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What fell between the cracks this week? TheSixtyOne.com insults its users; T61 refugees post their final thoughts; another look at T61 site statistics

On February 1, T61 co-owner James Miao essentially insulted and mocked its user base with a short blog post hardly worthy of the time of the users. The post attempted to dispel the belief that the duo had been influenced in any way by money from venture capitalists, despite a ReadWriteWeb news bite that seemed to suggest otherwise. Additionally, the post avoided making any professional commentary about the site changes by using crude humor in no way associated with the site’s situation.

“So, in this non-capitalized burst of unbridled arrogance, TheSixtyOne basically let the world know, along with their most loyal users, that they simply don’t give a damn,” said Erez Zuckerman in a DownloadSquad.com article on Thursday.

“Regardless of the design change, this is not how you manage a community; this is not how you treat your most loyal users,” added Zuckerman. “These guys can take a lesson or two from Seth Godin. Nice going.”

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It’s been well over two weeks since the redesign at TheSixtyOne.com, and the refugees have done their best to move past the mess. It’s unknown how many listeners and artists actually fled T61 after the fallout of the design change. However, it’s obvious that a significant number fled to Uvumi.com where Marshall Stokes, Michele Stokes, Olivier Couston, Lloyd Winter and Justin Mack have welcomed refugees with open arms.

Though most have put T61 behind them, a few users took the time to post final comments on the T61 debacle. User docMT posted an in-depth analysis of the T61 redesign fallout. Doc said: “While the site owners are naturally free to experiment however they wish with their site, their comments seem to reflect a delusional sense of omnipotence where they think that they can arbitrarily change well established music mappings and discovery mechanisms and ignore the social intelligence … contained in the various social groups bound together by their shared music tastes.”

User MusicMissionary also gave his closing remarks on the T61 situation on his blog this week. In it, he gives lessons learned by the community, but likely not by T61 owners Sam and James. The most compelling lessons were arguably that both the listeners and artists are people. “They aren’t factories that make a product, but living breathing people,” he said of artists.

This lesson resonates well with the post that M61 made about looking at Sam and James’ actions from the point of view of the disinhibition effect. It appears that they truly have forgotten that people were affected by their actions or lack thereof.

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Let’s take another look at the site numbers for T61. Thanks go out to Paul for alerting M61 to another statistics site called Quantcast.com.

This is a look at the amount of daily visitors to the site over a one-month period, ending February 4. Note that visitors to the site have fallen closer to January 11 levels, before the redesign went into effect. While the January 21 traffic peak wasn’t surprising, some may be surprised that it’s back down to pre-redesign levels.

This is a look at page views per person. As M61 said in a previous post, we can’t be sure if the drastic drop in page views is directly associated with the fact that the redesign ripped out most of the many pages we previously used. Regardless, this shows that page views per person is down but relatively steady. This number will be interesting to keep an eye on as the months progress. It’s interesting to note that this graph roughly corresponds to an Alexa graph posted by docMT. That graph measures time on site (in minutes), and it seems to match up well with the above graph. That said, perhaps when combined, this is evidence that people aren’t staying on T61 as long as they used to.

Shawn Douglas general news, thesixtyone artists, downloadsquad.com, james miao, listeners, m61, Marshall Stokes, movementsixtyone, statistics, t61, thesixtyone, uvumi, uvumi.com