I can assure you though – despite any appearances to the contrary – there’s nothing untoward involved in my (entirely justifiably) fulsome admiration for the ever-indefatigable Rooo…which I’m sure is shared by a great many of you.
If you’re interested I was going to recommend they make you and author on RIP Splinter as they appear to be adding them as you may wish to post/cross post to a wider audience. At least until things implode again.
about that…you might want to come see me if you’re wondering where that lot got vanished to earlier today.
you’re an old hand at this so I’m pretty sure posting the link would be redundant but me & the boys (&/or gals) seem to have been evicted from our residency at the wake & what’s left of our stuff sent to storage lockers we don’t have keys for.
I do seem to have found a way to see what’s in there & I’m going to once more attempt to get the band back together.
Or you may no wish to deal with more people. Which is why I would not make such a suggestion without asking you first.
words to live by…& the only reason I’m managing not to cross-post this to mine right now.
sometimes it is better to ask forgiveness than permission…but they didn’t ask us a goddamn thing before they swung that wrecking ball & we weren’t embarrassing anyone anywhere more than a few dozen folks were looking at.
so I may be feeling a mite wrathful just at the minute.
For those that swing that way there’s a Discord server out there called Left of Dead that one of our lot set up & there’s a deadsplinter.com WordPress thing but I’m stubborn & most of my point (if I had one) was that there are more than enough smart, funny, insightful & grown up users of this platform that we could provide for ourselves what they no longer wish to pay to provide professionally.
& I can not get over how incredibly childish it was to behave the way they have.
They could have spoken to us, after all – I didn’t even set the place up for people to use that way deliberately…they came in (modest) droves & we scrambled to make it worth their while because they made it worth ours.
We could have abided by a few house rules – changed it from the wake to the speak, that sort of thing – but no they had to be as high-handedly dickish as a bag of dicks could be instead.
It’s enough to make you want to sign on with the Tomatoface brigade.
Except we were having a grand old time without any of that shit being an issue which is very nearly a goddamn Kinja miracle…I hope it Streisand Effect’s them right where they fucking live.
Sorry…this isn’t really a place for this kind of venting…feel free to dismiss this but it was kind of nice to get off my chest.
I can’t keep up with the Discord thing but I’m keen to have a way to resurrect what I’ve always got from these comments & it’s the best non-kinja address book we’ve got that I know of.
SplinterRIP has gmail though, so if you had an address you wouldn’t object to disclosing I would certainly value your opinions &/or any tips you might have regarding reciprocal hosting of personal blogs?
We made some pretty solid progress last time but I think I would have done a few bits differently & now I guess I have a chance.
Good points all – & I’ll try to make sure they get to the relevant people.
It was others who set up both the Discord & WordPress options (although I think they may not be the only two…& I’m thinking of speaking to someone who might be able to do admin/hosting stuff if it comes to that) but I might take you up over email on picking your brain a little about Kinja.
It seems literally insane to me that something that gathered the better part of perhaps five hundred active users in a week or two just by altering the good ones™ to obvious trolls™ ratio the same way places like this have been managing for ages & letting folks with a hole in their browsing know they could shoot the breeze round our way is doing them anything but a favor.
One of Milton’s bits pulled over a 1,000 page views in under a half hour – that would be respectable for an actual piece on an actual website ferchrissakes…
We had people posting to say they’d lurked for years & made an account just to say thank you.
I might have been thoroghly enjoying myself & being more than slightly self-indulgent…but when I made that account I thought I’d be the only one it was of interest to & the sole purpose was to try to find out if I could catch enough of what the people I appreciated Splinter because of were saying to make Kinja worth using.
Otherwise I think I’d have been lurking for the most part & just using my regular account to say the occasional geeky thing about a TV show or whatever & giggle over things like the clap back mailbag. I always did read my news other places anyway. The comments were 80% of why I bothered with Splinter.
When a bunch of people came knocking on my door wanting something similar I figured I might as well take a punt at the group blog feature the help pages claimed was possible (though in fact disabled) & which was when the vast majority of users that got on this mystery tour bus.
So I gave it some thought as though it wasn’t a crazy idea & I think got about 50% of where my meagre understanding of Kinja would let me.
It’s been enough in terms of a proof of concept that I believe there to be scope on this platform for a place like that which served as a kind of hub/aggregation thing for a bunch of otherwise disconnected accounts who enjoy each others company but also can consume a vast amount of information & share/opine on some of it to the mutual benefit of all.
