DriveTribe - online car community from Clarkson/May/Hamond
Discussion
HorneyMX5 said:
ah! (personally) i can't abide him on yootoob (is he 'one of us'? do i have to pretend i like him so i don;t get on line bullied? 
). and i really hate those 'top ten wiper blades' type videos so i gave up on him.whilst 'obvs' canadian i like the Speed.Academy guys. their site/articles are decent too but they clearly get no time to do it as often as you'd hope.
Edited by briSk on Wednesday 18th January 13:36
Trick with drivetribe seems to be following the right tribes. There's a lot of s
t posting / spam, especially on tribes where followers are allowed to post there own content.
If anyone is still using it, i'd appriciate a follow so I can make mine public and start posting content!
https://www.drivetribe.com/t/A2tBNYBeTey8dHjMc8isr...
t posting / spam, especially on tribes where followers are allowed to post there own content. If anyone is still using it, i'd appriciate a follow so I can make mine public and start posting content!
https://www.drivetribe.com/t/A2tBNYBeTey8dHjMc8isr...
The drop-off in content is really, really noticeable - before you could post something and it would get pushed down very quickly, now the stuff at the top of feeds is days or weeks old.
I'm fairly sure Drivetribe has blown it's chance, and here's why:
For a social network to thrive, it just needs two things to happen: people need to write stuff, and people need to read stuff. Helpfully, there is a positive feedback mechanism here; writers love to know that people are reading their content - it motivates them to write more. And if people log in today and discover interesting new content, they will most likely return to the site tomorrow to read more.
Thus you can make a successful site without any paid contributors, simply by building a system where writers will find an audience, and readers will find content. The task is to build an effective network linking readers and writers together.
Now, 'content' takes various forms. The most common content on social media is (a) links, (b) written word, (c) photos, and (d) videos. Any combination of these can work - Twitter is mostly links with some words, Instagram is photos and a few videos, etc.
The biggest and most easily avoidable failure of Drivetribe is their failure to support the full range of content. They *have* a 'Studio' feature, which is a workable way to publish a combination of words and pictures. But 99% of Drivetribe users have never seen it - because you are only given access to the Studio feature if you make a tribe of your own. If you just want to post something interesting to an already-existing tribe, tough.
What most people get instead is a simple upload tool, where you can upload one or more pictures or videos. If you want to upload a single photo and two lines of text, this is fine, it pops up in the tribe's feed nicely. If however you upload more than one photo, all photos get cropped to a square format. To see the originals, the viewer must click through to open the post, then click again to view each photo one at a time. This is a very unfortunate design choice; cars are normally longer than they are tall, so nicely fill a standard 16:9 camera frame. Drivetribe then crops this, usually cutting off part of the car. Without a compelling preview, few users will want to click through and through again. Worse, loading the full photo takes a long and variable amount of time (a second or two), dissuading users from opening any more photos.
So, Drivetribe only offers most users a way to post pics, and really only works if you post one pic at a time.
Unfortunately, even if you do make your own tribe to get access to the Studio, your longer posts appear in people's feeds looking just like yet another single-photo post, with your header image and headline only shown, and little to tell people they can click through to see your other ten images and thousand-odd words of original content.
Early on, I saw a comment on DT calling it a 'better Instagram', and that pretty much sums up how the site works out in practice. People browse the feed, looking at each pic as it appears; there's no encouragement or reward to look deeper.
Drivetribe also almost completely fails to support link content. This works really well on e.g. Twitter - someone sees something interesting before work, grabs the link and dumps it on twitter with a comment. Twitter expands the link to display a title image and headline, and others see this pop up on their feed and click through on their morning commute. Yes, link content sends people 'away from the site', but knowing you will find something interesting to read also brings people back again. Drivetribe is back to late-nineties web forums - a link is just the clickable text of the link, with no indication of what you will find on the other end.
So, no link support, article support limited to a small minority of users and not published in a way that attracts people to click through, and limited photo support that only works well with single-photo posts.
If people can only post single photos, then that promotes a pretty shallow type of interaction, at odds with the strong bonds that the term 'tribe' suggests. With shallow interaction based on flicking through photos, you can expect people to come and have a look, post a couple of their own favourite pics of their own car, and then drift away again, as there's little to bring them back. And that's pretty much what seems to have happened.
