Other Our own Bit-Tech with blackjack and hookers!

A month or two ago I contacted @MLyons about giving bit-tech a bit of a redesign. I could see that articles were becoming shorter and more infrequent and was worried that bit-tech might be slowly dying. My idea was to design a front-end that could interact with BT's CMS and Forum API's, freeing me up to add a bunch of new features in a tech stack I'm familiar with. I went as far as to make a basic template and sent screenshots to Mason who said he'd pass it on. Nothing ever came of it, and now I know why.

So, following the end of bit-tech, I've decided to take it upon myself to continue that work and build a replacement. I've spoken to @The_Crapman who is eager to handle the content side of things, while I concentrate on the techy side. Bit-Tech will live on, if not in name, then in spirit!

Speaking of a name, we don't have one yet so for the moment, we're going to refer to it as BT2.

So where do we go from here? Well, we're in the first of four stages:

• Discovery: You are the client, so we want to get your feedback on the proposed changes and hear suggestions you might have.
• Design: Designing a prototype of the site in a graphics package, which will be published to get your feedback
• Development: Making the cheesecake...
• Deployment: Cheesecake!

So what are these changes? Nothing major, just ways of extending its reach, adding more utility. and making it more engaging. Obsessions with cheesecake, Relix, and MoTM will continue (although we probably won't have any prizes for MoTM initially)

Initial Changes/New Features

• Calendar: This is a stupidly simple idea that I always wanted to see implemented - A curated calendar to keep track of trade expos, launch dates, etc. I can't count the number of times that I'd intended to watch a live stream for such-and-such but completely forgot about it, and I'm guessing this isn't a unique experience.
• Video: I believe there needs to be a greater emphasis on video, as that's just where the market is these days. Every review would have a video, and the articles themselves would really just be transcripts of the video review but would have their own value such as...
• Interactive Charts: Charts generated at runtime rather than a static image, allowing you to add additional comparisons. If you've set up your current rig in your profile, that hardware would be automatically added to each chart.
• Podcast: Like video, we need to reach into other paradigms to keep the site relevant, so I hope to arrange a regular tech podcast akin to Hardware Unboxed's Q&A's, or (and I'm loathed to make this comparison) The WAN Show

Future Features
I have a few other ideas for features

• Twitch integration: I'm not sure if full integration is the right way to go with this, but I hope to encourage users to stream under a BT2 banner, cross-promoting each other, and the community.
• Steam integration: Again, I'm not sure if full steam integration would be overkill, but I want to implement tools to make it easier to...erm, play with each other - Stuff like tournament brackets, etc.

Once we get to the development stage, and I bury myself under a rock until it's finished, @The_Crapman is going to be recruiting volunteers...It has to be volunteers until we get established because we're trying to pull this off with a budget of zero, but we're going to need game reviewers and sales & marketing people if anyone has any experience in that area. If you're interested PM myself or @The_Crapman

I've written enough for now, let us know your thoughts - Would you be willing to support us in this even if all that means is showing up to improve our metrics for advertisers? What are your thoughts about the direction? Any suggestions? Or should we not beat a dead horse and be content with the forums persisting?

 

Honestly, I haven't gotten to that part since it isn't a viable business yet. I mean, the idea is 24 hrs old. I'm just testing the waters because I'm doing this as a volunteer too. Long term, I'd like to run it as a co-operative, although we need to get into the black first.

 

You're quite right, that is excellent advice, and I hope you'll chip in with more. Out of everyone here, you're probably the one with the most experience.

I, on the other hand, am really figuring this out as I go along. I know software development, and I've been reading tech magazines for long enough to know exactly what I want out of them, but I only have an outsider's idea of how the backend of this particular business works, or what dynamics can arise from them. As mentioned, it's been about 24 hours, and I didn't see myself as the owner but rather a contributor to keeping the community alive like everyone else.

This is part of this discovery phase. Bearing in mind that we're starting with a budget of zero, yet require content to launch with, do you have any suggestions? Perhaps play catch-up, paying people chronologically once we have a budget?

 

So, is there cheesecake? We also require the annual Christmas mince pie review this is non negotiable.

 

Following on from what Gareth said, I was wondering if there was a way to have it user content led. I know there are afew here who post some quite decent reviews. Is there a way of making this a cooperative like site, where users submit reviews or something. obviously there would need to be editorial control somewhere, but perhaps not too heavy handed.

On top of that, having sections would be nice, for monitors, GFX cards, CPUs etc, so finding things is easier.

 

Should we not wait and see what is in the pipeline first, before trying to start afresh?

