Future of WhatBoysWant.com

Quote:

Originally posted by omuh

The vid page seems nice too but the "no comments" warning color doesn't suit the rest of the page. This white/yellow color isn't really beautiful.
Perhaps try another background color for the warning div or use white and use color for the font.

Good one, I will tweak this!

Quote:

Originally posted by Diz-X

Small update, working on registration form now.

Are current members going to have to register again?

This is a long post, but perhaps there's something to it. Bear with me. It might be worth reading. A lot of times, I'm a goof. Sometimes however, I'm pretty fucking smart too. I firmly believe this is one of those times (that I'm smart).

Also understand that I care about this community and I care about our future. You may not agree with my position on things, but that I care about this place and the people within it really isn't up for debate. What I have to say, I say with the best interests of the site and our community at heart.



Not too long ago, Diz mentioned that we're getting less hits and less new members now than we used to. Some of us speculated as to why this is the case and some of the reasons offered had some merit. I didn't really weigh in much at the time.

Recently though, I've not been around as much myself. Tonight I came back and was thumbing through some of the galleries when the reason I haven't been here as much suddenly hit me.


About a month ago I started spending less time here. I wasn't sure why and I didn't even give it any thought. It just kind of happened on its own. Only tonight did I realize... I hadn't stopped looking at porn on the Internet, or even fully clothed girls on the Internet.

What I had stopped doing, was doing it here.

I've browsed other picture galleries before. I'm a member at another site and I'm a lurker at another. Years ago, I used to browse others but I lost interest in those over time.

What Boys Want has always been my primary place to go though, and I love the community here. In the past I've always spent most of my time here... But not lately.

It's not as though I like those other communities better. Far from it actually. One community I can't stand at all and I pretty much despise almost everyone I've seen there. In another gallery/community there isn't even really a forum and I never opened an account there. I just go through the galleries.

So why have I been spending greater amounts of time at the other galleries instead of here?


Tonight I was browsing through the galleries and it suddenly hit me.

Gang, there is something to be said for quality.

Ultimately, we're all here for pictures of attractive women.

Here is a link to the latest pics uploaded to WBW.

I have my page set to display 200 of these thumbs at once. Whatever your setting is, go through just that first page, and count the number of pictures you're even remotely interested in clicking on. Say it's... 10 out of 40 or even 15 out of 40... Maybe it's higher, maybe it's lower.

Now go through that same page and count the number of pictures you would have been just fine without ever having to see in your life.

How much do you want to bet that the number of pictures most people are excited about seeing is significantly smaller than the pictures they feel are a waste of time?

I realize that everyone's tastes are unique, but at the same time let's look at some of these ratings. This pic for example, and I mean no offense to the young lady in question, is simply not a very attractive photo. Right now she's sporting a 4.57 rating off of 57 votes.

Frankly, it's a bad picture.

Maybe the lighting was bad. Maybe it's an awkward pose. Maybe it's a cheap camera. Maybe her make-up is off. I have no intention of questioning the beauty of any particular woman. What I do intend to do is evaluate the end result of the picture of that woman.

It's a bad picture.

It's not isolated. There are more of these than of the good pictures on this site.

As I was browsing through the gallery today, I noticed I would go to picture after picture after picture, and ultimately I waded through a sea of pictures that were repugnant at worst, and a waste of time at best, searching for that 1-in-20 picture that was actually worth looking at.

And then I thought... "This sort of sucks. I could go to that other gallery I know about. I can't stand the people, but the pictures are more consistently attractive and fun to look at."


And that's when it hit me that the reason I have been spending less and less time here, is because there isn't any quality control on the pictures.

In the past we've made jokes about some of the truly horrible pictures we all run across, but we seem to be mostly joking and we just move to a stance of "each to their own."

But at the end of the day, our site may well be one of "more work than reward" for finding truly attractive pictures.



Guys, I love the community. But the pictures are what brought us here to begin with, and it's a big part of why many of us stay around.

The blunt, honest to god's truth: Our pictures suck.

We have some of the best pictures of women that I have EVER seen on the Internet. But they're buried beneath piles and piles of pics like this.

It's too much work to wade through the bad pictures to try to find the good ones. It makes it more difficult for people that just found us to find the site appealing, and it makes it harder to retain members.

Remember that our primary reason for coming to this site originally was pictures of hot women. EVERYONE in this community likes hot women.

If they're not finding them conveniently and easily here, they are going to find them someplace else.

I can't STAND the other two communities that I've found with photo galleries, but both of them have some system for purging bad pictures.

We... Don't.


If we're really interested in the long-term viability of WBW, then I think that at some stage we have to examine the heart of the matter; the quality of our content.


