June 12, 2008

Rebuttal on Commenting

James (Not Mud) Wrote:
oh yeah fuckers "nobody left comments so my post wasn't read and nobody liked it" - wasn't my fault that every "slug" was self-depreciative.

And "the board stays on the board" is an archaic thought system. Try hanging out with young 20 year olds sometime, thats all they talk about is INTERNET INTERNET INTERNET.

Hmmm.

Since Facebook is a worthless scrapheap - didn't you say you were trying to convert the board-history to a Word Press system?

Maybe I should just spruce up the ol blogspot board. hmm.


In regards to the commenting system being a factor in killing of the board, it isn't that not gaining comments stopped people from posting. I really don't think that played a factor at all. It was that people have short attention spans (though many of the board members had slightly larger attention spans). Thus, when someone comes on the board, they typically look only at the posts. They may look at the comments if they are board, or more likely if they are the ones that posted. The casual reader won't.

Some of the best/most interesting posts of the past took place prior to the comment system. Granted many posts were also one line "you're an idiot" type posts... but others were back-and-forths that had high-entertainment value. Those kinds of back-and-forths now get buried in a comment system, and the only indication that there was a commentary is a small digit indicator at the bottom of a post in a small font.

An early set of posts between you (James) and Jimmy went back and forth on the subject of winners being the deciders/writers of history and crimes against humanity (started here and ending here, with posts in between.

If you had started that post post-commenting system, the various back and forth would have been lost to the comment system, and the casual reader would have never bothered with it. (There are ways around that with the newer blog type formats, but that's a discussion for another time.)

As for the other stuff... I actually did migrate this over to Word Press... then I realized that by doing so, all of the past posts show up as if they came from me. That's a problem, so until I figure out how to fix that, this will have to stay with blogspot. I thought about starting a new board altogether, but there's a thing in marketing/advertising called "Brand Recognition"... it's why Sony keeps recycling the used Walkman brand, instead of coming up with something new.

And the problem is that people have no outside connections these days... it's all-or-none with the internet... there are mini-movements to change this, such as dedicated social-network sites, (i.e. Flickr) that are geared toward a social network specific to a common goal/idea/activity like photography (again, Flickr) or paintball. I'd go out on a limb and say that our board was a sort-of precursor to that idea, in that it was a "social network" dedicated to hating the idiocy of our contemporary environments and occasionally getting together to wallow in that.

I felt long-winded today.

No comments:

Post a Comment