A Collective Blog of Commenters

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Personally, I don’t plan to write or read any political posts. No doubt my distaste is at a higher level than usual due to the election year, but I am out of patience with scoldy posts, or “isn’t this outrageous” posts, or posts that seek to explain in microscopic detail how and why you (or your cranky Uncle Howard) are Just So Wrong About ______.

I think we might best serve The Internet At Large by providing it with content it does not already provide in massive overdoses: our wit, our good humor, our creativity, our helpfulness, and above all our modesty. :wink:

I mean, people can get cat videos and screeching polemics anywhere… even on BoingBoing.

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I kind of thought this new blog would be a place for more of a long-form type of “story”. Basically, the type of comments one sees here, but with the ability of the user to create a more read-friendly type of long form message, which would then allow of discussion/debate via the comments.

Of course, there would be a few mindless, fun things thrown in now and then.

I would also be nice to get a bit of point-counter point going, but via the blog entry system, rather than reacting via the comments. One of the things I like about the commenters here is that many of them can reply with a different opinion/thought on something someone else posted, but in an intellectual and yet respectful manner. I think people would be interested to see this. We certainly do it better here than the mainstream news outlets that just feel they need to show any opposing viewpoint in order to be “fair and balanced”.

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Editorial review process aside, it seems to me that there have to be submission guidelines - the format, voice, and subject matter standards that we all agree are necessary to ensure consistency and quality. These wouldn’t have to be strict, of course, and could be deviated from on occasion once a contributor has developed a reputation.

The format I would propose wold be that submissions be topical - that is to say, related to a specific news item. This could be a political story, a product release, a scientific finding, a significant event, etc. This would be the first 'graph - an “educate the reader” moment to catch people up. Call it the “This happened” section.

The second portion that would define the submission would be the commentary - the reaction of the author that adds insight and color. The comment they would post if they saw this story somewhere else, and had the opportunity to comment first. Call this the “And then I was all like…” section.

Format should also include a link and pic requirement. If it can’t be citied and seen, it shouldn’t be posted.

Voice, I think, should be positive, respectful, and civil. But not to be point where criticism isn’t permitted. Civil criticism. As for proscriptions I would say there should few, but that sexist, racist, victim blaming, etc posts should not be allowed. Same guidelines as BB comments section. No personal vendettas, no Gawker-style hit pieces.

Subject matter should be open, but categorized. If it doesn’t fit in a major topic header, we have our own “dizzy” and “wrath” sections for completely off-topic commentary, with the preference being we keep it to a minimum. At least at first.

Back to the editorial review, I think that there should be two classes of contributors; those who have no editorial review process and can post what they like, and others who must show they can meet quality and consistency standards before earning that privilege. It should be possible to move both directions; by approval of the other editors, someone should be able to move up, and someone who fails to post content to the standard should be moved back. Maybe we all start on that first level to get us all working together before granting anyone level 2 privileges.

I’m hoping at there will be at least one pedant in the group who can provide the occasional nudge to those who might be a little sloppy. I imagine a system where people mostly clean up their own writing, but that everyone will, wiki-style, be able to edit each other’s articles for spelling and grammatical errors.

@thekaz; I think longer form “story” is good, provided its introduced in a concise manner. The reader should get something from it in the first paragraph and be able to move on. As others have said, ramblings and polemics should be avoided.

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Ditto, but you can count me in as a reader, peanut gallery member. Thoughtful, friendly snark served fresh daily.

Perhaps there could be a Penelope Pricklepants photo section? I love seeing @nemomen’s nature photographs, they’re amazingly talented to my admittedly inexpert eye. Just floating that, no pressure.

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Since we’re running up against our first deadline, despite my feeling like I’m making the bulk of proposals, I’m going to go ahead an define Content Strategy Lead and Editor Lead. As always my word is far from law if people want to offer another vision.

Editor Lead is what it sounds like. They lead the committee on day-to-day format, posting guidelines, style guides, shaping the process of editing and submission.

What my idea of a Content Strategy Lead looks like is someone who manages or runs the committee that looks at analytics. Where’s our traffic coming from? What kind of posts are driving it? Are there a lot of incoming links from Twitter? Are most from Facebook? Should we encourage more posting about certain issues? Is there someone with a specific skillset in our ranks who could be posting more on a hot issue right now? These are the kinds of questions I expect from a content-strategy team. Solid recommendations based on available information. It’s good to separate this from editorial because I think that otherwise we might end up posting nothing but cat videos, since they probably would drive traffic. Obviously, that’s an exaggeration, but editorial should have its head somewhat in the clouds and content-strategy should have its feet on the ground.