It might be a hard pill to swallow, but the reality is that I can find a much higher quality of pictures overall in several other places than I can find here. I realize that everyone has their own tastes, but if we can't even get 40% of our members to say that a particular picture is attractive... Then maybe we need to ditch that picture and get it out of the way.

Digging through 20 terrible pictures to get a look at one good one... Is cool - but there are other galleries out there, and they have a much higher ratio of good pics, and less bad ones to wade through to find them.


Fundamentally, it may simply be that over the course of time, the quality of our content has degraded. Maybe it's time we look at that, and see if we should do something about it.

I just checked the first 40 public pics on the "latest uploads" page.

Things to note:

I posit that this was a "better than usual" batch of girls. There were more pics I was curious about during this particular moment than I am used to seeing.

5 pictures (over 10%) of all the pictures we have most recently loaded into the system, have a rating of below 5.5.

Guys, on a 1 - 10 system, 5.5 is average. Not 5. Further, this is supposed to be a site devoted to HOT women - not average women. But the reality is that over 10% of the pictures I just checked had a rating that was BELOW THAT OF AN AVERAGE FEMALE.

But we're not here for average females. We're here for HOT females.

Of the remaining 35 pictures, one (at least) is a known porn star - yes, I reported it.

There was one picture with a rating of 4.x (2.5%)
There were 7 pictures with a rating of 5.x (12.5%)
There were 18 pictures with a rating of 6.x (45%)
There were 14 pictures with a rating of 7.x (35%)

There were no pictures rated higher than that.

Guys, a full 15% of our women didn't even rate as average. One of the chicks who rated in the 7.x range was the porn model.

This is not a site for people who want to see average women. This is a site for people who want to see very attractive women. Over 15% of our pictures don't even meet the criteria of "average."


Our galleries have a lot of really beautiful ladies in them. The problem is finding them amongst this sea of marginal (at best) pictures.

The reality is that other galleries exist, and they provide more of what boys want with less work to get it.

The pictures are why people come here. Many of us stay for other reasons, but the pictures are what brings us here. We also all like pictures of girls, and if we can get them someplace else with better quality and less work... It's human nature to do so.

Bear in mind, in my opinion this sample... Was a favorable sample. I check a lot of the "latest uploads" because that's how I find dupes and earn credits. In my opinion, this was a better sample than what I usually encounter here.

Maybe it's time we look at that more closely. Maybe it's time to do some housekeeping.

Please can we keep all fav pics even when our membership expires?

Tarquin has made a good point here, there ARE a lot of average pictures being uploaded on a regular basis. I'm probably guilty of it myself if I was to look through my uploads. Maybe there could be system that automatically deletes pictures after they receive 100 votes and their score is below 5? Or, if they fail to get 100 votes, they are deleted if their score is below 5 after 3 months? I know it's nice having a large database of images, but who really enjoys looking through the '5 and below' rated pictures? Sure everyone has a different opinion of what is 'hot' and what is 'not', but the general consensus is usually about right.

I think Tarquin had a point, that there are too many mediocre or worse pictures.

I definitely think that applies to the videos. Of late I have downloaded a very small proportion of them. Anything just a few seconds long, out of focus, with loud music, and any number of other criteria is a waste of time and bandwidth.

Housekeeping definitely in order!

With that in mind there is still a lot of great content here, and it's a nice place to hang out.

!

Well, in response to the recent picture ratings and such...

Dizzy, would it be possible to group pics by rating?

I gotta weigh in on this.

If we're going to rely on our rating system to tell us what's hot or not, then we're going to be deleting a ton of great pictures. There are members out there who admittedly rate every picture of clothed (bikini, lingerie included) a one, because they aren't naked.

Also show me the absolute hottest girl on this site...any of you, and I will show you that she most likely has a rating under 9. So while our rating goes up to 10, in reality no girl has a rating that high after a few votes. An average score is not really 5.5 it's more like 4.5.

While I will agree that there are pics being uploaded that I personally don't enjoy, I've been surprised to see positive comments on them, so how do you filter out the bad ones? Does each mod make the personal choice and say "she's not hot enough"? I think that's a dangerous route to go down. Do we allow the ranking to automatically delete any pic under a 5? Not with the current system in place. Besides the pics would still be on the site for an undetermined amount of time. While you may be right about some pics not being "quality" pics, what's the solution to the problem?

Thank you all for understanding that my intention is to improve the place


What if once every 3 months, we simply purge the lowest rated 1% of pictures in the database?

Right now, that would cost us all of 14k pics - 14,000 pics that are uglier than at least 99 out of 100 other pics on this site.

Is anyone really going to miss those 14k pics?

That way, even if in the short-term one or two pictures are suffering some weird anomaly they won't be impact in the long run.

I'm not really so much concerned about which tactic is used though. More important is that we establish SOME standard of some type to raise the quality of our galleries.

