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| Detroitmusic.com Back Online - Making More Sense Than Ever |
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 The DetroitMusic.com message board has been back online since March 3rd, 2006. The site was taken down a couple years ago due to the bad behavior of some of its more unruly members. DMDC was originally created to offer the local music community a convenient place to network, but instead became a magnet for internet trolls and flamers whose offensive and sometimes threatening posts made moderating the chaos more trouble than it was worth. Click "read more" below.
 While things were over-heating on the DMDC message boards, founder Michael Kimsal was already in the emotionally draining process of closing down his primary business, Tap Internet, a web consulting firm he started with his brother in 1999. So the timing coudn't have been worse for the added stress of DMDC members who wanted to sue him.
"I had two people from the DM boards privately threatening to harm/kill one another (via private message) and both were threatening me with lawsuits," Kimsal said in a recent e-mail. "Between the two situations, I'd had enough."
But time heals most wounds and even jaded and cynical Detroit musicians deserve a chance to redeem themselves. After all, DMDC wasn't always a virtual pit of vipers ready to strike at any unsuspecting newbie who had the audacity to post an overly optimistic press release. Sometimes it was a mutually supportive network of music professionals who offered them good advice. Once in a while it even inspired a life-long collaboration.
"Not to sound sappy, but for while it was a great place to meet people. A couple people got married from having met someone on the DM boards," Kimsal wrote. "While I'm not sure we'll be able to rekindle that same spirit, I'd like the opportunity to be there."
Another reason for the sudden resurrection of DMDC is a bit more more practical: making money. Google's AdSense program (as seen on this very website) has made it possible to generate targeted advertising that's easy to install and easy to maintain, making it an attractive way to generate income from high-volume/low-maintenance websites like DMDC was in its prime.
"We used to have dozens or hundreds of posts per day," Kimsal wrote in his personal weblog. "The site had a lot of good (and some bad) content generated by the users, yet I had no way of monetizing that. No one did beyond dealing with crappy banner ads which had run their course at that time. The payback just wasn’t there. With the adsense program (and hopefully with the upcoming yahoo and msn versions) we can get a decent ROI without garish flashing banners. The targeted, primarily text, ads have proven effective."
But will conflict-dependent sociopaths once again try to ruin DMDC's message boards and drive potential consumers away from the site? Possibly, but Kimsal thinks he may have figured out a way to motivate them to do otherwise - by sharing the wealth.
In an attempt to inspire enthusiastic conversations, Kimsal has devised a points system that will allow DCDM's members to cash in on their own Goolgle adsense dollars by earning more rotations on his website (see the details here). In theory, the more conversation members produce, the more "points" they earn, the more often readers will see and click on their Adsense links on his site.
"I was never able to compensate people for contributing, and we used to get a lot of good content - issues debated, news highlights, etc. This may potentially help bring some of that back with the lure of cold hard
cash, " Kimsal added in another e-mail. "I make no pretensions that I have huge traffic or that anyone will retire from this, but am viewing this as an experiment to see how this sort of thing plays itself out."
Kimsal has included some limits to the ad-sharing program to prevent overt gaming of the system. For instance, you can't click on your own ads to score points and the posts are "rate limited" meaning you can only score so many points per post and only so many points per hour. He may include a few more rules if he suspects abuse.
But are online locals evolved enough to see the benefit of such a symbiotic relationship between music website and music scene? Will newbies grow thick enough skin to deflect the heat of an off-hand comment or deliberate attack on their creativity in order to score more points? Will social pressure, moderators and IP banning be enough to prevent abuse by other members? Will celebrity pap and pornography become the favored topics of DMDC threads? And will hackers, spammers, flamers and trolls ever crawl back beneath the rocks from whence they came?
These questions and more will be answered with time and possibly cold hard cash.
- Mitch Phillips
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