What to make of HotSoup, the non-partisan, non-ideological, mostly non-everything political discussion/debate site just out from Beltway insiders Carter Eskew, Matthew Dowd, Joe Lockhart and Mark McKinnon plus media types Ron Fournier and Allie Savarino (and top-heavy with yet more executive co-founders)? It’s difficult to be polite; I won’t always be.
Toward the end of its debut week, there isn’t much talk at the site. Nor are too many non-”Hardball” news outlets talking about it. Among those who have, appraisals tend toward the grim.
One is GOP Internet strategist Mike Turk, who once worked on a similar project called Grassroots.com. Upon HotSoup’s announcement this summer, Turk warned of the pitfalls at Personal Democracy Forum. But as he wrote this week at his blog, Kung Fu Quip, the problems were bigger than he’d thought:
Perhaps the most vexing thing about the site is the apparent lack of any correlation between the name and the content. Their content is divided into “Issue Loops” but that bears little relationship to Hot Soup. They might as well have called the site Eggplant.com. Honestly, I don’t get it. I have a lot of respect for the people involved in this, but it may be the most poorly conceived idea since Kevin Federline.
Earlier in the week, Paul NcManara of NetworkWorld.com had pled for sanity:
This group cannot be operating under the illusion that all they have to do is provide a platform and the Lincoln-Douglas debates will break out. They must know there’s a good chance that not every Hotsouper will come willing to bridge divides, celebrate differences and gain enlightenment.
Yes, they can be, but to their credit, they seem to: This week Fournier or somebody posted a message in the non-blog front-page meta window, “Hot Corner,” admitting that things need to be retooled:
We knew HOTSOUP.com would go online as a figment of its future potential, and that the finishing touches would come from you. That’s exactly what’s happening …. By scores, we’ve received your comments and criticism through feedback@hotsoup.com. Even better, many of you felt empowered enough to use the site itself to post your critiques in Issue Loops …. This take-matters-in-your-own-hands approach is confirmation of the core value behind HOTSOUP: It’s about you …. That’s why we’re hard at work at this work-in-progress … Among the problems we’ve fixed or are fixing: 1) Speed and performance of video …. 2) Content cutoffs in Loops …. 3) Discussion board display order …. 4) Loops ranking on homepage …. Thank you for your suggestions, and keep them coming. Only you can make the Soup the hottest site around.
It’s since been pulled (in favor of a blithering anecdote about their MSNBC appearance and something about the ONE campaign) — whisked away to who knows where. As I said, it’s not a blog. It’s just a square called “Hot Corner.” Once an announcement is pulled, it disappears into the aether. Please, people. Get a blog.
But there are many more problems than (I think it’s) Fournier addresses. For one, the registration process asks for too much information, and gets unpleasant when you don’t tell it where you live, what’s your job title, how you vote and where your ancestors came from:
Did I mention the site looks awful? The color scheme is unappetizing, its navigation tools are scattered, no RSS feeds are provided, and they have pictures on the front page where the content should be (c.f. Digg). The actual content (aside from “Hot Corner,” which apparently is not considered as such) is relegated to a narrow column just off-center:
Check the source code, and you’ll see the site is almost entirely rendered in Flash. Or, turn off your Javascript and watch the site disappear. There’s scarcely an indexable ASCII keyword on the page, so it isn’t likely to rank well in Google searches. This site should be rebuilt from the ground up. Most of the web-oriented co-founders arrive from a social networking site called SisterWoman.com that exhibits none of these amateurish flaws, which makes this venture’s absurd failure to launch all the more perplexing.
One of its selling points appears to be bringing famous-for-DC types to the blogosphere. But The Huffington Post — which was proclaimed to be the failure that HotSoup actually is — already did. (Still, I can’t let it go without noting that Arianna promised Gwyneth Paltrow, yet has so far only delivered Lynne M. Paltrow.)
HotSoup is closer to George Clooney’s “post” at HuffPo than a real meeting of the minds: It’s painfully obvious that most celebrity HotSoupers didn’t sign up themselves, their assistants or HotSoup did. Will we ever see them jump into the fray? How about you, Mary Matalin? Donna Brazile? (Seriously, John Ashcroft?) Hey, maybe even at some point Mark McKinnon and Allie Savarino will weigh in — you know, two founders of the site.
For the next part of my act, let’s roll the blooper reel. First, at the top of the main page you can find a link titled “Issue Loops,” and if you click on it even tonight, you will see:
Assuming there were threads to be found here, this is what you would want on the front page. This isn’t amateur hour; this is the afternoon before.
And this one is less a blooper, if anything more of a practical joke:
The second blooper, now apparently changed but still not actually fixed at the time of this writing, occurs on the celebrity pet issue page for Lance Armstrong, where an unidentified patronizing author/moderator (see “Editor’s Comments” in box at right) demands:
Never mind the fact that here the Beltway insiders are pretending they’re like, the new outsiders, man. Because whether you like it or not, Lance Armstrong has a pitch for his side, which you can pretty much ignore and skip to the very end:
Is Lance’s ghostwriter a fan of Joyce? Maybe we’ll find the answer if we just click on the “more…” button…? No:
Okay, now I get it. What big issues aren’t being addressed in current online debate? There are none. This comic software glitch is emblematic of why HotSoup.com is going to fall far short of its lofty goals: Try to be everything to everyone, and you will be nothing to nobody.
Others are already doing what they think they are. If they don’t like the partisan debate sites, there are plenty of online forums already offering whatever kinds of debate you want: Slashdot, Kuro5hin, OffTopic.com, Anandtech, even Something Awful and Genmay. Try the Corvette Forums. You might be surprised.