Parsing information online is inherently tricky but in the current context pissing away a community who can (& did) help many of us do that on a frequent & regular basis is almost certainly foolhardy in addition to profligate in the extreme. Those users have (IMHO) been ill served as a group by a succession of owners of enterprises who have utterly instead the value in the asset they possess because they haven’t taken the time to do the due diligence that could have made them more profits than anything they’ve done to date. Literally. It’s not even a particularly clever or insightful observation to anyone who’s been paying attention to the point of use end of this stuff since they first started sounding the death knell of print journalism.
Even now, when it’s a shadow of its former self the old guard (& the non-sock-puppet accounts) that add value to these sites represent an amazing resource.
I swapped messages with someone who had a specific glitch that refused to add Rooo’s stuff to their feed & I was serious when I said that rendered their product inexcusably defective. That shit is worth any two of their sites put together to anyone with the wit to see what’s in front of their nose.
& the lady is GIVING THAT SHIT AWAY. FREE. FREE-AS-IN-BEER.GRATIS…like some kind of fucking saint.
So I’m not done trying & I won’t be until Kinja itself dies &/or Mango Unchained goes back to just being a regular over-ripe mango spoiling in the Florida sun. & even then I’m not sure.
I may have developed a taste for this stuff.
Just as soon as I get a few more of them straight in my head I’ll drop a few of them in that gmail you mentioned.
I think we’re (or at least I’m) viewing Discord as the yearbook signing if school’s almost out…a way to get a little word out if there’s life after Kinja.
But if feasting on the carcass until the bitter end is good enough for the goose that paid the golden egg…then I see no reason why us peasants shouldn’t get down in the muck & do the same.
Which reminds me:
between Discord, a WordPress spot or two & some talk about Reddit there’s a chance we can find a few friendly faces if there’s life after the Kinja homage to the maiden voyage of the Titanic reaches its seemingly inevitable conclusion.
But I already lost the value add of arguably the majority of the commenting community that had me in stitches for years as a lurker. Kinjatown’s debut performance drove so many of them away that even the consistent refusal to operate the platform as it (implicitly) seems to have been designed to function hasn’t caused that kind of extinction level event over the time since.
Hidden under the oh, probably as many as dozens of individuals & their copious sock-puppetry doing their damnedest to drive anyone worth reading off the platform, the 1,000(s) of accounts they drown out on the main pages (for the purposes of your casual/lurking reader) a valuable resource to one another in a way & to a degree that I simply can not comprehend either of two groups of people behaving as the management hereabouts not only has been but continues to double down on at every turn…
a) anyone who paid even cursory attention to what Mueller spent the first half of his report explaining (about the degree to which places like this are being actively & concertedly targeted by interests that are no better disposed to US interests than we are to their presence in the threads on Kinja); or
b) was interested in either the mainpages/verticals or the Kinja platform surviving to make any money for anyone, let alone continue to provide enjoyment &/or interest for the likes of us.
The failure to properly gauge (or even recognize) the potential asset to a platform you lot represent is incomprehensible to me. Lamentably consistent over a series of hands on the purse strings, granted – but the idea that a group of sites that were (are?) running so much underlying crap served up with their pages that they were literally mining bitcoin for somebody can’t generate enough revenue to keep it alive & up where people can see it seems a better example of a thing that seems like a choice than Kanye’s, to say the least.
That in the space of a few days & without making any kind of song & dance about it we found a way to let those underserved users hang out, pass the time, shoot the breeze, share the news they wanted to talk about…& parse the endless torrent of bullshit currently inundating our news cycles through a snark based filter that belies how sharp, smart & insightful many are…suggests strongly that a half-dozen or so unpaid amateurs could provide 50% or so of what folks came to Splinter for – for free & while working real jobs – in a way you’d think was a no-brainer for a business looking to increase their userbase & furthermore to maintain or increase their engagement absent two of their websites.
I’m no Warren Buffet but it seems that if one of those amateurs could post something that broke 1,000 page views in under a half-hour (as I know for a fact Milton did at least once) then leaning into your audience instead of on your staff looks like a pretty decent path to fiscal viability.
Always assuming that you have that sort of motivation, of course. Which you’d think would be the case.
For whatever reason the actual course of action taken over the last few weeks & months certainly does a flawless impression of how one might go about assisting the project of the aforementioned concerted & consistent trolling effort & drive the whole family of sites into the ground.
Some might even go so far as to suggest that is in fact what we’re all watching here…in the words of the OG Sir Francis Urquhart:
[This was posted on ifyoubuildit the day after DeadspinRIP and SplinterRIP got worm-holed]
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