I’m sorry to say it: I have no idea where you’ve got this notion that we’re whining spongers who feel we can make arbitrary demands on the people behind BB.
For one thing, you folks released the BBS before it was fully finished and asked for our input – didn’t you? I certainly got that impression.
That word, “entitlement”, is certainly a very unpleasant one. Thing is, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard it used in a context where the person saying it wasn’t a pretty unpleasant guy who was trying to put down other people. I’m sure you have a valid point of view, but I’m not sure that word is helping you put it across at all.
I think the context-aiding “feels right” quality of the forums will improve quickly, as we refine things (including what, if anything, gets promoted to the posts)
Would it be a surprise if I said comments never drove traffic? In fact, I rather think they reduce it, because they create an incentive to make local discussion that drives no referral traffic to the site. Forums perhaps double down on that phenomenon (less traffic to the OP), but would presumably create a more fertile venue for repeat traffic in the forums themselves? Traffic isn’t a big motivator for us, so long as it stays healthy in general.
I was not a fan of that either, but it hasn’t been carried out for a long time, has it?
Anything is possible, I suppose, but from what I understand, the BB folks are generally in favor of moving toward a stronger division between editorial and community content. Placing live comments on a post is the … opposite of that.
But again, I think you’re treating this as glass-half-empty when it really is glass-half-full – there is a whole new community site for even more discussion, and even more flexible discussion.
But there are several issue that people are bringing up, and only one of them can be dismissed as entitlement. Some people are looking for the text of the articles to be in the same place as the comments, and even in that group only the ones who want all the comments on the main Boing Boing page can be called entitled. For those who are looking to read the comments alongside the articles they can probably be placated by including the complete text in the initial post here on the BBS, and making sure the author is credited correctly. A way of browsing the forum by thread creation date, as opposed to last updated, would also help.
The other major complaint is with the structure of the forums themselves. The community of Boing Boing commenters grew out of a threaded comment system, and they’re mostly objecting to being moved to a flat forum structure. @Codinghorror’s unwillingness to engage the community in the debate on flat vs. threaded also contributes to the dissatisfaction these users feel.
I’m not sure that even that is true. There is a world of difference between telling the world that you prefer all the comments on the main BB page, and demanding that this be the case because it’s your right. Has anyone actually done the latter? If they have, I missed it.
I was actually hurt by the decision at first. This is what Rob is referring to by “entitlement” I suppose. I felt unloved and maybe the butt of jokes. I think a lot of commenters are of a similar unsocial bent as I and looked to BB as some kind of refuge of happy mutants. As an adult I can, in time, see my own behavior for the ridiculous theater it is and drop my fists to my side and resume play.
The linking of the comments bubble to the forum page fixed a big part of the problem for me, but now I am prone to open another window for the forum so I can see the original post in full.
Some people are looking for the text of the articles to be in the same
place as the comments,
I get this, but would like to avoid the duplication. The auto-excerpts must go one way or the other, for sure: shorter or longer.
Au contraire! Boing Boing’s inline comments were flat Movable Type native comments from inception (2006) until we switched to wordpress in 2012, when they became threaded (disqus).
It’s often startling how many problems that seem to be about principles or attitudes are really just about user experience. Discourse and our developers Dean and Jonathan are doing amazingly fast and dedicated work!
It’s also somewhat important to note that the Discourse team is working directly with boingboing. You folks are all helping to shape the community and the platform in some capacity; something that pre-baked comment systems like Disqus previously couldn’t provide.
Concerns about change aside, I think that’s a pretty cool thing to be happening.
Hi, David.
Firstly, I’m learning something about transparency myself. I didn’t mention you by name because the identity of the author was not relevant to my point. I now see that I should have in order that you were alerted to my comment, so I apologise for that. Also, I’m sure I didn’t quite express myself as well as I wanted to. Believe it or not, that comment took me two hours to compose…
The idea of authors being made “uncomfortable” by comments was initially raised by beschizza in this thread so the use of the word was something of an oblique reference to discussion of that above. (If you do a quick word search of the page you’ll see what I mean).
That’s a good point and much of my commentary on this page has been about drawing attention to what’s wrong with it - not to complain but with an eye to encouraging improvement. I would say though that Stexe’s comment certainly was deserving of notability and since you obviously did read it I wonder why you didn’t promote it, given that it meets all of the (non-algorithmiclly-based) criteria for notability.
One other question: why was stefanjones’ comment initially deemed notable, and then that later reversed?
I’ll occasionally neuter a “Fuck you” in an otherwise valuable comment. Other than that, there’s not much point in it if it can just be edited right back.
This is done by algorithm, and it’s being fiddled with. The algorithm requires a certain level of participation (eg likes) to work effectively, and that isn’t happening yet.
