Categorize the homepage

Skibumsmith

Skibumsmith

Active member
There has been some debate that there isn't enough powder/big mountain content on Newschoolers, that if you want that type of content you should go over to TGR or Biglines. But TGR and biglines don't really compare. Newschoolers is fucking HUGE and it's way more fun plus the site is just better. The TGR forums look like an 8th grader designed them. I believe newschool is a state of mind and there's no reason why this site can't attract even more big mountain skiers. NS does have some big mountain content. I have really enjoyed the articles that Julian Carr has posted recently but those things rarely make it to the homepage. There's a shit ton of good park/urban edits that makes it to the top of the homepage. But rarely does a big mountain edit make it. When I log into NS, I go to the homepage scroll down a little ways, peep a couple pictures, maybe watch half of an edit then go straight to the forums. I'll admit I'm lazy and don't bother to search around for the content that I'm more interested in i.e. big mountain/powder, but it is there. It's just diluted by all the park stuff so it's harder to find. You can select different categories in the pictures and videos section but not on the homepage. I suggest we categorize the homepage into 2 broad categories: Jib and BC. You could check a box for one or the other or both for a mix of all the best content.

Here's how I imagined it might look.

Jib

View attachment 644629

BC

View attachment 644627

Hybrid

View attachment 644628
 
You can just search big mountain videos in the video section, NS doesn't want to change which videos show up on the front page because its based on the videos that are the most popular. If you like a big mountain video, give it an up vote and share it with your friends via twitter, fb etc and if they like it they can upvote it. The front page is 100% based on the community and having "sections" would just make it more complicated than it already is, there are sections in the video/photo sections where you can see just big mountain content.
 
Ehv is right, its not that hard to simple go to the videos tab and see the most popular videos in whatever category you might want to see
 
I read evan’s post. In the op I said, “I know you can search

different categories in the pictures and videos section.” But the idea here is

too get different kinds of skiing in the limelight by getting it on the

homepage. I upvote stuff I like. That’s not a lot of votes though. I realize

categorizing the homepage would kind of defeat the purpose of system, which

only lets the most popular stuff as voted by the community, make it to the top

of the homepage. There’s no way around that.

Right now what you see on the homepage represents perfectly

what most of the NS community likes. But for the small amount of powshredders

that visit NS they don’t really see anything that catches their eye on the

homepage. I’m not saying that’s a

problem. But I think it steers some people away. I think a lot of people

don’t go past the homepage in search of entertainment. Also if someone makes a

sick edit that won’t get appreciated by the NS community but will bring lots of

stoke on TGR that person might decide not to post their stuff and I think we’re

missing out. Most of the people I ski with don't visit this sight.

If you browse the big mountain videos section right now it's

seriously lacking compared to the really quality park edits we get.
 
So I actually know exactly what you're saying - and even see the need for this. However, its not quite as simple as you might think.

The problem here is addressing the niche categorization issue that we face.

NS has always been an absolutely unfathomable block of data - but there has been very poor organization to it. There's tonnes of good stuff, but finding the good stuff you want has been difficult.

The move to the new voting system, and community curation was the first step in developing the meta view of what is good content. That is awesome, and has worked swimmingly. Whether you want hot, or you want top rated - you can get great stuff based on the overall view of the skiing community.

The root of the problem is that NS lacks a tagging system to properly link all this information together. As soon as you do big mountain vs. jib, immediately you realize that there's tonnes of other sub categories you'd like... rails, street, jumps, style, pipe... to add one is the same issue as adding all of them. We need to build a system to globally handle it and then we need to rally the people to help us do it.

Its a task that is on our horizion though. The big strategy that we have come to with Newschoolers is first to allow the community to decide what is cool. Second, to allow you to customize your experience whilst digesting said cool content. Right now the customizations are relatively basic, but we have big plans to enhance that side of things.

TL;DR - Fantastic idea, not super simple to implement, and we want something like it too.
 
Thanks Bishop. That was actually really informative. I think a "customized experience" is a good idea and glad that's something you're working on.
 
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