There’s a new community/social content site in town - dotherightthing.com. The basic concept is digg-like: users submit stories, and vote on them. However, although the content technically is links to other content, the idea is different: they link to actions of companies, individuals and other entities that make a social impact, while the users vote whether these actions are important, and if yes, are they positive or negative, and whether their impact will be severe or mild.
The users are divided into two categories: representatives and personal users. The first group represent a company or some other entity, acting as a spokesperson and trying to supply valuable information about the company. The other group acts as a collective conscience, judging whether the company and its actions are good or evil.
Essentially, dotherightthing is a reputation builder.
Mike Arrington over at Techcrunch has a pretty negative review of the service, criticizing it for being for-profit, and the immaturity of its community. I can’t agree with the for-profit argument; this site can be called an activist site, but they are basically just another community like Reddit, Netscape, Digg or many others, which also needs funding to go on. The fact that a site deals with activist/green/environmental/sustainable development and similar subjects should not automatically mean that they aren’t allowed to make money, especially if it’s through advertising.
The community, on the other hand, is just that: a community. You can’t really control it, contain it, or teach it how to act and what to link. I agree that the quality of the submissions and the comments will make a big impact on the success of dotherightthing.com, however I cannot blame the service if the users aren’t exactly the intellectual elite.
The bottom line, for me, is that I like the idea. I feel that dotherightthing.com is doing something new in the social content / social news arena. While users of Netscape, Digg, Reddit and other similar sites can only bury something, decreasing its visibility and making it nonimportant, users at dotherightthing.com can vote on something negatively, and at the same time draw attention to this negativity. This is a novelty, and novelty is good. Add to this that the site itself is designed well and seems to be superbly coded, and I can only wish them luck and a thriving community.
Thanks for the very well-written post and support. You nailed dotherightthing better than anyone has so far… too many people are confusing the utilization of collaborative information sharing and sorting technology similar to Digg, to solve a problem, with creating yet another Digg-like service. When we set out to start dotherightthing, we wanted to recognize companies for doing the right thing, and measure this type of impact, or non-financial performance, for all companies that people care about, in real time. It was that simple. The methods using which we accomplished these goals simply came about from a thorough evaluation of all of our options… and dotherightthing, as it exists today, was born. It is powerfully community driven, flexible, and it, as you mentioned above, has all the potential in the world to revolutionize how companies impact people and the world.
We’re exited to have you as a member of the dotherightthing community.
@Ryan: Thanks for the kind words, and yes, I’ll make sure to follow (and actively participate in) what’s happening at dotherightthing in the future.