Welcome to Hell

As much as I like Entrecard and appreciate it driving traffic to my site. However, there are two major problems. The first is the quality and second is dropping. Some might not see this as a problem, and depending how it’s used, it might not be. However, is the Entrecard system being used properly and responsibly?

The first issue with the Entrecard system, is the quality of traffic that is being driven to this site and the others. Since using Entrecard this site has seen a massive increase in traffic to my site. However, most of this traffic, the vast majority of this traffic, is simply to show up to drop an Entrecard. The visitor opens the page, drops and closes the page. I know what they are doing, because this is what I’m resorting to when dropping. The issue is wanting people to read and comment on articles and information. This is not happening. The statistics look horrid, as a result. This runs completely against the philosophy of a Blog. A blog should be something that a person writes with the intention of creating a dialog with the readers.

The real issue here is that mostEntrecard users are only dropping in hopes that the drop will be reciprocated. This highlights the next issue, dropping.

Dropping is time consuming, difficult and shreds a machine. Of course not all of this is Entrecard’s fault by any means. However, it is a factor. The first issue with dropping is that the Drops Inbox does not allow you to sort or organize the drops in any way other than chronologically. Seeing the list chronologically is acceptable, however, wanting to reciprocate, seeing the list of the most recent 300 drops; the most recent 300 drops with the highest number of droppers listed first; or several other options, would be more useful. This would allow reciprocating to those who are being consistent. Even better, would be a drop queue that user’s could add sites they wanted to drop on everyday. There is the favorites on Entrecard but it’s not mature enough yet.

The next issue is with dropping is the sites being visited. Not to harp here, but some of these sites just SHRED a browsers. Visiting 300 sites per day, typically filled with Javascript, Movies, Audio and almost every technology under the sun creates some real technological issues. Don’t misunderstand, those technologies are great, when used properly. However, some sites use these things to excess. Some sites have 15 to 20 elements not related to their content. This increases the load time, the memory usage of the browser and impacts the performance of the entire computer. Resorting to dropping with Firefox because it handled the Javascript better than Safari. Then dropping killed Firefox and it had to be wiped completely off the machine and reinstalled.

Lastly, noticing a direct correlation between the number of drops related to the number of people who visit this site. This is great, however… dropping takes time. Dropping 300 cards per day is great, but can take two or three hours easily and it’s hard to consistently have that kind of free time.

My proposal is to reduceEntrecard participation until some of this is fixed. Having found a few enjoyable sites; will continue to visit those regularly. Appreciative of Entrecard for creating a way to find these sites. The end result is that I’m going to start collecting sites that deserve drops and make sure those sites get drops everyday. The rest of them, why bother.

Oh, and to those of you that play music or video on your site, without the user asking or clicking something to start it, will NEVER see another drop from me again. This is totally rude and completely offensive.