Why We're An 'Anti-Social' Social Network
Scripted is a "network" without the "social." There's no friending, no following, no wall posts or status updates. We do this intentionally because, well, the world is social enough as it is.
The one exception to this rule is our "Favorite this Writer" button. A buyer who's happy with someone's writing can use this function to work with them again, but there's nothing personal about it. The writer gets an email. No pokes, smileys, chats or invitations. Just an email saying hey, you did a great job. Keep it up!
We don't have anything against social behavior. We just didn't build it. And when we didn't build it, we discovered we didn't need it. We've had some buyers ask us to see writer profiles, but when we explain that we don't have profile pages, they just say, "Oh.. ok," and move on. We still get their business.
The main reason for this was described in my post about disintermediation. Other reasons include:
- In our market, the writers choose the buyers. But we don't have buyer profile pages either, and our writers don't care.
- Writing is a solitary sport. There's no gain to Scripted from writer-to-writer interaction.
- It makes us more relevant. If a writer or a buyer has a problem, they have to come to us, and we want that.
In this age of niche social networks startups and a few astronomically-large incumbents, we've decided to take the opposite approach. What do you think? Am I wrong to think we can run a successful website with no graph, no connecting, and no Facebook-inspired over-sharing?