Stips (Israeli website)
 | |
| Available in | Hebrew |
|---|---|
| Founded | February 6, 2006 |
| Country of origin | Israel |
| Owner | נדב דפני - אינטרנט ותוכנה בע"מ |
| Founder(s) | Dr. Nadav Dafni, Asaf Artzi |
| CEO | Dr. Nadav Dafni |
| Services | questions and answers |
| Website | stips |
| Registration | Optional to read contents, required to interact |
| Written in | ASP.NET |
Stips[lower-alpha 1] (A portmanteau of "Short tips"[1]) is an Israeli question-and-answer website, primarily intended for youth.[2] Stips allows its users to advise each other and consult anonymously about a large variety of topics, including music, philosophy, animals, technology, sports and studies. Developed by Israeli doctor Nadav Dafni with the help of a number of developers, Stips was founded in February 2006.[3]
Stips is ranked 45th among the most popular websites in Israel by Similarweb,[4] and in the first place among the most popular Israeli websites in the fields of nutrition and fitness.[5][6]
History
The idea for creating a question-and-answer website arose in 2005, when Israeli doctor and software developer Nadav Dafni realized that there was no internet platform where people could easily find help for problems that they needed to solve or that were bothering them.[7] Stips was finally established on February 6, 2006.
In its early years, there were many experts active in Stips, including dietitians, doctors, musicians, dentists, psychologists and even lawyers. It was even possible to consult with them by phone calls.[6] The experts were tagged with "Stips expert" on their user profile.[8] This tag of "Stips expert" (In Hebrew: "מומחה סטיפס") still exists today in a smaller number of veteran users, but they have no special permissions.
Between 2009 and 2016, there was a flash-developed virtual assistant called "Tipi". Her name derives from the word Tip, since she gave tips to users every day. Tipi's purpose was to help the users to navigate in Stips and to find questions that were previously asked on the site. Tipi was removed from Stips in late June 2016 because she was irrelevant and was used for unacceptable exploitation.
In the summer of 2015, around April, the "Spam night" ("ליל הספאמים") occurred. It was a night in which Stips was flooded with spam questions that violated the rules of the site. The loyalists, those who are responsible for enforcing the rules of Stips, were probably mostly asleep. In the morning, the spam questions were deleted and many users who took action in the violations during the night were blocked. By some accounts, up to half of the users were blocked in the "Spam night" occurrence.[9] Today, the site staff forbade mentioning the night throughout the site, even though this rule is not written in the rules file of Stips.
In the past, there was a radio with different channels on Stips that could play songs but it was later removed for unclear reasons. In addition, there used to be an option to choose between asking a question or advisement, but it was changed to questions only. This change has remained in place up to today. Stips also included a database of tips for daily life, but in 2017 it was removed and became a different, independent site called "Discover".[10] Additionally, There were group chats previously on the site, but it was also removed because it was being used for pornographic content.
Until 2017, Stips was divided into two rooms of questions - Stips for adults ("סטיפס למבוגרים") and Stips for youth ("סטיפס לנוער"). Sometime in 2017 they were merged into a single room in which every registered user can ask his questions, regardless the user's age or the content of their question. It remains like that today.
On April 15, 2018, the official app of Stips was launched for Android users on Google Play.[11] At present, there is no Stips app available for iPhone users in the App Store. However, Stips provides instructions for how to download the app through the Safari browser.[12] It was around April 2018 that Stips changed its interface to a new one developed by Israeli programmer Asaf Artzi. Additionally, new features and a new design were launched.[2]
On the night of October 2, 2022, Stips was shut down for maintenance purposes. Stips changed its servers at the time to faster ones, after many users complained about the bad quality and slow speed of the servers.
Structure of the site
As of March 2023, there are more than 370,000 registered users on Stips, and more than 14,200,000 questions were asked.[lower-alpha 2]
Stips is divided into several rooms of questions in different fields and tags. These rooms of questions include music, TV shows, technology and more. Every question asked on Stips can include up to five tags connected to the question's topic. When clicking on one of the tags, a room with all the questions tagged with the same tag appears.
Every registered user can ask up to 10 questions a day. The question might be asked anonymously, so other users cannot see the asker's profile. Those who answer the question can also choose to be anonymous. The user who ask a question can grant up to five "flowers" to five different answers. A flower is a way for the asker of thanking those who answered a helpful answer to the question asked.[13] It is forbidden to ask for a flower in an answer.[13] Every user with at least 500 flowers is granted with the tag of "senior answerer" (In Hebrew: עונה בכיר), which can be seen in the user's profile. The tag of a senior answerer gives the user no special permissions.[14] Each answer to a question can be graded (by users) with a minus or plus which offset each other for a numerical result. Today, the minuses and pluses are perceived by the users as dislikes and likes, respectively. However, they were probably intended to mark wrong answers.[15]
Stips is monitored by some 100 users who are known by their title "Loyalists".[lower-alpha 3] The loyalists are volunteers responsible for maintaining order and enforcing the rules of Stips around the site.[14] It is possible to know that a user is a loyalist by clicking on their user profile, where a tag of "Stips Loyalist" (In Hebrew: נאמן/ת סטיפס) will appear in the top of the screen, below the user's profile picture. The loyalists have been given special permissions by which they enforce the rules of Stips. They can delete questions, answers, and other user-generated contents in the site as long as they violate the rules. They can also ban users based on the severity of their offense for 24 hours. Out of the 100 loyalists (moderators), 8 of them are senior loyalists (in Hebrew: נאמן בכיר) who have higher permissions from the regular ones. The senior loyalists have a direct connection with the site staff, they can restore content deleted by regular loyalists and they can block users permanently. The senior loyalists were intended to oversee the activity of the loyalists and to criticize them accordingly.[14]
Every user on Stips has its own reliability index (In Hebrew: מדד אמינות). The reliability index indicates the reliability of the user and their actions in the site. The points consisting the reliability index are called reliability points (In Hebrew: נקודות אמינות), and they move between 0 point to 100, depends on the user's offenses on Stips. Every day, two or three (depends on the current number of reliability points), every user gains one more reliability point, as long as they did not commit any offenses on the same day/two/three. When a loyalist deletes content, including questions and answers, they can choose to reduce the reliability index of the user whose content was removed by 1 to 5 points, or even 10 points in specific cases, depends on the severity of the offense.[16] If a user's reliability index falls below 50 points, they lose the ability to edit their questions and answers. If a user's reliability index falls below 30 points but exceeds 20, they will be blocked until their reliability index reaches 30 again. In this case, the user will gain one point per day. If a user's reliability index will be reduced to 19 and below, they will be permanently blocked from Stips.[16] The higher the reliability score, the more reliable the user is. New users start with 50 reliability points.
