Operation MAYFLOWER: Everything Here, TLDR.

Operation MAYFLOWER

Like the pilgrims who first came to America to escape a world of religious persecution, Operation MAYFLOWER is an ark for gamers. Over the course of Gamergate, it has become abundantly clear that websites such as Gawker, Polygon and Destructoid do not have their readers' best interests at heart. They believe that they have done nothing wrong when the evidence to the contrary is as clear as day. They rush in to protect the guilty and defame the innocent.

Unfortunately, A corrupt media will go to great lengths to protect it's own.

Nobody will get fired.
Nobody will issue an apology.
Gawker may or may not burn, but there are numerous websites just like it itching to take it's place. We cannot catch them all. What then?

Operation MAYFLOWER is an ambitious and visionary plan to create an "ethical ecosystem"- our own network of news and discussion websites that are positioned to rapidly grow and overtake the old media. It will take a large amount of coordination to make it happen, and a little luck, but I fully believe that we can do it. It involves 4 main groups of people: The new press (techraptor, powergamer etc) our web developers, Gamers and Developers. In this paper I hope to outline each of these groups' role in mayflower. Specifically, i'm putting out an APB for web devs and programmers.

The great thing about OPM is that it's already happening. New websites such as startbutton, disc, nichegamer and indyjuice are already beginning to pop up. The problem is that there are many ongoing projects, but none of them are coordinated. If our new platforms work together, we could become a force to be reckoned with. For instance, there are several people trying to create a review aggregator at once, when we already have at least 3 projects being worked on now. A lack of cooperation won't doom these projects, but they will drastically limit their potential.

Operation Mayflower is a grand vision- and it's a long read too. I've talked about many of the components of this project here on my pastebin, but I understand that it can be hard to understand or read everything in one go. This is the reason why I am writing this paper. Earlier, I talked about how Mayflower is a vision for an "ethical ecosystem". What I mean by that is that our new alternatives will all "flow" together to form a cohesive experience for the end user, a place where they feel welcome and at home. At the core of this vision are 3 particular projects:

The News Aggregator
The New Gaming Community And Comment System
The Crosslinking Project

I will discuss each of these projects one by one, providing all of the relevant links to make learning more very easy. Also included will be ways each of our four classes can help bring these projects to fruition. Keep in mind that each of these projects are interconnected- and it will be very hard to only have one without the others. Taken together, the three projects will ensure that not only will our new media succeed, it will thrive. The only way to take out Gawker is to replace them with something far better. They must become Myspace and we must become Facebook.

Project One: The News Aggregator.
Mockups: http://imgur.com/tdYfOId
Longer, In depth Whitepaper: http://pastebin.com/D4Cz8EuQ

Before I discuss this, I want to stress that there is a major difference between a news aggregator and a review aggregator- while the later is strictly focused on reviews, the news aggregator is focused on gaming news in general. It is community-based, meaning that while everyone can submit a story, the community at large decides which ones deserve to hit the front page.

I know what everyone's thinking here: REDDIT!!

But there's a major difference between reddit and the proposed news aggregator- On reddit, you don't get the "front page" experience. The new news aggregator's goal is to look like an actual news website. It should look like Polygon, or Digg, or even Buzzfeed. Instead of sharing "10 skinny blue links", the front page of the news aggregator aims to be an inviting and polished place, with decent interface design. The reason why I chose the news aggregator first is because it could be created today if need be. Although it's intended to work with the new forum (more on that below), one could build a less- efficient version that runs on reddit. The aggregator is run by a robot after all, it automatically scans the forum for the best stories and shares info about them to a searchable database.

Also good to know is that the aggregator uses a new method of voting that minimizes vote fraud, which is a huge problem on reddit. We aim to start with video games, but to eventually branch out to other topics such as movies, sports, celebrity drama etc. The aggregators will be run as "verticals", each standing more or less alone and only being focused on it's main topic. Links to other aggregators will be found in the footer.

What do you mean by community based? How does the voting work?

These are complex questions, but the essential idea is similar to this: There are two sides to the aggregator, two subforums. One is a general "can someone write about this" forum, where normal users pitch ideas for potential news stories, which the community vote on. Enterprising journalists check this forum often for new ideas.

