An internet artist's place to write.
I figured it was worth expanding on that. I don't mean don't put anything there, but:
1. Don't expect to earn decent income. Earnings have crashed hugely, and for many, many reasons, I do not expect it to turn around (certainly no sooner than any other article writing site might manage to climb up). It has long passed the window of opportunity and good will, and has removed or driven off or generally discouraged most of it's more serious writers. Those still on the site have generally pulled back, or are actively diversifying (as I was last year).
Squidoo is also increasingly focussing on farming enthusiastic newbies, and denigrating the 'work for money' aspect. They were started out as a place where you could theoretically earn a living, and now utterly deny those roots. This is clearly not a supportive, or transparent, environment for earning money, and they have been actively negative and obstructive when the question of earnings comes up. They have been encouraging the idea that people are lucky to write for them - at this rate, they'll be encouraging writing for charity, or paying for exposure.
Actually, at least one of their recent initiatives (from last time I paid any attention), did not earn any money at all, something which was carefully omitted when hyping it up.
2. Don't put anything up if you are invested in getting it published, as you will run into problems and spend far too many hours trying to get one thing published, only to see it automatically locked for an unknown reason. This will be exhausting, emotionally draining, and not financially worth it. I saw so many people get caught up in the hamster wheel of these, and resolved just not to bother when it was my turn (I did hit a fair few filters that I usually just waited out, because I knew my content was either good, or not worth the effort. They usually ended up being adjusted eventually. This has happened less and less, though, as the filters get more unreasonable - they were generally of the 'can't republish' kind, not the 'locked!!' kind).
The support team is great - IF you ever get a reply. But mostly you won't, and if you do, it is often so late that it is no longer applicable. The only way to actually get help is to contact a named and known HQ member directly (something you are not supposed to, and should not have to, do). That can randomly get you instant help. Locked lenses, the worst scenario of all, generate the worst response rate - probably because they are locking SO MANY, and don't want to acknowledge that most are wrong. They would rather you frantically rewrite and republish until you trick it into working from your end (or delete and create a new page, which will get locked for duplicate content - many of the flags can be caused by things outside of your control (e.g. someone copying your content), or are unable to magically 'know' or are appropriate on a variable basis and not a reliable indication of good or bad content (such as keyword density!).
3. Don't put serious content there (e.g. major money makers, articles you care a lot about, stuff you want to link to and build on), or expect it to be somewhere you can invest a chunk of time into and then move on.
- Squidoo is now focussed on 'lite' content, and rewards churning that out. Write a pretty piece with gushing and 'personalisation', then move on.
- Squidoo is hugely unreliable as a host now. So if you want to rely on your work a) earning, or b) remaining accessible and fully readable (entire chunks of content and code can vanish forever when they "improve" things. They do not seem to believe in beta testing, or warning people in advance).
- Squidoo is weighted towards constant engagement and hugely penalises disengaged writers. If you don't stay 'active', you will fall behind and your account will be penalised in various ways. It will become extremely difficult to catch up and fix everything that happens. Among other things, you have to update lenses regularly to get a freshness boost, and they have started shifting a lot of activity to Facebook and social media. Featured work tends to be from people who interact with the specific staff that feature things. That's not even touching on the vast rate of changes in the rules for content and behaviour, and the technical side of things.
- they have frequent 'Squidoo surprises' (sudden new initiatives, overhauls or 'fixes' that are rarely, or never pre-announced, and tend to have a very major, often unforeseen and negative, effect on existing content). They also tend to favour new projects over old, yet proven, approaches, often at the expense of existing content. These projects are frequently abandoned, so most people learn not to throw too much effort into them. In fact, Squidoo prefers to just move on from problems in general, rather than analysing what went wrong and investing the time and resources needed to make it work.
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To anyone wondering: Right Click > Save As is the best way to save any webpage (sadly a lot of the modules don’t load, or are outright broken, so I don’t get that content, but I can’t be bothered rescuing it all).
