What a year it’s been in the Kinjaverse, eh?! I used to defend Kinja over the years but now, HOLY SHIT!
I can’t even visit Gizmodo anymore. Have you seen the new layout? I’d advise against looking directly at it to prevent you losing your mind as it’s sucked into the vortex-like cluster-fuck that it now resembles. I’d also advise against clicking on literally anything as you might end up clicking on ads or worse, clicking on Deadspin scabspin.
Rather than going to the actual site, I head to my dashboard to find my favourite Gizmodo writers so I can check out their posts without TRYING to navigate the disaster that is the Gizmodo main page, but can barely ever do that because my dashboard now only displays the author of the posts/comments a fifth of the fucking time.
Speaking of the dashboard, the damn thing is full of people you don’t even follow which (when the authors aren’t displayed) can lead to accidental (herb-al influence?) clicks on scabspin that deserves exactly zero point zero hits.
I usually just check out The Root, The Takeout, and the sub-blogs.
I’m not going to bitch much about those but when did everyone and their dogs become ungreyed on The Root? What once was my favourite comment community is now barely worth checking out. Ever. Unless, of course, you like racist wannabe trolls blended in with a tenth of the great community it once was.
AND CAN WE FUCK OFF WITH THE AUTOPLAY VIDEOS? GODDAMNIT! Do these pricks understand how fucking expensive data is?
I could go on forever and I’m getting too frustrated so that’s enough from me.
Let’s hear it from some members (or former members) of the Kinja community.
Cousin Matthew’s Tingling Leg:
Terribilis est cur Kinja
(Why Kinja Sucks)
This morning (15/10/20) I was reviewing a trio of Papal Bulls (don’t ask) so that’s why I chose a Latin headline.
Nick Denton used to say that he was developing Kinja to be a rival to, and would eventually surpass, Facebook as a global social media platform. He was clear that once the world saw kinja’s superiority Gawker would go away and he’d be Mark Zuckerberg 2.0. Well, Gawker did go away, and left in its wake of destruction a ragtag collection of failing sites whose page views and comments decrease with each passing week. Never mind that my junior high school newspaper produced better content than what the “journalists” (at least one blogger calls themselves that) throw up, typos, grammatical mistakes, factual errors and all. And at least half the staff seems to have “editor” in their titles, but it’s unclear what sort of editorial function they’re performing.
Concurrently, with each passing week it seems, “tweaks” are made to make the sites less appealing and promote Moldy Hill Partners’ vision, which is to eke out small amounts of revenue by being a third-party promoter of “Kinja deals,” which are given pride of place in the newest design. Jezebel just went through it, but I think Gizmodo suffered this first. Maybe the desiccated corpse of the “revived,” no-comments-allowed Deadspin.
That aside, the thing that made me a devoted reader of lots of the Get/Out Media sites was the robust commentariat. That’s pretty much gone. On Jezebel at least they will post some story and out of negligence or spite will link back to an almost identical story from, for example, 2016. The current story will garner 35 comments, let’s say. The 2016 story will show many hundreds. Weirdly all comments were supposed to have been scrubbed from every post as part of the sale to Univision but it is Kinja…
I firmly believe the drop off in commenting is because no one seems to get followed by a site since the dawn of the Trump administration. This means no one gets moved into the black. I was in the black on many different sites under a different username but my hard drive died. I had to start fresh. I’m in the grays and in the grays I shall remain forever.
This wouldn’t be too bad. It used to be that if you clicked on Show Pending you’d see all the comments, black and gray. Now, for reasons known only to them, only the first five comments show up in a comment thread, black and gray. So if I reply to someone and they’re in the black and they star me I will get seen. If they don’t and I’m reply number 6 or more I’ll never get seen. Never. There’s no possible way. What’s the point?
I’d love to know what Moldy Hill Partners’ end game is. They are a VC/hedge fund firm, but are there any assets to strip, like a pension fund? I think all the sites rent space, so it’s not like a “Boston Globe” situation where the “Times” sold it off for the value of the real estate they were sitting on. Sometimes an asset’s name has intrinsic value but what is the name “Jezebel” worth? You can load up an asset with lots of debt and take outlandish “management fees” but has Get/Out Media issued bonds, and who would buy them? It’s all a mystery.
