Restaurant reviews are tough. We’ve got people all over the world… do we limit to big cities?
I would, rather than a straight-up restaurant review, like to see the focus more of food trends, or some dish that a particular restaurant does differently, and to see a focus on that… this might help inspire readers to seek out a similar dish at a local restaurant, or perhaps inspire someone to come up with and share a recipe or technique they could then share with others here (without drifting too far into Kenji Lopez-Alt territory)… or something… anything different than just reviewing service, decor and food of a restaurant they ate at.
Totally agree. Also, everyone on this thread needs to be mindful of the invisible constraints in which we may be thinking about this. Many have framed this conundrum as a matter of topical focus. That’s certainly one way to view it but it’s not the only way.
Assume, for a moment, that our new initiative has one and only one topical focus. Now how do we frame our thinking on format? A multidisciplinary perspective? That is, historical, scientific, economical, psychosocial takes on the same matter? A discourse-heavy format using multiple opinions on the same matter?
Again, there are a lot of ‘me-too’ blogs out there that collectively cover every topic mentioned so far in this thread. If we want to stand out, our reason for existing cannot be defined purely by topic.
Maybe one person who likes doing restaurant reviews can do restaurant reviews and another person who prefers focusing on food trends or cookery can do that? And someone who lives in a rural area should not be restricted from food blogging. We may be country bumpkins, but we have surprisingly well developed palates.
I’m all for people blogging about completely unrelated topics, but that’s not going to generate the type of discussion you’re hoping to get. How could it if we’re just blogging together, not even at each other. So how about we allow people to post anything related to their niche interests but we also do assignments. Here’s how it would work:
@waetherman pulls 3 to 4 names from a hat and assigns a topic.
The team (lets say, @nimelennar, @William_Holz and @japhroaig) is assigned to talk about “MRA’s against finding dory: its a feminist movie say the haters”
From here I can think up a couple of ways to handle blog posts (I’m sure you guys can think up even better ways to do this):
Three blog posts go up, all point to the same comment section. Anybody commenting will necessarily read all three points of view before posting.
The team can discuss this via email, slack, chat, or VOIP and the back and forth becomes the blog post.
Teams can also invite anybody else they want to the conversation as they wish, could be someone from the group like @chgoliz or maybe somebody totally unrelated to the blog as long as they can add something to the conversation.
Hopefully we could avoid just flat out agreeing with each other so we could keep things interesting while at the same time showing how even the most contentious topics can still be discussed with civility.
By keeping assigned teams small we could have several teams, with overlapping members producing blog posts with regularity, even if we need to give a team a couple of days to put together these longer form conversational blog posts.
The goal would be to have at least one of these a day, and like I said, meanwhile we can all keep posting weird, interesting things and slowly start finding out what this collective is all about.
It might be easier to pull off if you limit how long the discussion can go on for. If we stick to email it might be easier to keep the conversation on topic than by using slack like a regular chat session.
But that’s just one way to do it and it doesn’t always need to be like that. How about a wiki style blog post? Have several contributors edit a post, publish it and show the conversation history and the changes that were made?
How many people here read the Happy Mutant Handbook? It was about a lot of different things. Women who drove across the country dressed as diner waitresses using bio-diesel that they made out of used fryer oil, now mainstream. A guy who made silly computer games, also mainstream. Sun Ra and his Arkestra. Weird and cool foods and beverages. Subverting politics and public spaces through art. Weird snacks. Robots. Smiley faces drawn on paper plates. Editing scraps of film together to make some weird new movie, now also perfectly normal and still cool. Building hacking. Games. Church of the Subgenius.
Random? You bet! But all guaranteed to keep some Happy Mutant somewhere happy and mutated.
So, here are all of my opinions:
I like Dopamaniacs and ChattyChatty.
I also like Hedgehogs. (Hedgehography?)
I like Discourse.
I can live with other commenting systems, but I refuse to work on a system where I cannot mute or block people who are bothering me or who are pretending to be nice in front of moderators but who are actually bothering me on other sites. It should be understood that we all have a right to protect our happiness and preserve our mutation, however we see fit.
I dislike the idea of pay-to-play for content providers, especially when there are free or already-paid-for options. I also dislike the idea of over-organizing things or limiting the categories or topics or approaches.
I’m happy to review/copy-edit someone else’s stuff if they’ll do the same for mine before publishing. I’m down with starting to practice with all of Medium’s tools at any time.
If my opinions are too divergent from the majority’s please feel free to leave me out. Please feel free to IM me if you wish to play with Medium’s features.
Just thinking outside the box for a minute:
What if the site is really an aggregator of sorts? Like, a public facing RSS reader. Each writer posts their work on whatever’s handy for them, and then is reposted to the main site?
I dunno. Thinking as I type.
I think this is a prime example of what I’d like to avoid:
First, we have commenters bringing evidence against both the provenance of the lists and the characterization of the materials on the list: having at least one person go over each article and fact-check it will boost our credibility.
Second, what good does this article do? It’s reopening old wounds and restarting old debates, and the person it’s about is dead. Sure, it’s news, and digging up celebrity gossip might be good for clicks, but is this story really newsworthy?
Finally, it’s that same narrative that we keep getting beat over the head with: Current events are awful. Your idols are awful. Your politicians are awful. Everything is awful.
Yes, awful things happen, and we can’t just stick our heads in the sand and ignore the awful things that happen. But we should be celebrating the awesome, if possible, rather than glorifying the awful. There might be a humanizing way to look at this story, and if so, it should be presented that way, instead of: if you doubted MJ was a horrible person, here’s more proof that you were wrong!
I’m thinking that the dearly departed Princess Pricklepants needs to be our spiritual mascot now if @nemomen approves and thinks the idea of her living on as our glorious avatar is appropriate.
Staggering a bit between the planning and building stages of the new aquaponics system, is anyone in this thread actually interested, or shall I just move on?