This inherent weakness of the design was compounded by serious failures of execution. Drivetribe went public in December, which was smart - over Christmas and New Year people have time off work, and the weather's nasty, so they sit indoors looking for something to do online. However, the site suffered a variety of ongoing failures, seemingly falling over under load. What happened was that most of the time, the page itself loaded, but it only showed month-old content. This is arguably worse than a total failure, because it makes people think that the site is dying, there's nothing new to see, and go away and not come back. Equally, authors who did invest the effort to post content over the holiday period found it 'blackholed', because it never showed up on people's feeds while it was fresh. As discussed, writers write for an audience, so failing to find one strongly encourages them to redirect their efforts elsewhere.
Ultimately, Drivetribe had a window of opportunity to fulfil its potential. In December, everyone with an interest in cars knew that Clarkson, Hammond and May were launching a new community site, and was interested to try it out. They came, they posted their fav car photo, they overloaded the servers, and now they have nearly all left.
I'm fairly sure Drivetribe has blown it's chance, and here's why:
For a social network to thrive, it just needs two things to happen: people need to write stuff, and people need to read stuff. Helpfully, there is a positive feedback mechanism here; writers love to know that people are reading their content - it motivates them to write more. And if people log in today and discover interesting new content, they will most likely return to the site tomorrow to read more.
Thus you can make a successful site without any paid contributors, simply by building a system where writers will find an audience, and readers will find content. The task is to build an effective network linking readers and writers together.
Now, 'content' takes various forms. The most common content on social media is (a) links, (b) written word, (c) photos, and (d) videos. Any combination of these can work - Twitter is mostly links with some words, Instagram is photos and a few videos, etc.
The biggest and most easily avoidable failure of Drivetribe is their failure to support the full range of content. They *have* a 'Studio' feature, which is a workable way to publish a combination of words and pictures. But 99% of Drivetribe users have never seen it - because you are only given access to the Studio feature if you make a tribe of your own. If you just want to post something interesting to an already-existing tribe, tough.
What most people get instead is a simple upload tool, where you can upload one or more pictures or videos. If you want to upload a single photo and two lines of text, this is fine, it pops up in the tribe's feed nicely. If however you upload more than one photo, all photos get cropped to a square format. To see the originals, the viewer must click through to open the post, then click again to view each photo one at a time. This is a very unfortunate design choice; cars are normally longer than they are tall, so nicely fill a standard 16:9 camera frame. Drivetribe then crops this, usually cutting off part of the car. Without a compelling preview, few users will want to click through and through again. Worse, loading the full photo takes a long and variable amount of time (a second or two), dissuading users from opening any more photos.
So, Drivetribe only offers most users a way to post pics, and really only works if you post one pic at a time.
Unfortunately, even if you do make your own tribe to get access to the Studio, your longer posts appear in people's feeds looking just like yet another single-photo post, with your header image and headline only shown, and little to tell people they can click through to see your other ten images and thousand-odd words of original content.
Early on, I saw a comment on DT calling it a 'better Instagram', and that pretty much sums up how the site works out in practice. People browse the feed, looking at each pic as it appears; there's no encouragement or reward to look deeper.
Drivetribe also almost completely fails to support link content. This works really well on e.g. Twitter - someone sees something interesting before work, grabs the link and dumps it on twitter with a comment. Twitter expands the link to display a title image and headline, and others see this pop up on their feed and click through on their morning commute. Yes, link content sends people 'away from the site', but knowing you will find something interesting to read also brings people back again. Drivetribe is back to late-nineties web forums - a link is just the clickable text of the link, with no indication of what you will find on the other end.
So, no link support, article support limited to a small minority of users and not published in a way that attracts people to click through, and limited photo support that only works well with single-photo posts.
If people can only post single photos, then that promotes a pretty shallow type of interaction, at odds with the strong bonds that the term 'tribe' suggests. With shallow interaction based on flicking through photos, you can expect people to come and have a look, post a couple of their own favourite pics of their own car, and then drift away again, as there's little to bring them back. And that's pretty much what seems to have happened.
This inherent weakness of the design was compounded by serious failures of execution. Drivetribe went public in December, which was smart - over Christmas and New Year people have time off work, and the weather's nasty, so they sit indoors looking for something to do online. However, the site suffered a variety of ongoing failures, seemingly falling over under load. What happened was that most of the time, the page itself loaded, but it only showed month-old content. This is arguably worse than a total failure, because it makes people think that the site is dying, there's nothing new to see, and go away and not come back. Equally, authors who did invest the effort to post content over the holiday period found it 'blackholed', because it never showed up on people's feeds while it was fresh. As discussed, writers write for an audience, so failing to find one strongly encourages them to redirect their efforts elsewhere.