Clever Name Here dba “Black Rod”:
I’m gonna check Deadspin on my phone and … oh, I’m logged out. Well, let me just log in and … I’m logged out. OK, now I’m in and to the comments … I’m logged out. OK, I’m logged in and reading a comment, and I’m gonna reply to … I’m logged out. OK, I’m logged in and replying to a comment and … I’m in the wrong thread. And I’m logged out. OK, I’m logged in, I’m in the right thread, I’m replying and … wait, this was from last year? The hell? And I’m logged the fuck out. OK! I’m logged in. I’m in the comments. I’m … looking for the thread. Where did the thread go? Oh, I found … no, that’s not it, and why is the infinite scroll now on and WHY AM I FUCKING LOGGED OUT?!
Hannibal A Portas:
Kinja didn’t always suck. In its prime, Gawker was some of the most fun you could have on the internet. Now the once user-friendly format has become all but nonfunctional. You never know when you’ll be able to comment or see other people’s comments. Even logging in isn’t guaranteed. You can’t always post pics or GIFs, and there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason behind when or if you can. You can be grayed or even banned without any explanation. Good luck asking for help fixing any of the multiple issues. I don’t care about the main pages at all most of the newer writers are lousy. But the toll the mismanagement has taken on the sub-blogs is sad. Once-thriving communities are now offering 2 0r 3 posts a day at best. What sucks the most about Kinja is that it used to be great. And now it’s not.
Hello America:
The Gawker/Gizmodo Media sites had all the chances to be great and were instead cannibalized by their own corporate incompetence – from Gawker falling on the stupidest sword, to Kinja being its highly malfunctional golden child, to the steady increase of ads and decrease of quality content, to leaving the corpse of a basically abandoned Kinja there to torture us, and finally to the corporate gutting of the Herb which has made it into an empty shell. The earlier 2010s were defined by its corporate and tech bro arrogance; in the later days we all were still there while they stripped it for parts. The whole time this happened, there were amazing writers and staff, and those who acted like petty tyrants with a palpable disdain for us. All along, no one seemed to understand that we were there to talk with each other. The content was important but without the community, it was nothing. The whole time when they arrogantly thought they were the arbiters of discourse, that we were leaching off them in our ad-less forums, that we were not to be bothered with or listened to, they were ignoring their asset. Their page views so high because we were conversing and coming back to comment threads over and over.
SplinterRIP:
…everyone around here knows I can’t keep it short (let alone sweet) but I’m going to buck the trend a little here & say Kinja never actually had to suck…in a lot of ways it’s a pretty decent platform with a bunch of stuff going for it …it was made to suck…& it took time & the sort of concerted effort that ignored the assets they had…in terms of both the developers who made a platform any idiot could use to considerable effect for negligible effort & with next to no aptitude for the technicalities & the community of commenters they’d inherited in the first place
IWillNotCalmMyTits:
Kinja sucks because I’m banned.
That’s pretty much it.
Not worth the effort of getting back in the black.
Awesome’s Razor:
To explain why Kinja sucks, it’s instructive to step back and get a sense of our surroundings.
Gmail has a feature buried in its settings which offers me a 30-second window to “Unsend” whatever terrible mistake I’ve sent into the world. I enabled this feature the moment I learned about it, and I use it daily. This is because I am an idiot and I need all the help I can get. I appreciate the help Gmail is giving me and I accept it.
Twitter, which is terrible, does not offer me anything, which I respect. Twitter just laughs at my dumb ass. Whether my sin is a typo or the whole essence of what I’ve just said out loud before God, the Internet and Rudy Giuliani, my punishment is the same: a big ol’ honking “Delete” button, which, perversely, only erases the evidence completely if literally no one has acknowledged what I said. That’s cold-blooded. In an attention-based economy, Twitter saves its true pity for the ratio-less existence.
Kinja, however, is the goddamned devil.
