Yes and no. He does want a community of people that read BB religiously and occasionally buy stuff or follow affiliate links. What he doesn’t want is the body of thoughts that come with building such a community. He wants to be wildly popular and yet have no critics? And I guess he wants regular readers but wants them to not care about BB? Because a large part of caring about friends, family and communities is sounding the alarm when you see a problem. That he can’t see that is too bad.
It’s not that different from some bands, authors and directors (content creators in general) that build a large fan base and then at some point they and the fan base have a falling out.
The boat was commissioned by Mark & co, designed/built by Jeff, and jason is just the captain that they all hired; probably not knowing that he was an ‘Ahab.’
We’re mostly in agreement, though ‘the community’ is an outgrowth of the Discourse era, and that’s all Jeff has been around for (I mean, maybe he commented before, but I never heard of him before Discourse ). It really wasn’t coherent before Discourse arrived. I think the PTB preferred that, whomever they are.
At the end of the day, I like it here better. And beginning of the day too.
Honestly not sure, but I think he came in around 10 years ago with Confederated Media, not sure what that even was but it floated around a while. Maybe BB was purchased?? The Wolf knows the timeline better than I, I’m an outsider such as yourself, I think oren had something to do with CM.
If Oren is who I think he is (Ken), then he’s been with BB for a very, very long time. He’s a great sysadmin… unfortunately, some of those properties that make him a great sysadmin (namely a great, overarching desire to order things into neat little boxes) conspire to make him a terrible moderator.
Kind of ironic given how deep the GOB club is in the Valley. Piss off the wrong people, burn the wrong bridges, have one unforgivable fuck up and you end up becoming an untouchable.
I’m tired of hearing this one because the reality is that no business is ever handing out free ice cream. There is always a transaction involved. Publishers like BoingBoing actively solicit your attention in order to profit by it, and in exchange they provide their users with an experience that they would reasonably regard as worthwhile. Over time that becomes an investment as the publisher deliberately cultivates an affinity toward its brand. This is especially true of communities like the BBS. Publishers set these up so that people will spend more time on their site, engage with their brand, and identify as part of a “tribe” centered around their private business interests. In exchange users are led to expect a platform where they can engage in open discussions, build and maintain friendships, and so on.
Then comes the day when one of your friends is banned forever and the site owners inform you, in no uncertain terms, that this is their house and they decide who is welcome and that if you don’t like it, you can simply say goodbye to the people you’ve met and forfeit all of the emotional investment that they have theretofore elicited from you. Having made a business decision to attract you to its site, the publisher then explains how hard it is to monetize you and what a burden is it on their time to have to answer complaints about what they’ve so freely offered. When they feel they’re not benefiting by the transaction, they’re a business with a bottom line, but when you feel that way, they’re a free ice cream stand and you’re an entitled little brat.
Screw that. When you actively seek people’s time, attention and especially the heavy emotional investment that comes from involvement in an online community, they have a right to expect you to deliver an experience which respects that. If you can’t make money and your users are unhappy, then that reflects upon you as a publisher. Your job is to find a way to make it work. You are a business that operates for profit and your users owe you nothing.
BB is the third time I’ve seen this play out and the crux of it is that it’s unwise to form a community around a business because their interests are different from yours, and their interests will always come first.
I guess it was just the maybe 5th time I’d heard the warning over many many years. I did have to look away this time though. It really is a bad plan to invest in something you’re not a shareholder in. I totally agree with you there. I’m not invested there really. I could invest here, assuming we come up with a proper manifesto (have I mentioned manifestos are important and cool, as I see them).
i agree with everything you said, was trying to find a way to say similar.
the one perspective i would add is that those at the other place believe the steps they have taken are steps towards making it work. for them at least.
and that’s where some of that hurt seems to come from. that there’s not a whole lot of recognition from their side that a community has grown up as they intended. and that summarily changing the rules without involving that community is an abrogation of their side of the deal.
it’s similar to when a company just ups and moves its factory. it’s legal, it may be financially wise, but it’s not exactly just.
[ edit: that analogy has its problems. ceos who put a brief uptick in share price above people’s lives are doing actual evil. its an entirely different kettle of fish. even if they are both technically kettles. ]
Working in engineering, this is the fundamental issue that I run into ALL THE FUCKING TIME. So, I understand what is going on with Jeff, and while I absolutely, totally adore Discourse, the wall I hit with BoingBoing was that engineering/software dev mindset that all problems can be solved with tech.
They have some brilliant frickin’ tech, and there is a lot of heart there, but still there are issues that need solving by human beings. Hey, let’s have the mods do a little video to teach people the rules of the road here. Let’s have a big group webinar and make this more social. Let’s start up conversations about what we want the space to be like that don’t revolve around bells and whistle and reward systems but how do we create warmth and community.
What drove me bonkers was they had all these people out there traveling the country promoting their books and blogs and such and it would have been SO EASY to create community events around those things, and it would have helped them sell their stuff, too.