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A bit more ranting (a lot of it just covers the same points as above, but I've written it all so I WILL POST IT DAMNIT):
My ABOUT PAGE got locked too! That page, and my original ArtRage tutorial page, were my very first lenses on Squidoo, back in 2008. And both were locked in the last month. Meh. It’s just blatantly obvious that it’s completely automated and off the rails.
I’m also sad about the Amnesty posters page (free resources). And the Wear the Lilac (Alzheimer’s Disease/Pratchett day) lens, especially as that’s only a month away. I donated all the money from those and they were as far from spam or sales pages as you can get.
One of the most exasperating things is that it has no correlation at all to any of their many overly restrictive filters, warning systems and guides. I have been ignoring all those things for a year while people panic, because they DO NOT affect whether or not you will survive. And they won’t admit that and save everyone the stress, because then what is the point of all the rules and flags and warnings?
It is a completely 180 from the site ideal when I started: write stuff and we’ll leave you alone. Sure, they were inundated with spam (which was mostly dealt with by ignoring it, which didn’t work, but at least it wasn’t actively hurting the writers), but freedom to experiment, and the idea of your content being YOURS, was a major part of the site. And I did experiment, widely.
Now, everyone is being shoehorned into a very specific, rather vapid, feel good niche, based on either the preferences of the most active staff or a very rigid interpretation of their userbase/earnings stats. Plus a lot of blind panic over their Google status. Not only where there huge, mass, often badly decided, deletions (some were fair, but many were not, and most had little warning and no way of resolving issues) and a constantly changing churn of “fixed” modules, new rules, new filters, new “suggestions”, more new automated restrictions…
...and no increase in support staff, and no acknowledgement that concerns were valid (let’s not even touch on closing the well used forums and banning people who asked questions on their blogs in anything they considered a ‘mean way’. Including me, and people who never even actually posted there. Anytime people start shutting out criticism that hard is a very, very clear sign that the ship is sinking. Or even if it isn’t, it will sooner or later, because the culture has become deeply unhealthy. Criticism doesn’t have to be LISTENED to, but trying to legislate and intimidate it away is a very, very, very bad sign).
It can be literally impossible now to publish something without having to fight and research to figure out how to trick a filter (when I hit those, I just refused to publish something until the filter was relaxed). The site was becoming almost unusable. And unsurprisingly, earnings crashed. And along with that, the concept of ‘writing for money’ became increasingly vilified, encouraging endless content production for the sake of attention and temporary acknowledgement, and a steady stream of pointless awards and features.
Another sign of bad design is the huge shift towards needing to be very active just to try and stay in place. There are too many broken things about the site to be able to leave it. And they decided to make that a ‘feature’, pushing for an involved fanbase (yes, fanbase. Not writers, or members. They want a fanbase).
…and I haven’t even looked at the site more than twice in the last four months, other than to visit a page I used to use as a bookmarks page. And it’s easy to see that it’s still doing all the same things.
Bah. I have a LOT of Stuff saved up. It may all come out as an analysis of What Went Wrong, along with the rant about Stuff In General (including the weird and unprofessional and incredibly rude message I got when I was banned from commenting there which I was too furious to write about at the time, and helped me decide to just walk away).
This is also why I haven't posted since mid-last year. Even when I was still around, I had too much to say and none of it good, so I didn't want to start. At least until I was sure. But now? Now all the stuff I was expecting has happened, and they haven't recovered and fixed things. NOW I CAN RANT.
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On the plus side, I now work in tech support and social media, and Squidoo has given me all these awesome lessons on What Not To Do. I get to pull out these tech/customer service horror stories to entertain my coworkers and I have insight into how it felt on the other side.
And finally... Damnit! This is why I was avoiding internet stuff! I knew I had all these thoughts and all this news to catch up on, and now I've started writing huge posts, and then I'll have to go catch up on other sites, and update content and see how many usernames I remember AND I WILL FALL INTO THE ETERNAL PIT OF DOOM.
Plus, my internet email is bursting. I'm a bad person >.>
