The Commercial Black Hole

Well, after being sick, sicker and sickest I'm back to just being sick. But, able to blog. So here goes nothing.


What I noticed this week is that tv.com tries to get their users involved with the look and feel of the website and the community. They're doing this by asking their members for feedback on for example the redesign. But, what I wondered about is; do they actually DO something with these opinions, or are these threads only there to create the illusion of having a voice in the community?

And thus, I explored. And as I suspected, the entire forum is filled with complaints from users, and zero response from the people who run the site. So it is an illusion of power. Not great.

I found out that the site is run by management from CBS, one of the biggest USA TV networks. That alone speaks volumes. Of course it's going to be one commercial megamonster. And of course there's no room for a close knit community. A few things I'd like to point out:

• There's too much irrelevant information for anyone to discuss anything in great detail.
• There's no two-way communication between 'staff' and 'members'.
• They claim to be a User Generated Content website/community. BUT, if the users don't generate, the staff will. Logically, the users are lazy and don't exactly jump to be the best contributor.

I think a lot needs to change here in order to get members more involved. They need to care more about this site, in order for the community to really start to evolve.

More on this later.