Monday, August 21, 2006

One of the founding tenets of the Experience Project is that it remain predominantly an anonymous community. If people are to feel comfortable talking about the things that matter, they can't worry about being recognized by friends and family.

That being said, the anonymous nature of the site, combined with the ability to easily share experiences that members themselves find notable, have led to a significant amount of entries as of late that might be considered, well, adult-oriented. A good example would be the various people who enjoy introducing a third party into their relationships... (I'll have you know that I tried very hard to come up with the least shady description for that particular set of experiences... ;) ).

In any case, we have no inherent issue with this-- adult experiences are just as valid as those of a less salacious nature. But, as you well know, adult entries tend to be quite popular, and to a newcomer to the site, they might seem to dominate most of the 'popular' lists that we maintain on our Stories main page-- and thus send the wrong message about the site as to the scope of experiences represented. We talk about everything at the Experience Project-- all the experiences that make us who we are, and want to project that image consistently so people quickly understand the opportunity participating in our community presents.

As such, we added a filtering option today on the experiences page that allows one to selectively display or hide entries that the community have marked as containing adult content. We hope that this option is yet another step in the direction of making the site both more usable, responsive to the needs of our rapidly growing member base, and exposing the sheer range of experiences that would be valuable to share-- namely all of them that make up our lives!

And yes, for those you noticing the time of this post, working at a startup means weekends and late nights simply do not exist as distinct entities in and of themselves. They are the same as any other time-- in other words, spent making the site better! ;) I have to say it is an indicator of our passion for the success of this project that we find this amusing and not in the least disturbing. lol.

Until next time,
-armen

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