Search Engine Marketing Blog: piloSEO

David Harry, AKA The Gypsy, has decided to leave Sphinn and all other social media sites and I for one will miss his contributions. David wrote a blog post outlining his frustration with the various social media properties at his Fire Horse Trail blog. The post, titled Social Media Cash Grab, outlines his frustration with the fact that he and other active members provide valuable content and help to build these sites and essentially get no real recognition for it. I am not going to go into too much detail explaining it because David does a great job doing it himself.

I too have experienced social media burnout

Now, I have never been nearly as active as David and I never put as much time and effort into building a community as he has but I have experienced a social media burnout myself. I always saw social media sites as a great way to share interesting news and interact with the other community members. For a while this seems to be the case but after a short period of time it seems that they become full of cliques, not to mention the proliferation of spam. In time the best articles get ignored and the simple regurgitations submitted by users with a lot of friends make it to the top. Now, I don’t necessarily have a problem with the friendship thing. After all, part of a social media community is developing relationships and sharing news. The problems arise when it is more important to vote for your friends stories than actually promoting quality content. This is a problem with all social sites after they become fairly popular.

Sphinn is losing a valuable member

David was insanely active on Sphinn and he contributed a lot of great articles and participated in the conversation. I will miss his contributions and I think it is a better place with him there. Sphinn and other social media sites would do well to make active members like David feel more appreciated. If it were not for their constant efforts these sites would not have reached the status that they have. I will continue to visit Sphinn and I will continue to interact with David through Plurk, Twitter, and Friend Feed but I will miss the contributions he provided at Sphinn.

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