Every user has the option to pin questions they find interesting. Pinning a question will expose the same question to a wider number of users.[17] The pin is located in the top left of every question and is marked in grey. After a question has been pinned, the pin will turn green.[17] When a user pins a questions, the question will be kept in their "pinned questions", and so can be visited again. The five questions with the highest number of pins from the last 2–3 hours will appear in the homepage of Stips which is seen every time someone enters the site, and thus will expose the question to a big number of users. The five popular questions on the homepage of the site are called "the hot questions" (in Hebrew: השאלות החמות).[17] A question that was in the hot questions can never be there again. The pin, bright green in color, is the symbol of Stips and in the past was part of the logo of the site.[17]
The "pen-friends" (in Hebrew: חברים לעט) is a room on Stips in which every user aged 13–21 with five flowers or more can send a message that will appear to other users who are also the room.[18] A message can be sent every 7 minutes,[lower-alpha 4] and after sending a message, the previous one will be automatically removed. The advantage of the pan-friends is that it allows to communicate with people the users do not know personally, so they can talk privately, freely and anonymously.[18] Clicking on someone's message will take the user to a private chat with the one who sent the message. Every user can send what message they want as long as it does not violate the rules of Stips.
Criticism
There is a strong criticism against the difficulty in deleting an account, and against the fact that even after deleting an account, the information and activity of the same account in Stips remains in the hands of the site staff.[19] Today, an account cannot be deleted manually by the user. In order to delete an account, one will have to send a request to the site staff, detailing and providing a good reason for why they want the account to be deleted.[20] The site staff will consider the request and will make the decision whether to delete the account or not.
criticism of loyalists (נאמנים)
In addition to the criticism against the site staff, there is a widespread hatred and harsh criticism against the "loyalists", those who delete the violating questions and answers according to the rules of Stips. Many users complain about corruption on the part of the loyalists, who allegedly use their power to their own advantage.
Notes
- ↑ In Hebrew, the original language of the website: סטיפס
- ↑ The number of a question can be determined by the number in the URL link. The same applies to a user's account.
- ↑ In Hebrew "נאמני סטיפס".
- ↑ Even though the Stips rules file states that a message can be sent every 8 minutes, this is incorrect.
References
- ↑ "Stips BETA". Archive.com. Archived from the original on 2006-02-21. Retrieved 2023-06-03.CS1 maint: Unfit url (link)
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 "סטיפס - Stips - applications in-Google Play". play.google.com.
- ↑ "חוקי סטיפס - אודות". stips.co.il. p. 4.
- ↑ "stips.co.il Traffic Analytics & Market Share". Similarweb.com.
- ↑ "Most Visited Websites - Top Websites Ranking for July 2022". Similarweb.com.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 פדידה, עומרי (2009). "האתרים השימושיים הטובים בישראל". Mako.co.il.
- ↑ "ד"ר נדב דפני אני מקווה שזה יגיע אלייך". stips.co.il (in עברית). Retrieved 2023-02-27.
- ↑ יצחייק, אילן. "עלו ברשת: סופריצה, סופריצה". yent.co.il.
- ↑ "מה זה ליל הספאם מתי זה קורה?". stips.co.il (in עברית). Retrieved 2023-02-27.
- ↑ "אודות - דיסקבר". discover.org.il.
- ↑ "חוקי סטיפס - שאלות נפוצות על סטיפס". stips.co.il. p. 6.
- ↑ "סטיפס - Stips.co.il, get-iphone-app". stips.co.il. Retrieved 2023-02-27.
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 "חוקי סטיפס - הפרחים בסטיפס". stips.co.il. p. 12.
- ↑ 14.0 14.1 14.2 "חוקי סטיפס - תפקידים ודרגות בסטיפס". stips.co.il. p. 14.
- ↑ "חוקי סטיפס - חוקים לנאמנים". stips.co.il. p. 15.
- ↑ 16.0 16.1 "חוקי סטיפס - דירוג האמינות בסטיפס". stips.co.il. p. 9.
- ↑ 17.0 17.1 17.2 17.3 "חוקי סטיפס - הנעצים בסטיפס". stips.co.il. p. 13.
- ↑ 18.0 18.1 "חוקי סטיפס - חברים לעט". stips.co.il. p. 10.
- ↑ "האתר הישראלי שאי אפשר לצאת ממנו". mako. 2018-08-01. Retrieved 2023-03-04.
- ↑ "חוקי סטיפס - איך ניתן למחוק את החשבון בסטיפס?". stips.co.il. p. 6.
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