Such a huge missed opportunity; imagine if the community actually went to events where Mark/Cory/jason are speaking because they like supporting BBS and feel that it supports them back.
I couldn’t get why were supposed to by crap from Amazon and not their stuff to support them. And the stuff they promoted was total crap. It was not in line with their brand at all. The one thing that I felt they did that was in line with their brand was the Christmas wish list. I thought if they had promoted things like that more, it would have made more sense.
I’m more fond of Jeff than I am of some of the others over there. He’s generally a cluey and decent dude, but he has one glaring blind spot. And, even in that blind spot, I think he’s clueless rather than malicious.
OTOH, I don’t have the appropriate chromosomes to be the subject of that blind spot, so I’m not in the best position to judge.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m glad for his presence on the BBS and he seems to understand that something has gone terribly wrong there, but I don’t think he fully comprehends how a technically oriented mindset has exacerbated the situation.
Well, let me describe the evolution of my own mindset on the place. I first came to boingboing.net when a co-worker forwarded links to me of articles he knew I’d find interesting. This would probably be around eight or nine years ago, and at the time I wasn’t aware of any “community” as such. (I don’t even know what form, if any, comments on the blog took at that time.) I just read the nifty articles and saw a few ads and figured that was the whole of the experience. I didn’t expect anything at all. There was just stuff to read, and ads to support it. Things began to change once I found a way to comment on articles, and found the courage to do so. Eventually, the comments turned into another feature of the experience for me, another way of killing idle time at work, and as I started becoming familiar with the usernames of regulars, I started making friends. Neat! However:
I can’t say I ever felt that BoingBoing ever really solicited my attention. It was always just there, whether I read it or not. The articles were meant to be interesting, of course, but weren’t written for me. I always got the impression that Mark and Cory and Rob and Xeni and Maggie would essentially be writing and posting the same shit whether they had an audience of twelve million, or an audience of twelve; it really did seem like a labor of love. Sure, by then it was long since monetized and profitable, but it never felt profit-driven.
I do think that this mindset was what led to the enabling of comments on the blog in the first place, but I don’t think that this happy optimistic mindset survived for too long. I remember when Mark and Xeni and Cory used to engage with the commenters all the time. They don’t really do that anymore, you noticed? For some reason, the 2-way exchange of information just isn’t all that valuable to them anymore. Rob still comes out to play, and Jason seems to want to be in on the 2-way back and forth (but only on his terms), but that’s about it. Jason has mentioned that the BBS is a drag, that most commenters constitute a tiny percentage of all BoingBoing viewers as a whole, that the blog is a soapbox for the “Authors” and the BBS is nothing more than a place to discuss the Authors’ posts.
Sure, we were “led to expect a platform where [we] can engage in open discussions, build and maintain friendships, and so on.” But that was, apparently, our mistake. Such was not the intended purpose of the BBS. They permitted this little infestation of boisterous, engaged commenters and encouraged it to grow into a community while it was still fun for them. But now that we’ve made friends and set up small subcommunities and played some games and put down roots, and started to tend the gardens…
Well, hell. Nobody ever told us to do that. They turned a vacant lot into a tasteful, well-furnished garden with seats and shade and conversation pits, along with flyers and temporary art installations and performances… and sometimes we felt encouraged to put on little shows and games of our own in this garden. Plus, we were actively encouraged to weed the flowerbeds and salt the slugs!
But then we put down roots. We moved in. We’d get smart-alecky with the landlords. We’d loudly mock the wares at the concession stand. We’d put our feet up on the upholstery like we owned it, we’d publicly deride the tastes and ethics and talents and judgment of the landlords, we’d sigh about how far the joint’s standards have fallen… and when one of our buddies poked too hard on the wrong day and got kicked out a bit too hard, we rose up and demanded satisfaction.
Like we owned the place.
Yeah, like that. Nobody told us to put down roots on the BBS. Nobody told us it was a place to make friends and build a community. We just went ahead and did it organically, which is one reason why it flourished like it did. But it turns out we were borderline trespassing by doing so.
What I came to realize is that we, the BBS commentariat (former and current) are an audience. We tune in, they show us what they got, our time is more-or-less pleasantly wasted, and that is meant to be the sum total of our relationship to the site. Once upon a time, they had The Submitterator, whereby users could contribute content to the blog, for which they’d generally tender thanks. That went away. If they still mine the BBS for ideas or links, they sure as hell don’t acknowledge it anymore.
No, if there was a time when they sought any emotional investment from their audience, those days are long past. They’re a blog, and we’re eyeballs. I think they only keep the BBS around out of habit, or maybe because Rob still feels some obligation to the community that grew in it. Nobody else there gives Shit One about the BBS, and the Publisher would cut it loose in a heartbeat if he could convince everyone else to let him. Our “right,” as you put it, to expect anything more from them, if it exists at all, is wholly unenforceable. Which is why we’re here and not there.
Jason has made it plain that the BBS does not contribute significantly to their bottom line. He’s told me that it’s a wash at best. I don’t know how much they paid Falcor, but it obviously wasn’t enough.