I okay with those proscriptions, but we were never the ones defining them, it’s a responsibility we’ve technically never had. There are always going to be contentious edge cases and it’s those edge cases that lead to articles like, “Even If All Men Learn Not To Rape: Women Should Learn Self-Defense.” I could see that going down a number of ways, and I don’t think there would be universal agreement about whether it fell under the banner of sexist. Meanwhile, it looks like it’s mostly guys involved in this project so far. Or what if the only person who thinks a post is racist is also the only person who’s a member of that race? I don’t want to create a situation where everyone is inclined to have the same blindspots and we sally forth embarrassingly claiming that we’re adhering to the noblest of guidelines. That being said, very few enterprises get off the ground without trust and some level of risk, so I’m not saying that there’s no way this is going to work and that we can’t be trusted to make good editorial decisions (it is, after all, the premise here that we’re editorially worthy). But part of the reason we’re going to make good editorial decisions is because we’re inclined to think about these things, so we should continue thinking about them.

This may be overly stringent. Opinions aren’t really citeable, and abstract notions are hard to picture. I’m more okay with the picture requirement, because you can always go with some form of clipart for an abstract concept and even just one picture in a post can help drive traffic and create a style. But if I’m writing up how I discovered this awesome way to make hot sauce at home with peppers, rubber bands, and a garden hose- there may well be pictures, but citations are very much not needed.

I realize that there’s a perceived need to avoid what are seen as the sins of our forebears, but I feel obligated to defend some of them as necessary evils, or at least inevitable ones. Professional journalists have professional fact checkers. They will check the most mundane details. I did a very brief profile interview once about people who made t-shirts for CafePress, and they fact checked the next day to ensure that the details were accurate. Even with this mechanism in place, mainstream journalistic organizations still report inaccuracies. We don’t have the budget, and possibly the time, to hold ourselves to that kind of a standard. It would be nice if we could, but we can’t. We can come up with measures, guidelines, and precautions to help keep the process as “pure” as possible, but we’re going to fuck it up. Almost immediately, too. My point here being that we cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I don’t want posting to become an arduous bureaucratic process to point where we’re engaged in paralysis by analysis, so to speak.

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This is not entirely a response to what you just posted (much of which I agree with BTW) but I wanted to identify three different types of content that you referenced, and think about them in the context of our format/voice/editorial checks;

This headline suggests that it’s a pure opinion piece - even without the potentially polarizing subject, it runs the risk of polemic. For something like this to be on the site, I’d say it would have to be cited to something topical - some news item related to self defense, not just a screed about women taking measures to prevent attacks based on some news of a rape. And if it is a story about self-defense and rape, again I’d say the headline should be formatted as a “TLDR: this happened, and I’m like WTF” and then the first paragraph would be details, the second graph opionion, which may very well be that women should learn self-defense.

This seems like “original reporting” which, because it’s fact-based and not pure opinion, suggests less scrutiny is needed. Citation is the reporting itself. First 'graph is “I interviewed these people” and second 'graph is “And I was like WTF!”

This is not quite opinion, not quite fact-based reporting, but more of the maker/hacker type, which I think is legitimate and fun to put on the site, but should be in its own category. Headline would be “I made awesome hot sauce with a garden hose, WTF!” and no additional citation is needed.

I guess what I’m aiming at here is that maybe our format include several different types of postings that are allowed, with guidelines for each; blog/reaction, story, original reporting, make/hack… and more. I’m very fearful of the rant/diatribe/polemic though, which is why I’m encouraging some sort of fact-based standard rather than pure opinion. For that kind of piece, we can set up another site called myassportal.com.

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I understand the problem with polarizing subjects and the (great) potential for discussion easily straying from intellectual debate to name-calling, but this is part of what I like about the discussion on the message boards here.

I guess, to me, what you describe above sounds like boingboing jr.

Is there a way to discuss polarizing issues intelligently without it becoming rank/diatribe/polemic…?

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It sounds like we need someone with a solid grasp of reality, who has a good idea what a blog like this requires, and can make the right choices when no one else wants to.

I nominate @ActionAbe :stuck_out_tongue:

I don’t think we should limit ourselves to topical stuff. I’m a pie-in-the-sky ideas kind of guy. For instance, I was considering, as my first article, writing a piece called “On My Honour” about social contacts and personal responsibility, with quotes from Baden-Powell, great Klingon philosophers, etc. It’s not inspired by anything but personal experience, and, while I’m sure I could dig up something topical, I’d want to do so because it was relevant, not to meet some requirement.

I would think that would depend on what you mean by “viewpoint.”

If someone has an opinion, and they can express their opinion in a respectful and optimistic way, I don’t think it should be censored.

My original idea, earlier up thread, was that if you can get two other contributors to agree, “This should be posted,” then it should be posted. After that, it would be possible for the rest of us to override that decision, but we’d need a 50%+1 majority to do so.

