Let me be clear, i am a fan of muti and find it extremely useful, i access it so many times a day i actually created a desktop application for it and the guys from blueworld seem to be doing a lot of cool things as well. Though i am going to ask the questions that need to be asked. Has muti made a fundamental mistake when it comes to community management?

Granted that the noise being made may be a bit loud regarding the spam, though just recently the blogging community made a similar noise against deal-a-day email spam which hit muti as well. Charl is a respected member of the SA blogging community and they did come out with a response and the issue should have died there.

However both the submissions were then subsequently pulled from muti, one at the request of Chris. The other i have no idea why? Coda then asked the question on why was the second post pulled? I find myself asking the same thing. Why?

Once muti starts making decisions on censoring content of what people submit it’s heading down a slippery slope. The thing is you can never please everyone. Google themselves refuse to censor search results. Even on Youtube, only content that is clearly hate speech is removed. So where does this leave muti?

I think the guys at muti need to decide if they want to cater for a small group of people, all of whom have the same opinions and that way censoring of content that differs from the general group consensus is fine. However if muti wants to cater for a larger community, censoring and pulling submissions should only be done in extreme circumstances of Hate Speech. Also note, with previous submissions of hate speech the vote count was merely cleared, the spam posts however were completely deleted including comments and the discussions around it.

We need to realize that since muti currently caters for large number of people, there are going to be differing view points and you really do not want to play the adjudicator, judge or take sides. Muti has clearly done this, and as the facilitator of the blogging community at large i believe this is a fundamental mistake.

As an example this raises questions like:

• Someone posts something that is factually incorrect and paints me in a bad light, could i request the post be removed?
• Or maybe this post could be pulled at the request of Yasser since it was clearly critical?

As you can see, the questions this action raises could go on and on, and you would never get to the end of it. This is a problem faced by many companies, Google, Facebook, Twitter. Even telecoms companies like Vodacom and Cell C where people complain falsely of harrasment via sms. Unless the community is extremely small it becomes increasingly difficult to be the judge, therefore the best response is to set clear guidelines on what is not accepted(i.e hate speech) and can be removed, anything that does not meet the criteria of unacceptable stays.

muti needs to ‘grow up’ and realise it does not just cater for a small group of people any longer with the same opinions, and with that nobody, no matter who they are (including shareholders) should be able to influence the content that gets removed. Let’s just hope this is something that will not be repeated again and we can take away a lesson from this.

Update: Mandy De Waal has a post regarding this as well

* Note these instructions are for mac, for windows replace fluid with mozilla’s prism, the same script should work on prism / firefox as well.

1. Download and install fluid – Instructions and details at the Fluid website

2. Run fluid, and fill in the details like the screenshot below:
URL: http://www.muti.co.za/new
Name: muti
Location: Applications

3. You can either choose to use the default website fav icon or a custom icon. I created a custom icon so it fits well in with the rest of the icons in the menubar. Feel free to use it
Rightclick and save as:

4. Click “Create”, fluid will work for a bit, then click “launch now”

5. A new window will popup with the title muti, click on muti in the menu bar and then preferences and select advanced:

muti > Preferences > Advanced

6. Under “Allow browsing to URL’s matching this pattern” change www.muti.co.za/new to *muti.co.za*

7. Optional:
muti > Preferences > Appearance : you can change the window opacity
muti > Prefrences > General : Tick open in the background this opens all links clicked on muti in the background in your default browser.

8. Close the prefrences panel

9. In the muti window, logon with your username and password

10. With muti application still open, click the script icon: and select browse userscripts.org

11. In the new window that pops up, enter in “muti” in the search box and hit enter, click on the first option. This will take you to a page with a description of the script, feel free to look at the source code. The script can be found at: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/29838

12. Click “Install Script” , this will display the source code with an alert, Click Install

13. On the menubar click the script icon: again, and confirm that muti is listed there with a tick next to it

14. Close down the userscripts.org window

15. Select muti > Convert to menuextra SSB

16. All done, now you have a desktop app for muti that looks good in the small window of fluid and it should look like this:

Notes:
* Elements on the right side navigation bar on muti seems to be used for a lot of things like voting and logging in, since this was removed logging in will not work. Voting will still work since i catered for that in the java script. If for some reason you need to login again, deactivate the script, logon and reactivate it again.
* Windows users can use the same script, just replace fluid with mozilla prism (not tested)
* If you prefer the default page to be hot on step 2, just enter http://www.muti.co.za instead
* To refresh, right click and select reload
* Feel free to modify/customize the JS code
* Possible future features:
-Dock badge with the number of new submissions. Though this is not currently possible since there is no way to differentiate new items since the last refresh.
- Auto Refresh