As some of you may already know, I have been writing online for a few years now. My first online writing home was the now dead Themestream which was a wonderful place to write about whatever your interests were. It was an excellent place to meet up with other writers and artists from all around the world. While it did pay a little bit, you had to really be addicted to the site to keep writing for as long as I did. Themestream survivors saw all types of hard times, from slow loading or no loading pages to content being deleted when the server crashed and had not been backed up for weeks. But through all the trials and turbulent, it became my home on the web.
The next one I joined was another site that works very similar to this one. It is still afloat, but talk has been going around for almost a year that the site was doomed to follow in the foot steps of Themestream. I seldom write there anymore. Venge ratings seem to go around freely on the site.
Then there was the good tangled Vines. I hated writing for this site from the get go. The site was slow to load and when you did manage to get an article loaded in, you may never be able to find it again. I have heard this site is also going down. It also is or was a site where you could basically write whatever was on your mind.
Bright Ideas was yet another site to capture my interest for a while. What Bright Ideas wanted was for you to come up with ways to improve life under certain areas of interest. However, the site had one major flaw. They under estimated the intelligence level of the online writer. They wanted them to come up with marketable ideas, which they later made clear in several emails that were sent out to the members. While there is a certain level of trust between you and the site you are writing for, I doubt very seriously that if I came up with an idea that the likelihood of it being marketable and earning millions of dollars, that I would share it with them.
Oh, and let us not forget the wonderful Evoice site that offered to pay you a dime for a praise as well as for complaining about a product. You looked for the category the information would fall under and then wrote your review.
Instant Angora was yet another one that I tried, ever so briefly. It reminded me too much of the Vines, the tangled mess that it was.
Written By Me is another site that is easy to fall in love with, although when Themestream first shut down and the Written By Me site was flooded with ex-Themestreamers the natives of the site were not very welcoming to most of the new people. There were tons of unspoken rules that had to be followed. And again, there was a cloud of suspicion cast on the site as people wondered how trust worthy the site was.
And then, one day, I found my new home. Mouthshut. It seems that this is by far the friendliest and fairest place I have seen yet. Other sites, no matter what their format, could learn a few things from the management of this site in my opinion. You are treated with respect here, you are informed on what is going on, and given chances to increase your earnings. You are not only paid, as you know, for writing on this site but also for taking the time to read other peoples wonderful articles.
It is as though, MS was looking over my shoulder all this time and asking me, “Why did you leave that site? Why are you not writing more for this site?” and recording my answers in a secret book to use as a design tool to design this wonderful site.
Most of the sites I have mentioned allowed for some sort of feedback and comments on the writing and information that the articles contained. But this place by far seems to strive to have the friendliest people found anywhere.
I applaud you on your efforts! It is good to feel as though I have a home on the web once again.