Ma.gnolia Blog: On Our New Front Doors
Last week I tweeted a couple of times about a big little change we made with Ma.gnolia about how we accept new registrations. Turns out quite a few people around the Internet noticed. One of the running themes among all of this is that we were using OpenID to minimize spam.
Let me say this as clearly as I can: requiring externally-verified accounts – either OpenID or Facebook – is not about using these technologies as anti-spam tools.
Because of OpenID’s freshness, and because of the way social bookmark spam works, it has significantly reduced the amount of spammers using Ma.gnolia for the time being. We knew this would happen, and it certainly influenced our decision making process.
But, how much is significant? Spam bookmark creation has dropped by 68%, and the creation of new spam accounts has dropped by 63%. This difference has tipped the scales so that legitimate bookmark and account creation by real people now outweighs spam created by bots. Hooray!
Still, why did we ultimately make this change to our registration process, especially considering that it could reduce desirable registrations by scaring off new, legitimate members? Simple: because we believe that the direction of the social web is towards an unofficial, loosely joined distributed social network.
We envision Ma.gnolia as one component of that network, and removing ourselves from the identity silo game allows us to focus on what we do best, helping people share and get more out of all of the great stuff they find on the web.
The most interesting result for me, in looking at the results of this move, was seeing how much our legitimate new users registration would suffer. At first, we actually saw an increase in registrations, which I would attribute to the attention we drew.
And, now, looking at the numbers a little further down the road, our overall legitimate remain at a strong 89% of what they were prior. While I would have loved to welcome all good souls to Ma.gnolia, I think that the continued strength of our new signup numbers speaks to the actual, ongoing success of OpenID.
Posted by Larry on April 3, 2008 | Mark This Post
Member Comments
Chris on April 4, 2008
This is definitely a good thing and forces a wider conversation about the utility of OpenID and remote credentials generally. Much needed!
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Dan on April 3, 2008
hoo-rah, Larry. I've been talking this up a lot lately in person (FOWA, SXSW) - not writing about it unfortunately, but that'll come soon enough.
We need more people/organizations to set examples like you have and take big strides toward the next generation of the web (not just the social aspect - the implications of things like OpenID and OAuth reach much farther).
Kudos to Ma.gnolia for being one of the first to make the leap.