It has been more than a decade since the launch of the world’s largest social networking sites, and today most of them have moved far from their original social nature. Their attention and focus have shifted — the mission to contribute real value to the communities they once worked so hard to build has been quietly abandoned. Once the millions or billions of users are in place, the only constant plan becomes to capitalise, market, and trade those users for corporate advertising budgets, tweaking and re-modelling the revenue machine with every passing quarter.
A true social networking site’s objective must be to create a network of people with varied interests, gather them around a common thread, categorise them, and connect them with those who share specific passions. Set the big data aside — people are not merely data points. They are not just numbers. The value of people within a social networking platform is immeasurably greater than what any spreadsheet will ever capture.
That is the thought that ran through the mind of the maker of Indiblogger.in.
The idea was never simply to create India’s largest bloggers-only directory. It was to build a genuine network of bloggers across the nation — to facilitate and support the everyday contributions of those bloggers while they quietly shaped the landscape of Indian writing. And while the bloggers were at it, the Indiblogger team constantly asked itself: what must we give back?
I used to have around 300 to 400 people on my Facebook, with whom I shared updates occasionally. They shared things at random, things they liked — relevant to some, uninteresting to many. I had not actually seen most of these people or even confirmed that they truly exist. I once encountered a social media strategist who offered services solely to inflate “likes” — by creating 50 to 100 fake Facebook profiles registered with purchased SIM cards. Did Facebook know, or even care, about protecting the integrity of its network and safeguarding the interests of its people?
On the other hand, the bloggers-only network that Indiblogger was building upheld its guidelines regardless of whether doing so slowed down new membership numbers. Manual moderation is not a simple checkbox exercise — it is a meticulous verification and validation process that keeps the network clean of spammers and unrelated gibberish. And it shows.
The people who exist in this network are real people. I have met most of them. Bloggers who read a post or follow a certain blog can meet one another in person at blogger meets across the country. That concept — born from bloggers themselves — has kept the spirit of blogging alive, and it is certainly a positive way to inject lasting value into the blogger community.
More than 200 blogger meets have been held across the country, connecting thousands of bloggers in the span of seven years — a minimum of two meets per month. I am not aware of any other social network that has achieved anything on this scale, with this level of authenticity.
Indiblogger’s idea has never been to simply market opportunities for commercial value alone. It has been to find synergy within a wonderfully mixed group, to help organisations understand and identify the real effectiveness of this medium, and to make sure that every blogger feels the platform as a wall of expression, a window of opportunity, and a door that opens to a million other things.
At these events, bloggers are encouraged, honoured, and motivated to do what they do best — blog. Every blogger is a winner in this network, whether or not they participate in the countless contests Indiblogger hosts. The respect and warmth that bloggers hold for Indiblogger is worth far more than the value of any prize they have ever won.
This is social networking. This is what social networking was always meant to be.
What Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey must learn from this network’s ideology is simple: their platforms were created by people. Without people, they are nothing. Moreover, the Indiblogger concept was not an imitation of anything that existed at the time of its inception. It was original.
Those billion-dollar social networking firms must choose to spend less time with their legal teams and financial auditors, and more time with the people who built them — in real time, in real rooms, with real conversations.
Indiblogger.in is working to save the ever-endangered species known as the blogger, and taking active measures to prevent their extinction. And that, for what it’s worth, is good work worth doing.
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