A somewhat unbiased review of Drivetribe

"Akio Ohtori - RIP Oppo" (akioohtori) 11/13/2020 at 14:28 • Filed to: None

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As we deploy our life rafts and get ready to depart the sinking ship that is Gizmodo Media, I figured I should do a rundown of my experiences with one of the intended islands: DriveTribe (DT). I haven’t given the other major contender , Opposite-lock.com (the Hyphen) a fair shakedown yet, but hope to soon.

Background

I sort of threw in my chips early on DriveTribe. There was a lot to like and the Hyphen was just starting to get spun up. (It has come very far in a very short time!) The things I liked about DriveTribe is the established platform, the chat features, being part of a larger community, and the the CEO seemed desperate for our love. But like... in a good way... I think.

I translated my first three Oppo posts, “That Time We Did Top Gear,” to the platform as a test. Admittedly it wasn’t a great test as these are very “clickable” articles, but all well.

Anyway, lets get stuck in.

Homepage

A major downside of DT is that Oppo isn’t the main event by a long shot. As a result, it can sometimes be hard to get to the Oppo tribe. I “fixed” this by registering the domain “ !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! ” and had it forward to the Oppo DT.

Other than that, the main page is no worse than any given Kinja operation. You have the option to look at “hot” posts, or view them chronologically. Posts get a lead photo and caption, somet hing I’ve long missed from Kinja. You can also see likes (hey! no more “saves”!) and comments before clicking through.

On the sidebar you also get a summary of who is on and some other info you don’t really need.

Up at the top you have your notifications, which let you know when something you wrote has activity or if someone you followed wrote something. Neat, but might slow down who I actually follow. Clicking a notification sometimes brings you to that activity, sometimes causes the website to die. I don’t have a strong idea as to why this is, but hey it wouldn’t feel like home without broken features.

Direct messages are accessed from a different menu and I gotta say, I’m happy to have that feature. Makes talking to fellow Oppos for straightforward.

Otherwise, there is a lot of needless clutter and OMG Ads, but otherwise it is pretty OK.

Editor

The post editor will probably make or break DT for you. There are two ways to post. You can make a “quick post” via the main page. This allows you to post either a photo or video with a 500 word caption.

Long form stuff is handled via the Studio, which allows you to create posts and view traffic on your existing posts. Overall I like the data, but it doesn’t really make good use of the space given. Also there is no way to actually read your existing posts from there, which is odd.

When starting a new post, you’re presented with a bunch of options, most of which are mildly useless.

The two I see ever using are Article and Story. Article is the way to make “normal” post with photos, text, and other stuff. “Story” is, as best as I can tell, a robust slideshow. Which is fine.

The others seem self explanatory and I guess I like that those options are baked in, rather than relying on 3rd party services.

Article

The only editor I’ve spent any time with is the Article editor. After clicking on it, you’re presented with a pre-formatted article. Which is to say your required to put in a “hero photo” (lead photo), a headline, and a description.

From there, you can do pretty much whatever. Every new line gives you the option to type, insert a subheader, insert an image or video, or a host of other features. Only one per line, so while it is fairly intuitive, it is also fairly limited. All photos inserted are automatically landscape and cannot be shoved to one side as you could in Kinja.

Overall the editor works well enough. In my use, the image upload was easily overloaded and I never got the video or photo gallery to work. Additionally, the editor does not autosave, so be prepared to lose something someday.

Another thing that will annoy you, is at this time there is no text formatting. You get one level of subheading and plain text. That is it. I’m fine with it, but I know it is a pain point for some.

Lastly, there is no way to “tag” a post, which is my largest complaint and probably the one I’ll bring to the devs first. When doing a build or talking about a car, I would always tag it in Kinja so when I need to look back at it I can just go to “/tag/project-dumpster-fire”. Simple, easy, and effective. Lacking that is going to make going back to old content difficult.

Good news is while you can’t paste an image into the editor, there is no mandatory photo crediting. You take the good with the bad.

Despite its faults, I found the editor fine to work with.

No deal breakers here.

Reading

Reading an article is also pretty straightforward, as you’d expect.

You can also heart (like) a post and comment. Reading through the comments is... medium. Not as bad as Kinja, but between comment shortening (READ MORE!) and thread collapsing, getting the whole story can be a chore.

Still not as bad as Kinja.

Lastly, you can use DriveTribe bucks (DriveCoin? TribeCoin! ) to give people “Awards”. These are badges that sit on the article and are used to reward good content. Or, that is what they say. They’re actually a revenue source for DT, but hey... gotta pay the bills someho w.

Awards start at 1 coin for the basic emotes and go up from there. If you want to give someone the “HEY BIM!” award, that’ll set you b ack 50 coins. Coins cost about $0.02 each and can be purchased outright or 100/month are included in a DT support plan. More on that later.

