I don’t want to be too negative towards the folks who provided me with more than a decade of (mostly) wonderful things for free. It’s greatly appreciated.
Comic Book Guy: Last night’s Itchy & Scratchy was, without a doubt, the worst episode ever. Rest assured that I was on internet within minutes registering my disgust throughout the world.
Bart Simpson: Hey, I know it wasn’t great, but what right do you have to complain?
Comic Book Guy: As a loyal viewer, I feel they owe me.
Bart: What? They’ve given you thousands of hours of entertainment for free. What could they possibly owe you? I mean, if anything, you owe them.
I wish we could have gone out on the note of celebrating that, instead of being told we should rejoice that it’s over and we’ve succumbed to the creeping rot that is the modern internet. But what can you do? People wanted a goodbye and thanks thread and it was impossible to create one.
Over the last few years I’d found myself engaging with fewer and fewer other sites. At this point in time I pretty much only engage online here in the bbs.
It had occurred to me several times over the last months or so, especially with the rise of Allan Rose Hill and the like, that maybe I shouldn’t have all of my eggs in one basket when it comes internet communities I enjoy engaging with.
As has often been pointed out here in bbs discussions, BB is a privately run site, and can be run however those in charge see fit. Maintaining this community has also clearly been a labor of love, for which all of us Happy Mutants are grateful.
Others in this thread have noted that they would happily chip in $ to keep this community running - I would too. I’m guessing the reasons for switching platforms instead of running a patreon or something are more than just money. But I wish something else could have been tried first, before making this drastic move.
I think maybe I am rambling at this point. So I’ll wrap up by saying that I share the concerns expressed RE substack. I will probably give the 7-day free trial a go. But I don’t know if I want to stick around…
Thanks to the wonderful hosts and members of this community who have shared so much enjoyment and perspective with me this last ~20 years.
I’ve always felt the authors’ position on the commentariat to be apathetic at best, although at times it has been extremely adversarial. In my extensive time here, I can’t say I’ve ever seen the authors interact all that much with the BBS users (other than Rob). However, in the past year as the quality of the content has so precipitously declined, so has the amount of author involvement here.
In my opinion, the BBS has almost certainly been a cost center. There’s almost zero profit to squeeze from here, and orenwolf works tirelessly to keep the lights on and the bad actors away when there plenty of other things I’m sure he’d rather be doing. It has long seemed like we were more of a tolerated nuisance than anything. It’s a little amazing to me it’s stayed alive for as long as it has.
I respect the fact that the BB owners want a way to bring in some $$$ to support the site without advertising and tracking cookies. I know how hard it is to maintain a community, keeping the trollies away. I’m also happy to pay for things I enjoy. I just wish there were some other way to keep the community the same while offering a pay option.
I can only assume that they checked out other alternatives. For example, the 404media folk have done a great job with Ghost and even offer a full RSS feed only for paid subscribers.
I will be taking a look at the new community, but I can’t say I’m even cautiously optimistic.
I don’t know if that’s true… orenwolf posted some figures about traffic through the BBS a while back that were startling. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if traffic to BB drops overall as a result of the crippling of the commentariat and community.
Given that Discourse offers subscription options and that migration always loses part of the subscriber base, I can really only see one of two options:
No, it really is all about the money, and Substack is offering a better rev share to whitewash their image
Going to the Nazi bar was desirable for reasons other than money
The BBS is/was, if nothing else, a great news aggregator sorted by topic, what with the small army of prolific article sharers among the contributors. That loss, plus the unfortunately similarly-timed implosion of the WaPo, and I guess I’m going to go into this election less informed by fewer allies.
It’s been fun for twenty-ish years, but I’ve found some of the editorializing and discourse here increasingly toxic over time which drove me from participating to lurking and am not inclined to pay to pursue it in concentrated form.
So all the best to the rest. I am grateful for what it was. Be safe, everyone.
We chose Substack because it provides the best available publishing tools to create the Boing Boing experience we’ve always wanted to deliver. After years of wrestling with aggressive advertising and technical limitations, we finally have a platform that lets us focus on what matters most - creating and sharing the content you love.
Our direct experience with the Substack team has been overwhelmingly positive. They’ve given us complete editorial independence and the technical support we need. We maintain full control over our space and actively moderate our community to ensure it remains the safe, weird, wonderful place you expect Boing Boing to be.
We understand some readers have concerns about Substack’s platform policies. We’ve thought carefully about this. Our presence here isn’t an endorsement of every voice on the platform - just as our presence on Twitter/X, YouTube, or any other platform hasn’t been. We’re here because these tools let us build something better for our community.
Our mission remains clear: to keep the wonder and weirdness of Boing Boing alive for happy mutants today and into the future. We believe this move helps us achieve that mission while creating a more sustainable future for independent publishing.
Over 90% of the content that I love here comes straight from the BBS. Sometimes it makes its way to the front page, sometimes not. But the BBS is the most valuable part of boingboing to me.
I’m not sure that there will be much of a community left after Friday. I’m not sure that there is now. This move is hurting a lot of us at a moment in history that is extra perilous.
That’s all well and good but the tools the community most values do not exist on substack. Even simple, straightforward shit like formatting, or editing, the text of a post, or adding a link.
This right here. It sounds like the community is considered expendable, as long as things become easier for the authors and moderators. I’m not entirely unsympathetic, as I’m sure running BB has only become more and more difficult, but unless Frauenfelder is talking about a hypothetical future community that pops up after this one is burned to the ground, this whole response feels tone-deaf. And choosing to move any engagement behind a right-wing-friendly site’s paywall (and there utterly crippling it via Substack’s vastly inferior comment system) right before this particular election can’t help but feel like a betrayal to some degree. For myself and a lot of others, our news and engagement and online social discourse was centered right here at the BBS, much more so than the articles.
