I created an account just to check it out, and it’s definitely worse than the original. RSS feeds appear to be truncated with no way to fix it - you’d think if I were paying for the ad-free service, I could read the articles in RSS! This is an inferior and obnoxious product.
I’ve been reading boingboing for 20 years now. My kids joke that that if I send them a link to anything online, it’s always from boingboing. It’s the top feed in my feed reader. I might not comment very often, but I always read the feeds, and I often check the comments for alternate viewpoints. Now both the site and the comments are essentially broken.
As a (relatively quiet) Boinger who’s seen several incarnations, I’d like to thank the editors @frauenfelder, @beschizza, @pesco and @jlw for the good times! And to all here: long may you run
I’ve been here for over 10 years, so I don’t think I saw the move from Disqus to Discourse, but I could be mistaken. What I do know I’ve seen is every other social media platform I participated in, either gradually become worse and worse, or start out bad enough to begin with, that it kept me from visiting. But this place was always somewhere I could come to read an amazingly broad range of viewpoints, someplace I could learn and laugh and feel like I was contributing. I feel like the way I interact with people online was shaped in no small part by missteps and mistakes I made here, and the resulting dope slaps knocking some sense into me. I’m gonna try it over at Substack, because I don’t want to be completely without what feels like my last avenue of this kind of online discourse. I don’t know how confident I am, but I’ll hold out some hope. I need to. Thanks everyone here, whether you decide to make the jump or not. It’s been a weird and wonderful ride.
You can’t see full articles in a feed reader. Every article has a “read more” link. The “old” boingboing has that, too, but you can generally get articles to load by requesting full content. That doesn’t work with the substack feed. So if you read with an RSS reader, you are better off not using premium.
I will say the echo chamber and the unneeded aggressiveness by some on here if you do give a differing viewpoint has also kept me from much in the way of commenting over the past years as well. That said, I still am disappointed by the way this was rolled out by the owners and the subsequent inevitable loss of community as a result.
Substack earns money from and helps earn money for known nazis, and refuses to moderate them from the platform. The nazis aren’t there because substacks moderation just can’t keep up or something, they’re there because substack has made an explicit policy choice to give them a pulpit and profit from them.
Of course just being on a platform isn’t an endorsement of every user there, but when the management of the platform is actively and knowingly monitizing nazi content for profit well we have a word for that and the word is “collaborator”. You might not view your participation there to be an endorsement of nazis, but it is unequivocally an endorsement of nazi collaboration, weather you like it or not.
(No, you absolutely shouldn’t have been on “X” either, post Musk’s intentional reinstatement of previously banned known nazis. That’s about as clear a signal of active collaboration as you can get and should have been a giant flashing warning sign to gtfo even if you missed prior more subtle red flags.)
I used to visit rob’s site all the time. He was selling something local to me and I contacted him to say that I was glad he was still being “weird”
Now bb is changing too… someone is cutting onions as I type
Eta: 20 years ago I discovered this site via a professor at the local jc. The prof, an army vet (who would wear apparently army issued kilts) would show us various articles from bb. He’d even go as far as searching bb for information á la google for his results. It absolutely drove me up the wall! Just google it!
One day I had enough and decided to browse the site. Oops I’m hooked. Thanks for the memories. Boingboing and dangerousminds.net you were there for me when I needed you most
But if I need to feed the thread about what will cause arguments on the bbs into chat gpt and have it spit out my last post here: when do I need to do it?
I did not have BB going full gated community on my 2024 bingo card, but yes, this will definitely keep out the kids, the poors, and other “troublemakers”. /s
In seriousness, I’m sure this change will significantly reduce the moderation workload, and I can certainly sympathize with that desire. I suspect it will have more negative impact on the community than you may expect, however.
I don’t feel that I belong in any community that denies people a voice unless they can pay, but I sincerely wish everyone making the jump the best in luck and life. Stay well and happy, folks!
I’d be happy to pay for a Boing Boing subscription in abstract but I’m trying to decouple from Substack. Not there yet, not sure if I’ll take this step in this case or not.
well I’ve been around forever and appreciated the comments sections. Thanks for facilitating them Boing Boing and thanks for participating in them, everyone. I’ve enjoyed our occasional interactions.
Yep, there are a few I know of (or have said so in this thread or others), who will definitely not be able to afford to subscribe. A lot of value to the community will be lost with them absent.
Not a big fan of the move away from the BBS forum, to a pay-walled alternative, though I do acknowledge that running a website is not easy at the best of times (and it is currently right now not the best of times).
I’ve seen gaming news blogs, in a change/re-design of their platform changing the comment system, essentially kill all sense of a community in the readers/regulars. What were news posts with a rich and diverse set of comments, now get maybe a single comment. Also didn’t help when some of them switched to SEO content mills by their corporate overlords.
