I’ve always thought that the mother ship was kind of, well, central, especially with all the cross posts. I miss io9 being a distinct entity, though.
I generally like the Gawker properties - they are some of the last major tech and culture sites with robust commenting. Kinja lacks the community of the discourse system, but as more and more platforms dump comments because they don’t know how to manage a culture, commenting is becoming much more rare.
Websites with robust comment systems get my eyeballs for much longer. FB comments for websites suck, and are evidence that merely having real (sounding) names does not impose quality or civility on a discussion. I value quality comments very much for perspective and entertainment, even on websites where I don’t comment myself, and I wonder if the acquisition by Univision will mean the end of Kinja.