The other side is where the actual story submissions happen. Every week, a new thread is made which contains the basic information one needs to know- what the topic of the news aggregator is, legal stuff (you agree that you wrote the story yourself and have permission to submit it) and any ethical/writing tips. In this thread, users submit links to their stories by copying-and-pasting a reply form a lot like this one:

[SUBMIT NEW STORY] /u/examplenewsbot
[STORY TITLE]: How we listen to ears
[NAME] Joan Marx
[DONATION ADRESS] qk73981hkjqwh12981382689q1sqhs92182
[LINK] Myblog.me/how-we-do-you
[LINK5] (links to 5 other stories you enjoy, they will be displayed when someone clicks the "author's choice" tab under your story on the news aggregator and next to your discussion topic in the forum. http://imgur.com/eHGMQNr

When you reply to the thread with all of these filled out, the robot automatically submits them to a different section of the forum as an new individual thread. Here is where your story really has a chance to shine, because number of upvotes, comments, shares and links to your story on the forum all factor into your rank on the news aggregator (along with the amount of feedback you get on your own site, of course)

Why is the Proposed News Aggregator good for the Press and how can you help?

When the aggregator is fully up-and-running, it is expected to become a major source of news in it's own right. Important stories will break early there, and it is community based. Similar to other news aggregators, if your story hits the front page then your website should see a major jump in traffic and views. You can help by submitting your stories to it when it's built! Nothing will be reuploaded, stories will only be linked to.

How Can Developers (Web and Game) Help?
Web developers can help by creating the website! Game devs can help by going there for interesting news and related topics.

Gamers

The news aggregator is very helpful because it makes finding relevant news far easier.

The New Gaming Community and Forum
Mockup: http://imgur.com/a/pbbQb
Whitepapers: http://pastebin.com/CnCXT4uS
http://pastebin.com/Tqgb9LKa

The new forum is the center of it all- nearly every other part of MAYFLOWER relies on it. As a short recap, the proposed forum looks and works a lot like reddit- but with some big differences. For one, you have the option to post anonymously. You also can bump threads and upload images. Self-moderated-threads and hashtags are also an option. It shares many common functionalities with a social network, so "community" describes it better than forum does. Due to this unique mixture of features, the new forum will be able to outcompete many other discussion platforms.

Why is the forum so important?

Great question. Because everything in Mayflower is so interconnected, the forum sort of acts as a glue that ties everything together. For instance, part of the plan involves getting the new gaming press to run their forums from the new community, similar to the way subreddits are operated on reddit. Every publication will get it's own subforum to moderate and customize the way they wish. They will have near-absolute control over that section, as long as nothing illegal is done. The great benefits for the press are access to a larger audience- there's less likelihood that a forum on this network will be dead since such a large userbase is being shared. The single-sign in and identity are all great bonuses for any gamer. The collection of forums available to users will make this community extremely lively and active.

But there's more- besides being the platform that the news aggregator operates from, the forum is also used as the aggregator's "comment system". If you want to discuss an article you see on the aggregator, you can talk about it right there in the thread the bot automatically creates! Everything just works. The goal of the new forum is to become the premier platform for gaming discussion on the web. No unarchived links to the old media will be allowed. Because signing up is optional and users can post anonymously, the website will be free and open to discussion with very few barriers to entry.

How does this help gamers? The new features this forum has, along with the single sign-in will make this a mecca for talk. There's a possibility that the forum may grow to encompass more subjects than just gaming in the future, if successful.

How does this help the press? More exposure, larger audience, greater traffic. You name it. Get the word out about the project so it might be able to be built?

How does this help developers? It becomes far easier to get in touch with your audience, and although many gaming forums exist today this aims to be the most prominent. The forum will become the center for an entirely new gaming industry.

How can web developers help? Let's start a team to build this! (you can contact me on reddit, i'm Kiwikku. On twitter i'm @socialunjustice

Equally important is the eventual use of the forum as a commenting platform similar to facebook or disqus comments. We aim to create an easy plugin that can be used in a news website's comment section. This will make mayflower a complete content management system (CMS)

Crosslinking? What does that mean? http://pastebin.com/j6UzAkC4

Two initiatives that could be of help to our new media would be a) crosslinking to each other's stories like here: http://i.imgur.com/5oPrVSk.jpg
and b) setting up a sleek advertising page, with links to all of the blogs, relevant statistics and their advertising department contact information. See Gawker and Vox's advertising pages for example: http://advertising.gawker.com/ http://www.voxmedia.com/vox-advertising

Crosslinking is very important and very easy. It will help all of our new platforms grow, and because the links are reciprocal there's nothing to lose. I would hope that the widget could be ran automatically so that the most popular or most recent stories on other friendly publications were shown without intervention by the writer. All we need are 3 crosslinks per article- that's it! In case the press is worried about SEO, all links between participating blogs will be nofollow.

The professional advertising page will make each individual media outlet look far more attractive to potential advertisers, because you subtly gain the strength of the others. Presentation is everything, and the statistics for all of the sites combined and the individual websites will both look impressive.

If you want to learn more, check my other papers. http://pastebin.com/u/randyrandaux