[Fun fact! While trying to insert a picture here I got the dreaded Kinja “Image Upload Failed” which causes the post to be un-savable. I will not miss that. ]

Chat

It is a chat client and it works. Not much to say here. I think I like the idea anyway.

DMs

Direct messages appear to be possible from any account to any account. Additionally someone mentioned in the chat you can add more than one person to a DM, making it more like a private chat.

Downside of DMs, other than concerns about death threats and unsolicited nudes, is they are also used to inform you that someone gave you an Award. This really clutters up the inbox. Furhter, since the message is automated, it is unclear to me if I’m supposed to respond.

Overall I think having DMs is a net positive, as it’ll make coordinating meet ups easier.

Support Plans = No Ads (but it’ll cost you)

If you can’t stand the ads or need some of that sweet, sweet Tr ibeCoin, you can pay to have no ads. This costs $4/month or $40/year and comes with 100 coins per month.

Honestly? If we end up having a high Oppo presence on DT I’ll probably go for this.

Exposure

Lastly but certainly not least, lets talk page views.

There are more on DT, but they are somewhat random. There are two main ways to metric views: impressions and bumps. Impressions are just views with a fancy name. I have no idea what bumps are, TBH, but I got some.

The variability comes into play when you look at shares (maybe those are bumps?). My articles all got a fair amount of promotion and sharing, and as a result got a lot of views.

These same articles have been on Kinja for almost 4 years and are constantly referenced in my content. They have 600, 400. and 300 views respectively.

After less than a week on DriveTribe they have 4.9k, 12.2k, and 2.6k respectively .

That... is hard to ignore.

Some of my better work has less than 200 lifetime views. There have been a few times I’ve worked really hard on an Oppo post only to get fewer than 100 views and no comments. Other times I’ve been putting effort into something and thought: But why?

That is sad, because I love Oppo for sure. It can just be... frustrating

Furthermore, DT has a content creator plan you can apply for, which gives you beer money for views. Nothing crazy, but seems like a good thing? Downside is you might get shared to the front page and honestly that is terrifying to me.

!!! UNKNOWN HEADER TYPE (MULTI-LINE BREAK?) !!!

As with any potential platform we choose as a replacement, “will I come here and it will be all gone” is a valid concern.

DriveTribe is well established, but not very popular as far as I am aware. Honestly I forgot about it shortly after its creation and was surprised to see it is still going. Given James May’s last post was 20+ weeks ago, my confidence in the platform isn’t stellar.

That said, traffic volumes are good, so maybe they’re getting enough ad bucks to keep the lights on!

Feelings

Does DT feel like “home”? Yes, and no. The feed is clean, easy to read, and full of other Oppos content. That is good. The ads are plentiful and getting comments from randos took some getting used to.

I will admit, hands down, that The Hyphen feels more like Oppo, but I think DT will make a great home too. Speaking of...

The Hyphen

I have an account and will absolutely be posting there. In fact, I’ll likely post this article there as its first shakedown.

I say this every time it comes up, but I really do appreciate the effort people are putting in here and will absolutely support it as a sustainable effort to get away from corporate overlords.

Conclusion

tldr? I like DT and plan on continuing to post there.

I will also post at “The Hyphen” too.

We’re going to be OK.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > Akio Ohtori - RIP Oppo 11/13/2020 at 14:35

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One thing of note is that for all that there are a lot of bugs, DT staff have absolutely been bending over backward to welcome Oppos, and are very receptive to ideas of new features and tweaks.

Just for that, I’d call them worth a reserve hold of Oppo positions.

Thomas Donohue > Akio Ohtori - RIP Oppo 11/13/2020 at 14:37

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My only experience with DT was the first few weeks it opened.

Honest question based on limited 4 year old info : Isn’t it tied to The Grand Tour? And isn’t that show on shaky ground at Amazon?

jminer > Akio Ohtori - RIP Oppo 11/13/2020 at 14:38

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This is an excellent take and write-up. Thank you!  I feel the same as you, we’ll continue to be engaged in both communities.  DriveTribe also reached out and was pretty impressed with the efforts of us making our own home which was awesome of them!

The Hyphen does definitely have some quirks but RallyDarkStrike also put together a pretty solid getting started page for folks too. It’s a wee bit out of date as I’m still constantly changing shit, but that’s my fault.

I will also note on the Hyphen view counts show lower than they are right now as it only increments the thread when a registered user looks at it, and only once.  Better stats is on the list, but it’s a bit down from the top.

ttyymmnn > Akio Ohtori - RIP Oppo 11/13/2020 at 14:38

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The lack of text formatting made DT pretty much a non-starter for me, especially since I do so many long-form posts. However, I would love to get my material there for the very reason you mention: eyes on the page. I had one article shared to Jalopnik and it garnered more than 27k views. Not expecting anything like that, but more would definitely be better.

