---
title: "Caught in the Current of Writer River: Building and Participating in Community-Driven Websites"
date: 2008-10-21
description: "$( document ).ready(function() { // Handler for .ready() called. $("
canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/2008/10/21/caught-in-the-current-of-writer-river-building-and-participating-in-community-driven-websites/
---
# Caught in the Current of Writer River: Building and Participating in Community-Driven Websites
Digg's main focus is technology, and I always thought it would be cool to have a tech comm version of Digg with news more relevant to me. One weekend I sat down and created a Digg imitation using software called [Pligg](http://pligg.com). Pligg was pretty much a Digg clone, so I thought it would work out perfectly. I [called](https://idratherbewriting.com/2008/06/10/announcing-writerrivercom-a-digg-like-social-news-site-for-technical-communicators/) the site [Writer River](http://writerriver.com/), referring to the idea of content that continuously flows down a river, all merged into one stream of information that bystanders can observe from a single view, perhaps picking out an object for a while and then sending it back on down the river.

The site was well-received, and it seemed to be taking off, gathering around 50 registered users within the first week. But if I was hoping for a Digg clone, I had a lot to achieve. For starters, whereas the typical number of votes on articles submitted to Digg was around 500+, the number of votes on Writer River was a bit depressing -- 3 or 4, sometimes 9 if I voted several times. 

The movement of unpublished articles to the front page (through an increasing number of votes) simply wasn't happening. The site lacked the robust, thriving community of Digg, which made me realize a fundamental truth about Web 2.0 sites: it's all about the community, not the technology.

I posted less frequently on Writer River and grew more frustrated with the number of spam posts appearing as pseudo articles (for example, posts on hand cream). I'd set Writer River as my home page, and one day while launching my browser I didn't see the site but rather a message that said, "Your site was [hacked by Silahsiz Kuvvetler](https://idratherbewriting.com/2008/08/03/thank-you-silahsiz-kuvvetler-for-showing-me-the-light/), the Turkish Hacker."

To be honest, it was a bit of a relief. I felt I need to regroup and come up with a better implementation of Writer River. By then [Twitter](https://twitter.com) was all the rage, and I'd heard good things about [Prologue](http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2008/01/28/introducing-prologue/), a Twitter-like WordPress theme in which people could leave brief messages directly from the home page, without logging in to the admin panel. Since I was comfortable with WordPress, I sat down one Friday night and worked on version two of Writer River for about the next day.