I think that this kind of decision will be easier to make once we have something like a mission statement nailed down.

I like it.

Strong disagree. We’re all human; we’re all prone to typos, to forgetting links, to misreading articles, to logical fallacies. I want “quality” to be our watchword. Everything should at least be proofread, or, my preference, have a basic fact-check done before going out.

Maybe a more basic guideline of “write what you know?” As a Canadian, I shouldn’t be writing about the American gun culture, since I can only see it from there outside, but maybe I could write a piece about the parallels between the rise of Steven Harper and the rise of Donald Trump.

Agreed. Nothing we can do will prevent us from making mistakes. I think we need to own those mistakes when they happen: a big area on the front page just labeled “OOPS!” where we acknowledge that we done goofed, apologize, and provide the correct information.

That said, I don’t think having a second contributor proofread (and check Snopes) before publishing is too much to ask.

Edit: D’oh! Thanks @ActionAbe

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You might be right, but I think that before heading on of on a rant, we need to inform readers about the “what” - there needs to be something informative in every piece. A site that is just pure opinion, without context, is just…well, like most of the internet. As they say, opinions are like assholes…and the internet is full of both.

I like this idea, and maybe it’s a solution to the problem I have with polemics; what if an opinion piece were only published once another editor had taken up the counter-point? So yes, we can have opinion pieces, but if they’re really out-there and nobody wants to touch it with a 10-foot pole, it just sits in the queue. But if its provocative and well-reasoned, and encourages a response from another qualified editor, both the point and counterpoint are published at the same time, with equal weight.

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I can get behind that idea; an idea that no one wants to disagree with is probably so obvious that it doesn’t need to be said.

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Or so offensive it doesn’t merit a response.

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I understand what you are getting at, but some of the more interesting discussions we’ve had here are about gun culture and the view from the commenters from Canada, Europe and elsewhere have been interesting to read.

So perhaps other writers have access to the queue, as well, and if one sees a piece written by another author they wish to counter-point, they can flag it and note they wish to contribute before publication…?

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Did you mean “impossible?”

I think we have some slightly different ideas about polemics that both hinge on a strong dislike of them as a way of fostering discussion. The problem I have with point/counterpoint models is that it creates an artificial bifurcation on issues. I remember living in Atlanta and I believe it was the AJC I was reading, when coming upon “equal time” columns and thinking, “God, you’re both twits.”

I’d much much rather have them address the same topic and link to each other, but not word it as a point/counter-point. I want to incentivize fence-sitting, and third ways. Otherwise it’s a bit too much like this:

There is no “last word” on a topic, so why adopt the pretense that there are only two perspective on a given issue? I think that this more nuanced level of presentation is more challenging and I’d like to come up with a way that “leads” the reader to a discussion. There’s something about point/counterpoint that the reader is likely already familiar with, but I’d argue they’re too familiar with it, and it’s a running weakness in television and traditional media presentation where time and space are constraints we’re not going to have.

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Actually, I meant “would be possible.”

Editing accordingly

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so more a “here are a series of thoughts/views on a topic by our writers” than a point-counter point…?

I like this. It gives a more nuanced (and more realistic) view to the topic. The problem I see with much of the media trying to be “fair and balanced” is that they wind up making the world black and white, rather than the grey that most topics are.

I’d love to see opinion pieces explore the “greyness” of topics, and to try to help people make better sense of the world, rather than a “you are either with us or against us” mentality that the US in particular seems to be heading toward.

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… that being said, I’d still like a lot of fun stuff, as well.

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I’m not suggesting a “last word” format, I’m supporting @thekaz’s suggestion that we start off with at least two perspectives on something, and take the conversation from there. And it doesn’t need to be black or white - in fact, I agree it’s much better if it isn’t. Responses don’t have to be “yes” and “no” they could be “yes” and “yes, but” or “no” and “actually a little” or “maybe, but have you considered…” and we should encourage those kinds of responses rather than just falling in to two camps.

The problem I’m trying to solve for is one in which one person just decides to rant on something, and there is no check on that person. So instead we make the check that someone else has to agree that it’s worth talking about, and actually respond to the OP before the actual article is published. Hopefully that check encourages the OP to be cautious and nuanced, and the response is equally measured.

And while I don’t think we limit ourselves to two opinions, having three or more seems cumbersome. Start with a point-counterpoint, the article is posted, and discussion commences from there.

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Here’s an expanded concept for a format. Yes, @ActionAbe this does make it seem like it’s a black/white but I’m just using this language for fun. I hope for more nuanced response, especially around things that are more general topics (not like politics and culture wars);

Pasted image656×583 128 KB

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…Can we please get a confirmation that we are not actually going to be using that font?

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