At the end of the day, rather than dumping and formatting my archived material on DT or Hyphen, I plan to make my own site and then drop links on both. I need to come up with a way to jazz it up with pics or short descriptions to get people to click, but I think it will work.

Going forward, I plan to hang out at Hyphen, but post big articles to both. I think DT is a much better platform for big things, while Hyphen is a fantastic platform for shorter things and shitposts.

Thanks for this awesome write up. Have you posted to Hyphen so it’s available when they pull the plug here?

AestheticsInMotion > Akio Ohtori - RIP Oppo 11/13/2020 at 14:39

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Their mobile platform leaves a lot to be desired, whether on web or app. I do love the chat feature though. 

Jb boin > Akio Ohtori - RIP Oppo 11/13/2020 at 14:54

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The main dev just posted on the Oppo tribe chat that he did add in beta the copy/pa ste of images on “Quick Post” which seems to work (on pasting an image, not a link to an image).

So it might be added soon to  the Live Studio.

Just Jeepin' > Akio Ohtori - RIP Oppo 11/13/2020 at 14:55

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One extreme pain point with Studio this doesn’t address: adding photos (unless you’re willing to do a gallery for all of them) is very, very tedious.

Three clicks just to get to the point where you can add a photo, and then you can only add one. Maddening.

Just Jeepin' > Akio Ohtori - RIP Oppo 11/13/2020 at 15:00

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Also, tagging is possible with DT. Just add a hashtag string to your text.

I much prefer the Kinja approach; DT would look like a very clunky In stagram if everyone started leveraging tags.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > jminer 11/13/2020 at 15:02

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I have yet to even be on the hyphen, because it’s on my work boyz’ “newly registered website” block. Should clear up soon, though.

TheRealBicycleBuck > Akio Ohtori - RIP Oppo 11/13/2020 at 15:07

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That was a very thorough and thoughtful review. My first impression was of being overwhelmed. As you noted, it’s somewhat difficult to find your way to your “tribe” without a dedicated link. I’m over that now that it’s been bookmarked, but having to receive an email to log in the first few times was off- putting.

I’ve realized I’m not much of a “content” creator, so I suspect most of my time will be spent on the hyphen. I’m trying to convince jminer to develop the “hook” so we can write on the hyphen and with a single button, post it over to DT. Until then, I guess it’s a copy/paste affair.

Chariotoflove > Akio Ohtori - RIP Oppo 11/13/2020 at 15:10

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I liked when I saw video uploading as an option, but then you said it didn’t work? Is that correct?

I too like personal messaging because it allows us to link up IRL much more easily.

jminer > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 11/13/2020 at 15:24

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Yeah I only bought the domain last Friday night so it should hopefully be a little easier for folks to access soon. You’re not the first to have this probl em

RallyWrench > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 11/13/2020 at 15:41

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The Maudi Quancho and Random Ass Old Car Countryside Barn Trailer Hunt program goals will both be making the jump, and will require your presence .

sony1492 > Akio Ohtori - RIP Oppo 11/13/2020 at 15:45

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From a mobile perspective it lacks any way to do much beyond a quick post. Its a: only if I have to sort of thing.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > RallyWrench 11/13/2020 at 15:57

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jeepoftheseus > Akio Ohtori - RIP Oppo 11/13/2020 at 17:42

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If the CEO wants you and your work but pay is optional, does the CEO really want you?

Urambo Tauro > Akio Ohtori - RIP Oppo 11/13/2020 at 18:43

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The post editor will probably make or break DT for you .

[n ods in agreement ] Yeah... I’m afraid so. I had high hopes for DT, but the editor is just too weak for the kind of posts I want to make. It has a bunch of flashy icons that make it seem well- rounded, but it’s arsenal of features is rather disappointing .

I’ll try to keep an eye on both for a while, but it looks like I’ll end up publish ing posts on the “ hyphen”, and maybe linking to them from DT.

Akio Ohtori - RIP Oppo > Just Jeepin' 11/13/2020 at 20:48

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I agree it is a little silly, but I haven’t minded it so far . Also I like that you can add an image placeholder.

Taylor Martin > Akio Ohtori - RIP Oppo 11/14/2020 at 06:58

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Those bumps you get are the little awards, at least I believe that’s the case. Regardless, I agree with nearly everything you said. The interface is swell, your articles and writings can get spread around easily, it’s a clean interface, all well and good.

One of my only issues that you didn’t message is the FP of Oppo though. I like being able to see a lot of posts in one screen, but each article or post people write takes up the entire screen. Super tiny thing, but idk, it just feels a bit jarring.

Also, DT doesn’t seem like the place for shitposting/little writeups. That’s the place for when you do real work, actual writings, like the time you did Top Gear.