Ultimately, Drivetribe had a window of opportunity to fulfil its potential. In December, everyone with an interest in cars knew that Clarkson, Hammond and May were launching a new community site, and was interested to try it out. They came, they posted their fav car photo, they overloaded the servers, and now they have nearly all left.
You just can't buy critical mass.
I know its probably not the most technically advanced site but the reason I like PH is that it has SO many types of posters over SUCH a vast range of topics.
There are nether regions of PH that I still haven't explored after years of coming here.
Every so often I'll go off the beaten track and find fierce but informed arguments about anything from lawnmowers or Scottish Independence.
I know its probably not the most technically advanced site but the reason I like PH is that it has SO many types of posters over SUCH a vast range of topics.
There are nether regions of PH that I still haven't explored after years of coming here.
Every so often I'll go off the beaten track and find fierce but informed arguments about anything from lawnmowers or Scottish Independence.
All the great videos that have been lost in their poor algorithm have just started appearing on their official youtube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChiwLDIBJrV5Sxqdi...
It would be great if this ended up as the next DRIVE/TV with supporting written content on the main site... but I worry they've already blown it.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChiwLDIBJrV5Sxqdi...
It would be great if this ended up as the next DRIVE/TV with supporting written content on the main site... but I worry they've already blown it.
These days you need to be cross posting content from one social media platform to another (eg. post a link to your YouTube video on Twitter and/or Facebook) so it can be shared by the users of that platform who might have missed it (or don't follow you).
I can't remember seeing any links to any DriveTribe content (either their's or someone else's) being posted in my timellines from the hundreds of 'car people' that I follow on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram.
(I have just manually looked at Henry Catchpole's Twitter feed and he's posted 5 links to DT content for the whole of January, Jethro Bov has posted 4 links (2 on 01/01 and one on the 4th), Clarkson 2-links, James May 2-links and a couple of twitter containing the word 'Drivetribe', However Richard Hammond being a keen Company Man has a 100% record for 2017 with his single tweet of the year being a DT link.)
When the 5 journalists directly associated with the project have only put up 14 links in the 31-days of 2017 it is not surprising that we aren't finding our way there.
I can't remember seeing any links to any DriveTribe content (either their's or someone else's) being posted in my timellines from the hundreds of 'car people' that I follow on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram.
(I have just manually looked at Henry Catchpole's Twitter feed and he's posted 5 links to DT content for the whole of January, Jethro Bov has posted 4 links (2 on 01/01 and one on the 4th), Clarkson 2-links, James May 2-links and a couple of twitter containing the word 'Drivetribe', However Richard Hammond being a keen Company Man has a 100% record for 2017 with his single tweet of the year being a DT link.)
When the 5 journalists directly associated with the project have only put up 14 links in the 31-days of 2017 it is not surprising that we aren't finding our way there.
Truckosaurus said:
These days you need to be cross posting content from one social media platform to another (eg. post a link to your YouTube video on Twitter and/or Facebook) so it can be shared by the users of that platform who might have missed it (or don't follow you).
I can't remember seeing any links to any DriveTribe content (either their's or someone else's) being posted in my timellines from the hundreds of 'car people' that I follow on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram.
(I have just manually looked at Henry Catchpole's Twitter feed and he's posted 5 links to DT content for the whole of January, Jethro Bov has posted 4 links (2 on 01/01 and one on the 4th), Clarkson 2-links, James May 2-links and a couple of twitter containing the word 'Drivetribe', However Richard Hammond being a keen Company Man has a 100% record for 2017 with his single tweet of the year being a DT link.)
When the 5 journalists directly associated with the project have only put up 14 links in the 31-days of 2017 it is not surprising that we aren't finding our way there.
This is very true, I spend a fair amount of time on Youtube as is so I'm much more likely to watch the stuff on there, or even just watch a trailer for it then follow a link to the Drivetribe site to see a full video or read some words. I can't remember seeing any links to any DriveTribe content (either their's or someone else's) being posted in my timellines from the hundreds of 'car people' that I follow on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram.
