Gak! The ‘M’ word!
My earballs!!
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The reshaping of BB happened at a fortuitous time.
I’m happy you’re all here. At a time like this we need as many people onboard the sanity ship as possible.
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Oh, sorry. I’ll see myself out.
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ETA: Please don’t go! You help me to cleave closer to sanity
Edited again to add missing “help”
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It may just be a lunatic we’re looking for… [/BillyJoel]
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I visited, then unsubscribed from my free membership. I didn’t know why at the time; it just felt right. Now I know why.
It could be that you are.
Or you’re being advertised: “New BB, with the same high-profile commentariat!” Someone agreed to part with money over the free memberships; they must’ve expected some benefit.
I can’t tell which is more likely; I dropped my subscription.
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That’s my take on this.
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We would have provided free added content. Seeing a bunch of folks already there talking about the articles would have prompted new folks to join in themselves. Being the savvy and skeptical folks we are, I think a lot of us recognized it, and our reaction was fairly predictable.
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Something you wrote a year or more back has always stuck with me:
“We ARE the product”.
I can’t remember the context, or who you were replying to, but that gave me some food for thought.
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I’m fine being the product as long as i’m provided value for me being there, after all a lot of things that we use on a daily basis use us in return. The value for me would’ve been the community but what they served up was… i don’t know even know how to qualify what ever the fuck SuS is. A sterile news feed? Depression? 
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Maybe it’s bait to make it seem more popular to those unfamiliar with BB, since it’s the NKOTB over there.
After a day or two, I stopped because I was curious about how the stats would look after a month. I didn’t want to contribute any clicks to make it seem like they had a lot of visitors. 
Maybe I’ll check out the before and after this weekend, if I have time.
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If you do, please report back. So curious.
Also curious if anyone else has noticed any improvement in the content at BB. I get the daily email of all the stories from the day. I’ve usually been deleting without reading, but the few times I have scrolled through it looked like they have a higher proportion of non-click-bait/rage-bait crap than they did on discourse these last few years.
There is a small hope alive inside that the move will allow them to get back to mostly wonderful things by interesting authors. Even if I’m not part of it.
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I visit somewhat regularly*, and am probably one of their more prolific posters (which isn’t saying much).
Yes, rage bait is definitely down, which is great. As for why they have certain names at the top, it definitely isn’t based on most interaction. Outside of elevating certain profiles to make it look like the prolific posters from the old site are active on SuS, my only guess is that the algorithm is showing who they gave free subscriptions to first.
*my visits have fallen off considerably over the past month, though. I now realize I was at BB mostly for the conversations about the articles and other topics; now that most of the wonderful mutants are here, I have less reason to go anywhere else.
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I was finding even before Cory left, that it was becoming merely a news aggregator, with little original content, or even critical viewpoints; just “Here’s an article on a thing”. So all they seem to do is trawl other sites and post links and a brief summary or quote from the article.
ETA: Reading further down the thread, I see other people have said pretty much the same thing; just a news feed for the last few years.
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I was ok with aggregation because during the day i’m pretty much doing that anyway, i’m jumping around looking at various things to read that catch my attention. The convenience was that i could have constructive conversations about those things as well, though i did miss the discovery of weird delightful things as they came up less frequently.
These days i’ve wholly written off the other place. I can find my own weird interesting things and i can share them here 
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Yeah, an aggregator is fine, and they did pull together some interesting stuff, but I was also interested in the writers’ take on things, and yes, the commentariat was a huge part of the draw. I see mr raccoon is the only one commenting in the chat at this point.
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News aggregator isn’t necessarily a bad thing. When Devon Neally and Garett Branwyn (sp??) were still posting, they surfaced interesting news and sites I would never have found myself, and there other contributors occasionally doing the same. But for a few years now it did seem to devolve into collecting news from MSNBC, NYT, NPR or other mainstream sites, which I’d already seen so nothing new or “wonderful” there.
eta: I owe @Grey_Devil a beverage of his choice!
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I’ll take a chai for this cold weather 
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Is that Indian Chai (spiced milk tea), Russian Chai (black tea), or Central Asian green tea?
I’ve got them all, mon ami!
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I haven’t had the others but i do know i love Indian spiced milk tea
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