IDK, is very difficult to be such a tone-deaf first-class a-hole and being AI generated. I stopped reading his articles after he posted an Eulogy (i think it was about Betty White, but could be wrong) that was not only horrible and disrespecting, but also it was the first news I had about this… I think they had to close the BBS thread, and later remove it. And I think they also deleted the article.
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I’m not.
ET is definitely a sock puppet for Mark, IMPO; whether AI generated or not, I do not know…
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As someone who’s evidently not considered an “active, valued, and important member of the BBS community” myself, I say don’t feel bad for us. This whole thing was handled badly.
Same. If I hadn’t joined up back in 2021, I’m not sure I would have been told about it now.
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That was about Shelley Duvall. And yes, it was inappropriate, disgusting, disrespectful, and completely unacceptable, and the vast majority of the BBS let him know about it. I think the story was removed from the front page, but it was never deleted, which it should have been.
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Don’t feel bad about that. You have a right to be here. And I say that as someone who most definitely is not on the list of valued contributors.
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The fact that you were invited here earlier says otherwise.
The Regular Mutants here did not have any input on the 100 or so members who were offered free subscriptions.
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I’m pretty sure that works through gravatar.
I’m just speculating, but I think what they wanted was money, which is why the only metric of sucess that they seem to care about is paid subscribers. Engagement only matters from a financial standpoint if you are receiving payment based on those engagement metrics. They may also be receiving indirect income based on engagement. I certainly don’t know how Substack works. If they’ve met their financial goals through subscriptions alone, then they can be concerned about engagement later. I don’t begrudge them their interest in being financially stable. If we were to apply that to a classic newspaper or magazine model, then again the success metric most important would likely be the number of paid subscriptions (let’s ignore classified ads for the moment) rather than the number of letters they receive in response to articles. That’s not a plan for how you build a community, though, which I think is what is affecting people the most, at least those who had found a community there whether it was intended or not.
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I know. My point was more like… that nothing much has changed. It is going to be probably less dramatic than when I took down my facebook account and I lost contact with all my american friends because they weren’t willing to switch messaging platforms 
I am unable to locate it but I remember that never felt such contempt for a post in the blog. It doesn’t help that the next day he posted a scathing article about how savages are the barcelonians for ruining tourists’ holidays with our water guns 
Could be. Makes more sense than “AI Generated”.
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Oh, please don’t misunderstand my meaning; I’m almost certain that Mark was using ‘AI’ to generate that “content.”
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The day he forgot to take off the ChatGPT header from the first sentence gave that game away.
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Was finally able to log into SuS… I see what y’all mean that that the chat system is a mess. I do see posts by Frauenfelder, so perhaps they intend to interact more over there? or else he’s just trying to prime the pump.
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I guess, but you’d think engagement would bring more people to the site, which a certain percentage of would subscribe. So I would think there would be a correlation between engagement and subscriptions. I’m sure it’s a shitty conversion rate, but still…how else are you getting subscribers?
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This, for sure. He made an appearance in the BBS maybe once a year? I don’t see that changing.
Also, he hasn’t commented on or even liked any of my BBS reminiscences/shitposting in SuSchat. What kind of engagement is that??
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according to the cycle of enshittification, you start making the free tier worse or inexistent until they have no other recourse than to pay or go elsewhere.
And then you cry because they go elsewhere.
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Rude!
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Good point.
I went over there to cancel my free subscription.
They don’t make it easy, but I went ahead and took the dozen or so steps to cancel it. Gone.
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I don’t either. I do really dislike how the transition was announced and how quickly the BBS is being wound down.
The tone of the public announcement was like someone told AI engine to write copy in the form of bad seen-on-tv adverts and advertisements from the 1950s. It didn’t account for or allow room for people to be upset the BBS was being shuttered. We should all just be grateful Substack has comments and nevermind it isn’t structured to allow the type of community we had and there wasn’t time to spin up a replacement.
If it hadn’t been for the generosity of you and the original Elsewheres, we’d all have lost touch.
And maybe the owners of BB just didn’t care about how closing the BBS would upset people. How it was a haven and a comfort during COVID particularly. Orenwolf is catching a lot of undeserved shit for it though.
I get they need to make money, to keep the lights on. I get this is how they decided it would work best. But the handling was botched.
ETA: and also, thank you for listening to all of us bitch about it with such patience!
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We had a surreal sense of humor in common, too. She was a trip.
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Jason sure didn’t. No surprise there
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