 

Honestly this is where I am right now. I'm not saying there isn't value in the idea but clearly Something Else is in the works, and it might be a better use of time and effort to help make Something Else a success instead of potentially trying to compete. Without the name and all that historical content it isn't going to be bit-tech, it'll be just another tech site and that's a crowded market... Unless someone swoops in and buys the assets, rights, branding, IP, etc, bit-tech as we know it is dead in the water.

 

Can we do reviews of gear we bought ? for free like? I'm up for that *groucho smiley*

 

Absolutely. @The_Crapman would be doing the hardware reviews for now. We do, however, need someone for the gaming reviews, but a camera isn't needed for that. It could be (and I'd prefer it to be) 100% game capture footage, so only a decent mic is needed. Reviews would be video-based, news articles would be written.

Vote, ensuring everyone understands the cost/benefit of taking someone new on. Alternatively, we could vote on a core-decision making team. No matter how we do it, committees are going to be messier than a dictatorship, but there's no way around that. Bit-tech has been a part of all our lives so a long time. Everyone feels a certain sense of ownership of it, and I want to reflect that in how the new venture is run.

At the moment I'm leaning towards a straight revenue share. Basing it on analytics could steer the site away from its mission - continuing the bit-tech spirit.

These are really Andy problems. I'm just the code monkey.

Yup. That was actually always the intention, I just found it easier and more succint to underline the point that we need to put a higher emphasis on video by expressing it that way. In a bullet point.

Done.

User content-led could get messy, fast. Look at social media. Trying to exert editorial control over such a system would be like herding cats, including the claws coming out. On the other side of the coin I don't want to sweep in and say "we're doing things my way now!", so I'm trying to find a happy medium

Don't worry about that. My goal is to make it the most advanced, user-friendly tech magazine on the planet. That's a tall order, but I am on a first-name basis with the team members of every layer of my tech stack who can help me out. Hell, I know people on the Typescript Technical Steering Group. We don't have much going for us, but we do have that.

I too thought about waiting, but given all we know, I don't think we should expect anything similar to hexus/bit-tech. David has already been promoting Tarinder and Parm's Hexus replacement and, having spoken to Mason about this, he said there would be no pushback if I did this. Whatever is on the horizon, all signs point to it being nothing like what we have now. I did suggest some sort of brand licensing agreement of the bit-tech name, but I've no idea if anything will come of that.

I disagree that bit-tech is dead in the water for now. bit-tech is a community, not a website. My fear however is that, without at least some content to gather around, the community will slowly bleed users before eventually dying.

 

I think this is the important bit.
I've been there, done that, got the T-Shirt (well actually it was a mug but same difference) and watched the phoenix slowly crash to the ground.

Back in the before, when Dennis had magazines, websites & forums there was an active community that crossed the magazine boundries in the Meeting Place. This was around the time they acquired this very site.

Then with a week or two's notice they were going to take the forums's down (as part of redevelopement) and when/if they returned they'd be split.
Nobody in the larger community wanted this, Social Media was still fairly new (think 10 or so years back so just the basic facebook, twitter & tumblr. Instagram was new and a proper site for photographers, WhatsApp was a tiny company trying to get cross platform messiging working)so I spun up a new forum to keep the community together. It wasn't pretty (I'm was a server monkey rather than a code monkey) but it worked. A few volunteers helped with some code to make things look nicer, the community voted on the logo design, we had active mod's keeping things polite, no intrusive adverts (as the fas at the time was for ads that overtook the full page) etc it was nice. The webmasters at Dennis got wind of this and we had the Dennis content writers posting in our forum (with links back to their articles) under instruction from Dennis Publishing management.

Eventually the Dennis forums returned (with a U-turn on splitting the meeting place) but the community stayed where it was, with 100k+ unique visitors a month and a community of people who wanted to build something better.
So we added a CMS to the main site and people started submitting content, no money was paid (as we generated the square root of f**k all income at the time) and a couple of volunteers acted as editors to ensure content met the guidelines.
We even had real life meetups. Heck, I even met my wife on there.

But the content began to dry up, people had real life commitments, we were new so would never get any exclusive news or reviews, the pro writers went back to posting on their employers websites, keeping the site running & secured was a full time job and the site became stale. This is all in addition to the site running at a loss because people both hate adverts & don't want to pay for things on the internet (although the financial part wasn't a major concern at this point, nobody had planned on starting a media empire from it). In addition, all the refugees from the old forums who wanted to be part of the community had made their way to us already, when Dennis closed their magazine forums down due to lack of use the last few users may or may not have held us responsible for their death and went elsewhere.

So the site was stripped back to just the forums, we went down to 400 or so active posters and it just sort of sat there for a while. People grew older, started famillies etc, social media use really kicked off with everybody online being on at least one platform and forum "friends" adding each other on these platforms and traffic dried up.