While I'm generally in favor of raising the standard for pictures and videos in the galleries, the result will be less "real world / girl next door" content, and fewer contributions in general. I'm also not a fan of users being able to get other members contributions deleted because their preferences are different. We all know there are members here that have both enough time, and enough determination to skew voting results.

Quote:

Originally posted by Sugarpie

I gotta weigh in on this.

If we're going to rely on our rating system to tell us what's hot or not, then we're going to be deleting a ton of great pictures. There are members out there who admittedly rate every picture of clothed (bikini, lingerie included) a one, because they aren't naked.

True, and there are other instances as well. I won't rate any picture above a 3 if I can't see the face for example (with rare exception).

We all have our quirks though. It comes out in the wash.

I don't think anyone here is going to credibly argue that the two examples I linked to above are "quality" pictures. I'm sure someone, somewhere, thinks those two pictures are gorgeous. Maybe it's their mother. Maybe it's a guy who thinks they remind him of his long, lost love.

But by and large, at a certain point it really does become okay to draw a line and say, "YOU might think this picture is amazing, but not enough people share your view. Save it to your hard drive and let's move on."

It does become okay to draw the line someplace though. It really is okay to do that at a certain point.

We're at that point.

Quote:

Originally posted by Sugarpie

Also show me the absolute hottest girl on this site...any of you, and I will show you that she most likely has a rating under 9. So while our rating goes up to 10, in reality no girl has a rating that high after a few votes. An average score is not really 5.5 it's more like 4.5.

Not true. The ratings go down to 1. Find me a picture with a rating below 4.x on this site. It ain't easy.

Our rating system makes the scores relatively compact, and I concede that scores of 9 are rare, it's equally rare to get a 1, a 2, or even a 3.

It's true that the VAST majority of our pics fall into the 4.0 to 7.0 range. We don't know that they're skewed towards one end or the other, though.

In any case, that's why I suggested taking the lowest X percent. Then it doesn't matter where the pics are skewed at.

Quote:

Originally posted by Sugarpie

While I will agree that there are pics being uploaded that I personally don't enjoy, I've been surprised to see positive comments on them, so how do you filter out the bad ones?

You tell the three guys that gave this picture a ten "tough shit."

If they genuinely liked that shit (and I'm skeptical of that), then there are plenty of fetish sites out there they can go to.

At some stage, we have to decide if we're catering to everyone in the entire world, or if we're catering to the majority of people who want to see hot chicks.

There IS such a thing as being "too inclusive" if our goal is to have a large amount of active members.

Quote:

Originally posted by Sugarpie

Does each mod make the personal choice and say "she's not hot enough"? I think that's a dangerous route to go down. Do we allow the ranking to automatically delete any pic under a 5? Not with the current system in place. Besides the pics would still be on the site for an undetermined amount of time. While you may be right about some pics not being "quality" pics, what's the solution to the problem?

Set it up so that once every three months, the bottom 1% of all pictures in the database are deleted.

It doesn't matter what the score is. They're either rated lower than 99% of the pics on this site or not.

Make it so that it only includes pics older than 90 days so that they can all get their trial run of 3 months to flatten out any ass-hattery.

I don't care who, or why, or how... But if a picture in this database is less appealing than 99% of the rest of the pics, then it needs to go.

I might even put it higher than that, but I think that's a good place to start, and let's see how that impacts things. It couldn't hurt at least.


At some stage, we've got to do something though.

You have a bunch of people who love trees on this site. The problem is that they can't find a good tree because of all the dead wood in their way.

It's time for a lil' gasoline near the campfire.

Apologies for the multi-posting, but I don't want to edit a post someone might be replying to.

It's not my call to make. If it was however, I would take any picture that has been on this site for more than three months and compare it to all the others that have been here more than three months.

I'd delete the bottom 10% of those pictures.

I'd then set the boards up to do the same thing to the lowest 1% every three months from here on out.

If it were me.



I understand the arguments for not wanting to clean house, but the reality is that at least in my case, it's impacting my enjoyment of the site. I doubt I'm alone.

Lots of other sites use a standard of quality for pictures and they do just fine.

We can too.

If it ain't broke let's fix it.

I see nothing wrong with the site right now.
It is the best of its genre on the world wide web.

But here's what I would change and I would only change this:
Your means of making money.
You charge too much.

In the days when every main street in America had a sandwich shop
hamburgers cost .35 cents.

Then McDonald's comes along.
Their burgers were .15 cents.

They sold billions at .15 cents.

You charge so much for a membership that most guys can't
afford it.

HOWEVER...if you collected a dollar a month (not $12.00 a year)
But a monthly charge of one buck, who could not afford that?

Think in terms of volume, like Ray Crock, the man who started
McDonald's did and died a muli-millionaire.

Make that change and you will be pretty well off and you don't have
to put in a lot of hours, tedious hours (I've done websites)to change
anything.