I found Deadspin because the site had been left open on a coworker’s computer. I just stumbled the fuck inside like it were a bar on the corner and I, thirsty and on my way home, had time for a drink. I returned once, then I returned again, and before I realized it I felt like a regular. I opened my mouth to join the chatter of voices around me — but before I can say a word the man next to me, who I have never before noticed, but who seems like he’s literally always been there, says to me:
“Hey, I’m Kinja, would you like to be anonymous?”
“Fuck yeah!” And just like that, Kinja handed me a burner account. My fate was sealed with 25 random letters that I mistook at first for a clever passcode. I recognize now this was some ancient incantation that summons Satan himself.
Like a shitty gang you can never leave, Kinja buys your soul but doesn’t really care what it does with it.
Kinja gives you a whole five-minute window to fix your mistakes, which seems pretty great, but every time you click, Submit,” there’s Kinja holding up a mirror and asking, “Why do you look like shit today?” Worst of all, Kinja’s not wrong.
Every time, five minutes to flail around in the void. Check the spelling. Reword a joke. Check that reference. Walk away. Oh, you know what would be funnier…
And for what? No doubt on Judgement Day, when the full accounting of my actions is run, God will point to some afternoon I spent more time tweaking anonymous comments on a dumb sports blog in five-minute increments than time I spoke to my family, and I will be sentenced to an eternity of damnation while Kinja laughs it up in the corner.
Kinja was so bad, I never bothered to register. Honestly, I wanted to comment on gawker, Deadspin and Jalopnik, but it was (And still is) such a pain in the ass that it wasn’t worth it.
Each comment more true than the last. For my part, once I made the decision to stop using Kinja, the break was clean. I have never once visited any of the other G/O sites because I am that fucking petty.
I read somewhere that there was one lone guy responsible for keeping Kinja together using Band-Aids and Scotch Tape. He either left out of frustration or was part of the massive waves of layoffs. I mean, not so massive, they had a pretty skeletal crew to begin with so I don’t think Get/Out Media’s employment strategy is going to shake the markets like the recent layoffs at Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase.
Not to self-promote, but I still enthusiastically contribute to GroupThink under this username. They have a daily Open Thread and I sometimes start one. I started one fairly early yesterday morning. That’s fun. I’ve never gotten into journaling but I post these incredibly self-referential stories, comments, replies, and I haven’t been banned yet. I think GT must be somewhat moderated because no one yet has ever said, “Would you stop talking about your fucking husband and your fucking dog and fucking stuff that happened in the past and get a fucking life?”
For some reason there is an automated feed of public press info from the White House which lives in Kinja:
https://publicpool.kinja.com/
Evidently when the herbs first wanted to shut down all of the side groups that still exist, they got an unexpected uproar from highly connected people about the potential death of this feed, and they backed off.
…I think that might be one of the hidden gems of kinja…pretty sure I came across the suggestion somewhere that it was the only automated feed for the white house press pool, even
…the thing my time with kinja always seemed to come back to was the idea that as a platform it was capable of a good deal more than they ever really made obvious to their users…which was yet another reason it seemed like they didn’t have much respect for them?
I should add that I’m an egregious hypocrite. I visit The Takeout daily. They often discuss things I’ve never experienced, like why McDonald’s McFlurry machines are always broken. The last time I was in a McDonald’s was at least a decade ago and you’ll be reading about this in an upcoming Food You Can Eat.
One of the “editors” over there likes me very much and stars all my comments but has never followed me, so in the grays I remain. I’m not sure she or anyone else has the power to follow me to get me into the black.
Over on SNS (Jezebel) there’s a woman who is a very talented cook and posts amazing food photos and abbreviated recipes, just the ingredients. She and I have a lively online relationship. I’m not in the black over there anymore.
When Splinter was around I left a fairly anodyne comment and was followed immediately. It was so mundane I can’t even remember the topic but it was relevant and brief. Then “Child Blogger” Libby Watson, and her co-conspirator, whatever his name was, Nick something, the “Native American” whose heritage and story is not officially recognized by the Tribal Nations, decided they didn’t like criticism, what junior high school student would, and we all went into the grays.