There's still a handful of users on it, people check in a couple of times a week, people re-visit it after being away for 10 years and are surprised we're stil there but it's just existing rather than thriving and all that's keeping it there is the fact that it's no longer any technical hassle to keep it running, it just runs. Next major issue with the site (some sort of technical failure) and that's it, it's gone, never to return.


Wow, that was a lot of text.

TLDR: Content is the key. Forum's & communities only grow if people sign up to comment on things and keep coming back for the comments/discussion,
If you don't drive traffic to the site for the content, the community slowly moves on.

 

So now that I've (sort of) seen what Something Else looks like, maybe I should comment on this proposal in more detail...

IMO video has got to play a bigger part, but it already sounds like that's going to be part of the plan anyway. I know there are always people who are going to prefer to read text rather than watch a video and that's fine, but just because it's a video doesn't mean it can't be substantial or in-depth - just look at what Gamers Nexus do. As has already been suggested though, I would not want to read an article that's just a transcript of the video - I'd just watch the video instead! Maybe save that article for more in-depth data or detail that can't fit into the video. Having more in-depth data and data visualisations would be a good, too - like an interactive and searchable list framerates in various games for various GPUs, for example. I can give some more detailed advice there if you'd like - I'm a Data Engineer by day and this sort of stuff is Wot I Do(tm).

Gareth has already gone into quite some detail on the business-y side of things, but there is always the option of crowdfunding if the cost of keeping the platform running starts to creep up. If there's more than one person involved then you definitely want to have all the business-y side of things in place first, but things like Patreon are already well-aligned to video content.

Twitch streaming was mentioned, and it's totally possible to embed a Twitch stream in other web content. I'm not sure if that's what you mean by "full integration" or not though. To start with you'd be better off having multiple people share the same account and setting a consistent schedule. All that needs to be shared (securely) is the stream key, you needn't give people the username and password for the account. You can create a Twitch 'Team', where individual streamers all stream under the same 'banner'... but you have to get to Partner first and that's not an easy road! I'm also happy to have a more detailed discussion about streaming if you'd like. It's something I dabble in now and then and I've been meaning to get back into it, I'd be happy to volunteer my time to help out with this.

 

No comment.

I regret wording that the way I did, but I saw it as a semantic difference. Rather than the article being the transcript of the video, I was thinking the article could provide the script for the video. Yes, this is serving two masters but I think, at least initially, it'll have to be this way - Doing both simply asks too much of contributors who aren't getting paid. If we reach a level where we turn a profit that could change, but for now realism trumps idealism.

Right now I'm planning out the road map. Version 1.0 will have feature parity with what we had before, and stuff like your suggestion is on the roadmap somewhere, I just need to figure out how and when to best implement it.

Gareth's posts were invaluable because they brought me back down to earth - From the excited enthusiasm of "Wouldn't it be cool if..." to "Yeah, I probably should start treating this like a potential business".
I've skeleton-ed out a shared document for all the things we need to think about, which I'll just go ahead and write out here in case anyone has any input:

• Legal
  • Legal structure
  • Policies - Privacy, Terms of Use, Cookies, Accessibility, Forum Rules, Hiring, Revenue Share
• Finance
  • Start-Up Costs
  • Capital Expenditure
  • Revenue Expenditure
• Staff - Identifying what roles we need to fill
• Content - Exactly what types of articles we'll be writing. In the case of reviews, what we'll be testing, and what hardware and/or software we need for those tests
• Monetization Options - Should we ditch banner advertising in favour of video sponsorships or Patreon? TBD...

I'm not entirely sure what I mean by that either. What I do know is that Twitch has a comprehensive API that I'm sure I can work in somehow, but I still have to do a deep dive on it. I'll probably take you up on that offer of assistance.

 

One thing I found for this that can help a bit is Amazon Affiliates (& other affiliate schemes). Whilst most people will run an Ad-blocker or not want to pay a subscription, they will on the other hand be willing to buy something from a store (that they were going to buy anyway) through an Affiliate link. It's not a massive income stream but every little helps.

 

I've always wondered about those binaries around the logo...anything to offer?

I assume it'll be part of privacy, but don't forget GDPR if applicable (maybe for member details etc.).

This sounds very positive though - don't let the obstacles get you down. Everything starts somewhere (Google started in a garage) and most of us are willing to help if we can.

 

Bit-Tech "UK"

Fun fact: Back in the day the logo used to have the union flag in the background

 

Well I never! Finally, that's been put to rest - nice one.

I do remember that logo, incidentally...