Why 'Communities' Is The Future For Car Throttle As A Media Platform

Six months ago we decided to make our first significant product push as a media platform company. For the year prior, we’d seen huge growth through social channels like Facebook, and - as mentioned in my end-of-year roundup - we witnessed a quadrupling in size in 2014 alone.

However, as many publishers have quickly discovered, reliance on Facebook for traffic and revenue often spells disaster. We were privy to this when huge gaming companies like Zynga flourished and a wave of video apps like Viddy catapulted to the top of the App charts, then swiftly perished at the hands of the Zuck. How long would it be before the same happened to content creators?

Discuss was our answer. It became a live testbed, constantly improved by our product team, showing what could happen if we allowed user-generated content to have a proper voice, sitting alongside editorial posts. The aim was simple: how could we scale content on Car Throttle without the ability (or the money) to hire dozens of journalists like the largest media players in the world? And could we grow a community of car enthusiasts who would look to replace Facebook and Twitter usage altogether?

The results have far exceeded our lofty expectations. What started as 100 posts per day has become 1000 posts per day in a few months. Where we once had thousands of daily votes, we now have tens of thousands. Where we used to have a handful of keen commenters who we’d know by name, today there are thousands of hardcore, active participants who have helped make Discuss what it is today. There’s even been a virtual bromance of sorts (Melons, Carlos, I’m looking at you)!

But as our affection for Discuss grew, we started to fall out of love with other areas of the site. The homepage, for instance, started to feel stale and static. While it highlighted editorial posts effectively in a feed format, it failed to highlight conversations that were occurring in realtime across the platform. It didn’t provide the same level of excitement for users who landed there. And as the majority of traffic started to move to single pages, the homepage felt redundant.

Single pages too became highly fragmented. We had editorial posts with an infinitely scrolling sidebar, editorial video posts with links back to Discuss, and user-generated posts, all hacked together to try and peacefully co-exist.

We discovered that what people enjoyed about the Discuss experience was its feeling of infinite discoverability. We heard stories of users who would spend hours scrolling through the Latest feed (you da real MVP), and users who would open up Discuss in class to make sure they didn’t miss any chat. We’ve onboarded publishing partners like Shmee150, ThatDudeinBlue, Engineering Explained and XCAR, who all now automatically pipe in their fresh YouTube content so the Car Throttle community can be the first to watch.

But 1000 posts per day soon becomes unmanageable, hard to sort, and hard to consume. There’s a reason why forums became such an unstoppable force ten years ago; they allowed for deep user engagement and interest-based content. And they created lock-in with users who would spend time populating their profiles and engaging with like-minded individuals.

So today, I’m proud to introduce Communities to the world. We’ve added a few more requested themes on top of the old ‘Topics’, designed to encourage interaction based on your niche automotive passions. We’ve launched with around thirty, but will be adding new ones by request for the time being. The feeds are all infinitely scrolling and, because you know we care about the user experience, we’ll only display native advertising – so you won’t get any nasty interstitials popping up in your faces.

Users can still browse the site without registering, but members with accounts will now land on “My Feed”, designed to highlight trending content from Communities you follow. Unregistered users who land on the homepage will be taken to our “Editorial” feed, allowing them to experience the best content we have on the platform.

Anyone can create content in any community. We know you sometimes break news faster than we ever can, so we wanted to give you a place to show off your automotive knowledge and inform your fellow members. However the editorial staff you’ve come to know and follow will still be there giving you exclusive content, reviews and helping to drive the conversation in the Editorial feed.

For mobile users, there’s a collapsing sidebar where you can login and create your feed. You can easily add or remove Communities and upload text, image, video and link posts. At some point in the near future, we’ll also work on removing content types so you can be free to post any content, in any format you like.

I want to also take this chance to answer a few pressing questions:

Why is my CT score suddenly higher?
Congratulations, we have gifted you extra points! Now you get a point for every piece of content you upload, on top of points scored from upvotes on uploads.

I liked the old homepage, where did it go?
You can still see Editorial posts by visiting the Editorial feed. These are the same old articles created by our in-house team, so don’t fret!

What’s happened to the Garage?
The Garage lives on! We know there are still a few bugs to iron out there, and at some point we will be integrating your cars into the rest of the platform, but we’ll need a bit more time to figure it out.

What’s next for Car Throttle?

We’re continuing to build the best digital media platform for car enthusiasts. There may still be teething issues and some frustration as we know you were starting to become accustomed to using Discuss, but we promise, these changes will be for the better. We’ll continue to tidy up the platform over the next few weeks and implement large architectural changes to ensure smooth running and scalability. New communities will be introduced (today we’ve already rolled out Geneva 2015 and BMW Owners) and we’ll improve ways in which you can discover and explore these new hubs.

In the meantime, we love hearing from our users and answering your questions. So please fire away in the comments section below: what do you like or not like about the new update? What features are you most looking forward to seeing from us next?