I defended Libby and Nick Martin, but if I deserve to be held accountable for some of my Splinter comments, those wouldn’t be them…
Regarding the GT thing, self-promotion isn’t a bad thing imo. The point of this site was for the group blogs because the herb threatened to shut them down on Kinja.
GT, Backtalk, White Noise, Gawrker, TSB, and Clashtalk are (or unfortunately in some cases, were) worthy of promoting.
…the sub-blogs (like the press pool thing) were arguably the best side of kinja & I think it’s fair to say that the exodus of long time commenters that ensued after the business with the herb has substantially diminshed them…which is a damn shame
…but then the only alternative they had would have been to get the mainpages sites to raise their game & that was clearly never part of the plan…just look what they did with i09, for example
…there just doesn’t seem to be any explanation for that trajectory other than a complete failure to understand what was good about the thing they thought was worth investing in…which might tend to make a person think they disliked the competiton & thought the best way to be better was to make the new thing worse until their thing regained parity
…& that’s pretty much a damn shame in the first place because The AV Club was pretty great back when I first remember it & arguably they could both have thrived given a bit of love & understanding
I wish more of them would join us here but try as I might they’d rather put up with the glitches and ads. I still comment on GT myself, and host Fur Face Fridays but I don’t bother with anything else.
Clashtalk!
I feel like a kinja curse is upon me. I was a very quiet observer of Splinter because someone would say something mildly critical of some icon, like Bernie Sanders, or Hillary Clinton, and the volcanic rage could be felt through laptops and desktops and phones worldwide. Then I discovered Clashtalk. Libby and Nick were frequent topics of discussion. I left a comment saying something like, “I’m really surprised something like Clashtalk even exists. Can you imagine if Condé Nast allowed comments and there was an entire sub-blog, using the CN commenting platform, devoted to reader hatred of Anna Wintour? How long do you think that would last?” Clashtalk was gone within about a week. Soon thereafter Moldy Hill Partners shut down Splinter entirely, just as we (Americans) were entering one of the most exciting presidential election cycles in a generation. If not more.
Wonkette was originally developed as part of Gawker but Nick Denton sold/spun it off, maybe to fund the Kinja Dream. Then years later the wheel was reinvented with Splinter. Two Gawker refugees founded the much-missed “The Awl,” which begat “The Hairpin,” a much wiser and funnier “Jezebel.”
It might be because I’m a guy but I much preferred the Hairpin over Jezebel. The Hairpin was, if anything, more feminist and woman-centered than Jezebel, but it was so much more intelligent and most importantly funnier, and the comments section wasn’t weighed down by people discussing, at length, their various deep-seated mental health issues.
On GroupThink I have tried to recruit for Deadsplinter, like Hannibal, because a lot of them had issues with Jezebel and were banned or threw up their hands in disgust. One person replied to me during my most recent recruitment effort and said that Deadspin and Splinter were a toxic dump of masculine oppression and the thought of even looking at something called Deadsplinter held no appeal. I didn’t really have a response, because it would have come out as something like, “Well I’m a guy and Deadsplinter is not like that, it’s a very warm and welcoming community–”
Whatever. It’s a free country. Speaking of, I hope my fellow Americans have or are planning to vote. One week to go and maybe the long national nightmare will be over.
I agree with that one person on GT. It’s unfortunate that the name of this site gives people the wrong impression prior to even looking.
I was always a fan of Clashtalk, but I never commented. I found that group to be hilarious and most, I think, maybe cared more than they let on?
I’ve been an avid reader of Wonkette from day one. If it wasn’t running on Disqus, I’d have been a commenter there…I can only handle so many accounts.
…not for nothing but (aside from the various ladies in these parts very much not deserving to be tarred with that brush) if it were me I might have been tempted to suggest that the best way to redress that balance would inevitably be if folks who might be in a position to balance out that sort of thing (if it were a problem hereabouts) were to lend their voice to the mix?