(I have just manually looked at Henry Catchpole's Twitter feed and he's posted 5 links to DT content for the whole of January, Jethro Bov has posted 4 links (2 on 01/01 and one on the 4th), Clarkson 2-links, James May 2-links and a couple of twitter containing the word 'Drivetribe', However Richard Hammond being a keen Company Man has a 100% record for 2017 with his single tweet of the year being a DT link.)
When the 5 journalists directly associated with the project have only put up 14 links in the 31-days of 2017 it is not surprising that we aren't finding our way there.
As it stands I just can't be bothered to go to the awfully laid out Drivetribe site in the hope of there being something new. Sure, it's not all that much effort overall, but it's one more social media site to check on which I just cannot be bothered to do.
After posting in this thread yesterday and watching their videos on Youtube, I did follow a link from YT into their 'Tribe Nation' tribe (which is where all the professional content is) and there really isn't that much there, especially compared to sites like Jalopnik, TheDrive or even PH (which IMHO has never been an article driven site).
I'm old fashioned enough to still use an RSS reader (feedly.com) to keep track on web content rather than going to sites directly and drivetribe has no feed that I can find for it.
I'm old fashioned enough to still use an RSS reader (feedly.com) to keep track on web content rather than going to sites directly and drivetribe has no feed that I can find for it.
The simple truth is that magazines and forums still exist because they work. Car Throttle gives me a headace and DT is horrendous in terms of UX. I like forums, there easy to keep track of, follow and contributre too. I like magazines as I can read them on the bog esp when theres no wifi... I don't mind youtube as it lets you curate your own feeds with ease and you don't have to really trawl through stuff. Harrys Garage is the main reason I love youtube.
One of the selling points was the discussion. Very disappointingly the few times I posted it then would end up with a stream of alerts each and every time someone posted anything. But no way of muting. Regardless of how pathetic the post was. So I just didn't bother commenting.
To finish it off many followers were phishing hard-core adult material.
To finish it off many followers were phishing hard-core adult material.
samoht said:
The drop-off in content is really, really noticeable - before you could post something and it would get pushed down very quickly, now the stuff at the top of feeds is days or weeks old.
I'm fairly sure Drivetribe has blown it's chance, and here's why:
Didn't quote your full post but I think you've hit the nail on the head.I'm fairly sure Drivetribe has blown it's chance, and here's why:
Prior to Drivetribe, I would post any articles I wrote on a car forum I've used for years. It's a regional forum so has an average of 200 users online at any one time. Typically, my articles (and those from other contributors) would generate some feedback on the forum, and this would often end up in a 2 or 3 page thread - or even longer. And as a non-professional contributor who doesn't earn any kind of living from writing, nor wish to, that feedback and discussion is the payoff and the most enjoyable part of putting the effort into an article.
On my 6,200 member Tribe, which is meant to be accessed by a global audience, I've tried to submit a couple of full articles per week, amongst re-posts of relevant stuff, short photo galleries and so on. As much as time allows me. I also try and share these on Facebook, Twitter, etc. Despite that and despite getting a few hundred clicks which I can see in my Studio stats, I'd be lucky if there's more than 2 or 3 comments.
It's not really about seeking praise or approval, but some level of interest in the articles would be encouraging and would drive me to create more content. The only areas where I can see massive levels of commenting on DT are in the posts by the 3 Musketeers, each of whom have huge numbers of followers compared to the rest of us civilians.
I've given the site a few months and not attacked it critically at all (if anything, I've been an apologist on the DT support messageboard where some scathing comments have been made) but I think at this stage there's no serious growth potential for my tribe. There was a period of accelerated growth when it all went live (600 to 5500 members in the space of a week, since then it's been about 8 members a week). Now, it feels like I'm putting in my efforts for very little back, so I'm quite tempted to bin it.
Edited by carguy45 on Thursday 2nd February 13:07
Edited by carguy45 on Thursday 2nd February 13:08
The Spruce goose said:
still shows around 50k views a day which is that bad still about half of PH.
Depends on whether it was 60 thousand last week and 70 thousand the week before. Given the TG trio's celebrity status and other high profile journos on there its not looking good. I don't know anyone who uses the site. Its only this thread that reminds me it exists.Also PH is mostly UK petrolheads whereas DT is really aimed globally. Its too early to kill it and never underestimate the ability of a lot of £££ to fix things.
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