Though most online forums are not about politics, all the big ones have off-topic sections where debates left, right and beyond are carried on around the clock. HotSoup is going to bring you… prepared text from Lance Armstrong’s agent? The experience of being hounded with insipid questions — “Is the sentence stiff enough? Too stiff?” — by Ron Fournier?
Blooper-wise, best of all is the unenlightening, unlinkable and surely soon-to-disappear V-Factor sidebar:
Take it away, Mike Turk:
Something called the V-Factor rates posts on a scale between “never” and “definitely will”, but completely fails to indicate what they will never or always do? What the hell is that?
Update: I had thus far left out any mention of Right Wing News blogger John Hawkins’ involvement w/r/t the Conservative Forum he was asked to oversee — which so far is less popular than the now-defunct Conservative Grapevine message board Hawkins once ran all by himself — but now “Hot Corner” is mentioning it, and well, see for yourself:
…. Today we welcome the many readers of “www.rightwingnews” to the Soup ….
Never mind the fact that Hawkins has been on board since before the launch, so it makes no sense to welcome his readers “today.” Apparently HotSoup editors are not among the readers of Hawkins’ site. Because, depending on your browser, typing in “www.rightwingnews” won’t get you very far.
Update, months later: Things I should have said when the site was still operational:
- If it was supposed to actually be “hot soup,” it must have been carrot and pea soup. It never looked appetizing.
- Per the image asking what issue “our mainstream media and our leaders” were ignoring, why were the “voices” all people featured in the mainstream media?
- One of the key points that I did make was that this thing was bound to fail because it never had any buy-in from the famous-for-DC names attached to it. Carter Eskew and Mark McKinnon might have been interesting discussion leaders, but they never tried.
- The apparent teenager asking about legalizing marijuana is actually a married adult, possibly with kids. Months later, I saw him on “The Colbert Report.”
- The Corvette Forums have actually been pretty big on Fred Thompson.
I think that was about it.
Interesting analysis. Don’t you have anything else to do with your time? Why not go to work for these guys and help them address the issues you’ve revealed? Nothing wrong with constructive criticism…unless nothing is done about it. Be a part of the solution.
Great breakdown. I just went through this thing and think it is DOA.
I question the intelligence of the idea to begin with. But the execution is so atrocious they aren’t even giving themselves a chance.
The part I found most bizarre is that there is no way to add someone as a friend in the networking area of the site. Isn’t that the point?
William, great analysis of the pitfalls of HotSoup! I recently wrote a short piece highlighting the new partnership between the site and MSNBC and was glad to have your site as a resource to link to that shows the other side of the coin that the press releases aren’t going to emphasize. The recent piece at C3 is available here. What do you think is the driving force behind the partnership with MSNBC?
Sam, thanks. That’s a good question. It’s something to think about further, but my initial guess is that someone at HotSoup finally realized their rhetoric about creating an exciting new forum was losing to reality. They already had advertising from NBC and McKinnon is making regular appearances on Hardball — so corporate synergy was already in effect.
So by signing up with MSNBC, HotSoup is already a success, despite everything else. Now they could tap MSNBC’s resources to improve the website and maybe locate an audience. More cynically, they might try to sell it off and wash their hands of the project.
William- Great Article. In the social networking space, I’m generally quite cynical of large corporate attempts to mirror the success of more organic\entrepreneurial successes of social networking sites such as facebook and youtube. That aside though, I think the general idea of hotsoup was a very good, to create a niche social networking site based around politics. These typed of sites are actually doing quite well and I believe they will be the next “wave” in social networking.
With Hotsoup, as with many things the devil lies in the details. The fact is from the get go they have had a very poor implementation of the project. The final nail in the coffin I believe was laid with the structure of the site. Having organized the site around opinion drivers and everyone else they have imposed a hierarchy, which flies in the face of the egalitarianism that has made social networking sites successful. Within a site like Myspace, I can meet and converse with pretty much anyone I want. Hotsoup has taken a completely different route by filling press releases upon press release of celebrities who are “going to join” the conversation. It has created an unreal expectation that one will have a chance to converse with say Bill Clinton about social security. (As a side note -I might ask who would really want to converse with the so called opinion drivers? you pretty much know what they are going to say most of the time anyways. The more interesting discussions I believe take place with real people. For example talking with a intercity school teacher about the best method to fix our public schools…) Although the chances of Clinton actually taking to me about how to fix social security within a form such as hotsoup are slim. As it is he has much better things to do-such as getting AIDS medicine to people in Africa.
In the end though I think you are right-having realized this, Joe Lockhart and Co. might be trying to sell the site to MSNBC.
I would also add one more note to my comment above- I think that Joe Lockhart and Co. are probably the wrong people to create something like this, because of the fact that they are political insiders. For a niche political networking site to be a truly successful instrument of change it needs to come from an outside source, which is not afraid to rattle a few cages.
Moreover, it truly needs to have a strong focus on real people, and empowering their views/voices into the system. Not to mention a clear actionable way for channeling the relationships and discussions done online into the real world for social change.
To that effect I stumbled onto this site- http://www.rizzleweb.com. It seems to have a very interesting concept of allowing everyday people to rate their congressmen/senator etc. (kind of like an employee does for an employer). Reading on their blog, it seems they are currently building a stronger site with increased focus on social networking, and also an interface which will allow people to forward their performance reviews/ratings directly to congressmen and senators. I could be wrong, but it’s interesting to ponder if this could be the Google of the political social networking world….