…I’m not saying they were wrong about the old sites but I think they’re missing out…& that’s hard to see as being our fault…but I guess all we can do is offer to be welcoming…I’d be happy to see some of that crowd make it over this way…but I’m pretty sure we’re not in the business of twisting arms…& the company we have so far suits me pretty well…so all in all I’d say it works out as their loss as much as it does ours?
well said
…I was happy in the grays…but in the last days of splinter I was briefly elevated to the realm of black & white…to be honest I appreciated the compliment but I was never entirely sure it wasn’t an effort to get me to behave myself
…down in the grays where no one necessarily saw what I said I may have given in to the temptation to engage with trolls with…let’s call it extreme prejudice…but once I got the nod I felt like that would be letting the side down?
…either way I’m about 90% certain it was a guy called David Boddiger (who was the weekend editor & seemed to be the only one of the staff who had any affection for the commenters) that did me that particular honor
He followed me as well, for ripping on Mitch McConnell. He was the only writer on Kinja at that point who interacted with commenters, liking and occasionally replying to comments. I hope he ended up somewhere halfway decent.
He also got me ungrayed at Splinter, and really early on after the relaunch. I was stunned by it and didn’t even realize at first the power I had!
I also got the de-gray at Deadspin but that was later. (And I think it was Burneko?)
They moved The Onion and AV Club there, which is the big stuff I still read.
The Onion is a shadow of what it once was, for reasons having more to do with the vultures than Kinja. AV Club had its communitty gutted by Kinja, though. I still remember Tim Marchman angrily insisting it was not going to matter, which was clearly just nuts.
Try using the link for Latest on any of the G/O(d awful) Media sites. It helps. Still doesn’t fix Kinja though. I currently cannot interact with the front page on Jalopnik as it will not remember my account. I sign-in on the main page, but when I try to flag comments; which, let’s be honest is the only reason to visit the front page there anymore, Kinja still thinks I am logged out and wants another sign-in. Which of course does not work. I honestly feel bad for Torch. He’s about the only bright light there and management is going to destroy what was once the best automotive site on the internet.
Fucking Herbs.
I long ago gave up on going to home pages and always just go to …com/latest instead for a date sorted version.
I still remember the series of events and bad thinking that led to the grays system for comments.
Jezebel was getting its comments slammed by organized trolls posting absolutely horrible gifs of gruesome brutality. The easiest and best solution would have been to simply block graphics from comments. Defector does this by default Kinja could have implemented it in a day But management wanted Kinja comments to still allow the same old stupid gifs to be posted in comments, because of course it’s the height of wit to show Orson Welles applauding for the ten millionth time.
So first management dithered and delayed until the writers at Jezebel were forced to take a public stand slamming management for its inaction. Finally, they came up with grays system, which never worked right. Good quality posters got stuck there because some Kinja editors never bothered, while others pretty clearly elevated trolls.
Anyone who read Splinter knew how easily concern trolls could game the system if they were pig headed enough to persist. Elsewhere, there is a longtime poster Emilio Lizardo who apparently has been plagued for years by a weird stalker who repeatedly clones his account. Kinja managed to elevate crappy comments, supress good ones, and overall dampen participation all at the same time. A good metaphor for our voting systems.
I go to Lifehacker every 2-3 weeks. That’s really it for me. It’s too bad.
i mostly live on oppo (occasionally ill pop into groupthink but mostly i lurk and learn over there..as i do sometimes put my foot in it when i get too chatty…lol)(on the note of lurking tho…anyone know where askim benim got to?…that situation sounded umm…worrying)
other than that i check jez n the root…mostly to see what were all hating about the administration today
I hope she’s okay. I’m assuming she’s keeping a low profile online to avoid a confrontation with the husband.
Haha, these are great.
I’m sure Kinja wasn’t the first platform to come up with it, but the whole idea to take the buggiest part of running a website — the CMS — and say, yeah let’s make the users and the writers use this to do anything, I mean, that’s some real sadistic shit.
Yeah, Kinja is a good idea in theory, but in practice it was always a dumpster fire rolling down a hill toward a tire fire perched above a forest fire.