of letting you know the important information.
JumpCut could do with re-thinking their workflow for this.
In order to flag a questionable video on the site not only did I have to sign in with my Yahoo! ID (suddenly semantically joining my use of the site with the rest of my Y! account) but then I was forced to create a complete JumpCut account too! At this point I decided to leave it – I have no interest in a JumpCut account and despite them being ‘free’, I’m not in the habit of signing up for accounts I don’t intend to use.
Why wasn’t this process ‘one-click, job done’?
As it happens that porno is still on the site, hopefully it hasn’t been viewed by anyone who might find it offensive or indeed a child.
A quick reinvestigation of the site tonight shows there are more questionable videos on the front page, and if not explicit they are certainly ‘border line’.
Looks like JumpCut is little more than a video cesspit to me – Yahoo! should be ashamed of itself. You Yahoo’ers can do better than this.