Cowboy Caleb the liberal arts, grown-up stuff & random mischief

Let us Remember Yesterday together!

Shortly after I published my thoughts on editor moderation and digg voting style models, a promising website called Yesterday sprung up out of nowhere and was looking pretty good. Their slogan was “Let us Remember Yesterday together!”

Tomorrow.sg thought they had some spirit and decided to feature them on the main page. Of course later, we weren’t so amused that Yesterday was taking a stance of being an anti-Tomorrow.sg sort of website with low blows such as:

Conventional Singapore Blog Bulletin systems did not allow users to exercise democracy. One such site, http://www.tomorrow.sg/ follows an editorial system, where news and stories have to “wait” for editors to approve of them at their leisure so that the masses can lay their hands on them.

and they go on to say:

Therefore, such bulletin sites can be seen as one big irony, championing for blogs that are a symbol of freedom, while not practising full democracy when it comes to selection of news stories.

You can read the entire post here.

And that was how they launched their site on August 18 2006.

Barely a month later they posted a message of defeat saying:

Dear visitor,
Thank you for dropping by. Because Singaporeans do not value democracy when it comes to selection of stories and blogs, we have shifted our focus to something more specific: Online Blog Shops that had been springing up all over the Singapore Blogosphere recently. Instead of voting for your favourite news and stories, we now allow users to submit links to any blog shop (lets call it Slop) here to let other people know about it. Users can also vote for their favourite and most reliable Slops which will then appear on the front page of our website for all to see.

We hope to share with everyone the largest collection of links to Slops that offers the best value, service and reliability. You play a part in the submission and voting process. Do it now!

Happy Slopping!

The reason I am writing this is not to gloat, taunt or make fun of Yesterday. I had hoped that they would succeed. What are the lessons learnt from the very quick demise of Yesterday?

1. Be humble
2. Acknowledge those who were here first, they may yet have things to teach you
3. Don’t give up too quickly, persevere and keep on trying

I think it still holds true that Singapore isn’t ready for a digg style site. The interest and spirit is definitely there. But the participation of masses is completely missing to make it work the way democracy works. So in that sense it’s like communism - it only works in an ideal world, but we don’t live in an ideal world.

The slogan is wrong btw.

Anyway, yes I do admit that the idea for the original Yesterday was pretty half-baked and I carried it out half heartedly, but I think this new idea may just work.

Thanks for dropping by!

I went to the site thinking that there might be something interesting, and could be something satorical about the name “yesterday” since it was in obvious reference to “tomorrow” which was a dig at the paper based daily “today”.

But a shopping site??!

Are you kidding me?

erm, if you haven’t read their announcement or this blog post properly, they shifted focus to Blog Shops.

Like you, I think it was a good initiative. That aside, I thought it was presumptious to say that “Singaporeans do not value democracy when it comes to selection of stories and blogs…”. Hmm, have to be careful in phrasing… they can’t possibly speak for all Singaporeans. Most likely the real reason was “we have no time”. Maybe if they gave it more time, it might have worked. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Because Singaporeans do not value democracy when it comes to selection of stories and blogs?

I love it when people who fails became sour like this. But where else can you go if you say things like “bulletin sites can be seen as one big irony, championing for blogs that are a symbol of freedom, while not practising full democracy when it comes to selection of news stories.” without providing a working concept first.

Sounds like the life story of our opposition parties here.
Sounds like SDP.

ah, when i saw this, i thought you were referring to yesterday.sg, which is a sort of heritage/nostalgia blog supported by the National heritage board. it’s moderated by a group of volunteer “friends”.