You've got the best now. Leave it alone.

Quote:

Originally posted by Tarquin

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Not true. The ratings go down to 1. Find me a picture with a rating below 4.x on this site. It ain't easy.

Our rating system makes the scores relatively compact, and I concede that scores of 9 are rare, it's equally rare to get a 1, a 2, or even a 3.

It's true that the VAST majority of our pics fall into the 4.0 to 7.0 range. We don't know that they're skewed towards one end or the other, though.

In any case, that's why I suggested taking the lowest X percent. Then it doesn't matter where the pics are skewed at.

A recent search of All Time - All Categories In Top OF The Babes showed 14 pictures with a rating over 8.5. 14 pictures out of 1.3 million or so. And not a single picture over 9. So again I say that the average score is well under 5. For various reasons some members decide to squew votes one way or another.

While I do think your 1% deleted suggestion does have some merit, it still doesn't entirely fix the problem. Those undesirable pictures are still going to be in the database for 3 months or more. And every month more undesirable pics will take their place. So I don't know if it would improve the quality of pictures or not...perhaps, but it would be difficult to measure.

Quote:

Originally posted by Sugarpie

...

A recent search of All Time - All Categories In Top OF The Babes showed 14 pictures with a rating over 8.5. 14 pictures out of 1.3 million or so. And not a single picture over 9. So again I say that the average score is well under 5. For various reasons some members decide to squew votes one way or another.

How many pics with a rating of 2 have we ever seen?

Quote:

Originally posted by Sugarpie

While I do think your 1% deleted suggestion does have some merit, it still doesn't entirely fix the problem. Those undesirable pictures are still going to be in the database for 3 months or more. And every month more undesirable pics will take their place. So I don't know if it would improve the quality of pictures or not...perhaps, but it would be difficult to measure.

I concede that "site quality" is difficult to measure, as are the quality of pictures.

But that doesn't mean it's impossible to make some reasonable strides and lines too.

It's abstract, but it's still real. Just because something can't be measured in quantifiable data doesn't mean certain things aren't still true, nor does it mean they're impossible to figure out - or even predict.

I think people over a certain amount of credits should be able to tag photos, ton of good photos that are never seen b/c they aren't tagged

Quote:

Originally posted by Bama_Boy

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Are current members going to have to register again?

No, everything will be converted to new database.

Quote:

Originally posted by Tarquin

...

How many pics with a rating of 2 have we ever seen?

I don't know because its not possible to search for lowest rated. You're probably right that there isn't many. Another question to ask would be how many unrated pictures are there?

Quote:

Originally posted by Tarquin

I concede that "site quality" is difficult to measure, as are the quality of pictures.

But that doesn't mean it's impossible to make some reasonable strides and lines too.

It's abstract, but it's still real. Just because something can't be measured in quantifiable data doesn't mean certain things aren't still true, nor does it mean they're impossible to figure out - or even predict.

Again I agree with you, I'm just saying that I think it would be difficult to notice a difference. I think at some point in time, as a site owner you need to decide if this is going to be a site that allows all amateur content, regardless of what it looks like, or if you're going to have a certain level of quailification to be accepted. And whats hot to one member isn't hot to another. So who makes the call? Do we delete so called not hot pictures because 90% feel that way? What about the 10% that liked the picture...what about them? There are plenty of sites out there that cater to only hot pictures, I believe WBW stands alone in allowing almost any amateur content, providing it falls within the rules.

Could the content be improved? Absolutely it could be. Is it in the best interest of the site? I'm not so sure about that.

Quote:

Originally posted by Sugarpie

Could the content be improved? Absolutely it could be. Is it in the best interest of the site? I'm not so sure about that.

Well... Let me put it this way.

This picture and this picture are side by side on the front page of our site right this moment, in the Amateur Babe thumbnails. They're easily visible from our front page, and anyone opening all the thumbs to get a quick peek at what we have to offer is likely to click on these pictures.


Even if they're just browsing through the galleries, what does that signal send?

The problem is that this is not at all uncommon. I would wager to say that the overall quality of our pictures has dropped considerably from when I first joined.

No system will ever be "perfect," but we can certainly do "better."


Frankly, those pictures are repugnant to me. I don't like them and I think they're... They totally kill my mood and just... They're a buzz-kill.

And there are a lot of them here.

Look at those two pictures. Ask yourself if this is really what most boys want. Is being all-inclusive really gaining us more members than it's costing us?

I'd speculate that pics like these are why people like myself are now posting here on these boards, but looking at the galleries on other sites.

I dunno. Hard to say. I guess we could run a poll or something, but even that won't answer the question for sure.

I do think that certain things - like the idea that these two pictures are not pleasurable to most of the people that view this site, is a pretty safe bet with or without quantifiable, empirical data.