State Of The Site, Late 2013
I may or may not do something like this again, but UMHoops does 'em and they seem like a good idea. Since I've mentioned my general dissatisfaction with the way things have been going around here in a couple of different formats, I figure a fuller explanation is due to everyone who doesn't listen to the podcast or care about Twitter, and Twitter was about six sentences anyway.
I've gotten a lot of emails and tweets in support and while I appreciate them a great deal, I feel like it's not really all that bad and perhaps I haven't expressed any of this clearly enough. So here's an attempt.
THE BAD THING
We moved servers just before the season, and for some reason this imploded the Drupal module we were using that did the voting/comment-graying. Don't get me started on that unless you want the animated gif above to be my fate.
The new server is a champ, and was direly needed. We only blew up during the Hand commitment aftermath, and I guarantee you that the blog would have been crushed four or five other times during the year if we had not moved. At times this has been a mixed blessing—it probably would have been nice to be down after Penn State—but having your internet site on the internet is a goal.
The cost was steep, as without the obvious disapproval provided by your comment shrinking into a gray box, dumb comments multiplied and fights about those comments multiplied since there was not an obvious indicator that other people had already dismissed it. I felt this would happen but had very little time to do anything about it since this event happened smack-dab in the middle of me pounding out the 50k-word season preview.
Flaming went up, signal got obscured, and things veritably roiled.
THE BLOWUP
We brought Brandon on board to be a recruiting reporter and he posted an interview with a 2016 kid; he gave us a picture in which he looked pretty young. I thought nothing of it because I follow hockey closely and there kids who don't have to shave commit all the time. (A kid born in 1998(!) just committed. The OHL speeds up their timelines.) Michigan just took a 2016 commit in football, and has a half-dozen offers out. But this resulted in a comment thread in which a lot of people made jokes about the kid not having to shave; others put on their Serious Issue faces and wondered if this was ethical. Then the prospect posted a screenshot of people making fun of him on twitter. SMH, man.
By this point we'd had a lot of crap on the board and this was a seeing-red moment. I posted a thread about how this was unacceptable, etc., whereupon there was a huge comment thread in which concern trolling featured heavily. The ethics of talking to high school kids about where they might go to college was frequent topic.
This was and is ridiculous. We're not about to Rosenberg these kids, both because we're not [REDACTED] 5'2" [REDACTED] goobers who'll do someone dirty to get ahead in the world and that going Rosenberg on someone would completely crush us with our readers, deservedly.
We're going to ask them softball questions and publish them after correcting any spelling mistakes, and you, the reader, are going to post comments like "Good luck wherever you go!" because that's the social contract we have here. That's how this works. You are going to assume that high school kids are going to read anything they can about themselves online, and we're going to throw Charmin at them in slow motion. This is not hard-hitting journalism here.
Anyway. The primary concern troll was a guy who'd been around since the very beginning of the site, chitownblue. He quit in a huff once, then came back as chitownblue2, and almost never appeared except to chide someone about something. At some point virtually everyone who writes for the site complained to me about him. The rest of the people who had posted things that broke the social contract in that thread quickly apologized; he dug in to fight the battle of the Somme. Another complaint about him happened in the midst of that thread, during which my dander was up and finger already hovering over the button. So I banned him, and various compatriots. And I've had an itchy trigger finger since.
They'd been around forever. I regret nothing, except that I waited so long. I hated that guy.
THE ISSUE
A friend sent me this post from 4chan's founder in response to similar issues he'd had, in which he cites another post from Steve Pavlina about why he shut his popular forums down. Pavlina talks a lot about entitlement of longtime users and standards that he felt weren't being met, both of which I kind of feel. But moot's thing is the thing:
Something that’s always surprised me is how often people seem to forget how large the overall 4chan community is outside of their own respective interaction with it. Some simply don’t care, but I think others plain don’t realize they’re just one of millions of people who post and browse 4chan on a monthly basis. …
My view is that it simply isn’t possible nor prudent to attempt to please everyone, and so I don’t. This can be misinterpreted as not caring, but it’s far from it—it’s just a reflection of my belief that the needs of the community outweigh the needs of individuals. Which is an ideal I think most would agree with, but when emotions run wild and tensions run high, we often lose sight of it.
The general rule of thumb is that 10% of your readers will read the comments/forums and 1% will leave most of them. I believe our numbers are quite a bit higher than that, but even so that the the primary thing that happens in the comments is lurkers reading them. From the perspective of the commenters these people do not exist. From my perspective, they're the majority of the readerbase.
Most of these people seem to like the site. They visit it. That majority has not been reflected in the comments. Of late when people recognize me I wince a bit, because I'm not sure how this interaction is going to go. I'm kind of waiting for someone to unload on me. This never happens.
As the season's gone along this disconnect has become apparent. And I'm finding the complaints harder to deal with because with the demise of voting so many of them have become personal attacks hardly sheathed in anything resembling logic. Brandon just took a lot of crap for posting that usually when recruits are open with him that means they're excited about Michigan and Malik McDowell was tight-lipped, which may not bode well. This exploded into controversy for some reason: that reason is there are a bunch of people who just complain about everything about the site.
IT'S NOT YOU, IT'S ME
Why these people can't let go and do something else, I don't know. They're locked in a prison of their own devising, being miserable about the state of the blog while they make it worse by constantly complaining about it.
I am going to help both these folks and myself escape from purgatory by hitting the eject button on them. Like this guy who has 41,000 points, most of which seem to be accumulated complaining about the site. And this guy. Great news for everyone: they're banned. Now they are free to explore the rest of the internet, perhaps to find something they don't hate.
This represents a policy change. In short, that is: if the people who write for this site hate you we will ban you. That is the upshot of the twitter burst and the podcast thing. This is not really a change for most people since we did that for anyone with a few points who came in guns blazing. This mostly applies to folks like guy I just banned who'd accumulated the third-most points on the site. I hated that guy! For three years! And out of some idea about respecting the community I let him fart all over it.
To respect the community, we should ban jerks, even if they've been around so long that it seems that there must be some redeeming value in having them around.
If you don't like the way the comments are laid out, or you think there should be more jumps, or fewer jumps, or have a substantive disagreement with what I think, or even have argument-free opinions I roll my eyes at every six months or so, fine. I have to get to know you to loathe you. All you people are good. In fact, here are protips to not get banned under this new regime:
- Don't have an avatar. You're less likely to get noticed.
- Don't be a jerk to people who write for the site. Much more difficult that #1, but still doable if you try.
- Don't constantly complain about the people I hire. If you want to send me an email, fine. Publicly crapping on the other guys who write for us is filed under jerk.
- Don't get mad at me for having a particular emotional state. This happened constantly throughout the season, as if the internet tough guys who were taking the bullets the season threw at them could somehow improve my mood by berating me.
I can understand how the last few years have put people in a place where they find me irritating after once enjoying the site, but all the comments in the world aren't going to be able to change what is primarily a sports blog about what it feels like to be a Michigan fan. If you feel differently, okay! I accept that you feel differently. If you want me to feel like you, that is an argument you are welcome to have anywhere else.
It's been a trying year for everyone, and I'm about to go figure out how to get the damned voting back on comments, so hopefully things will recede from this, their irritating zenith. Thank you to everyone who did not expect me to be an emotional clone of themselves this year, which is like 99% of you. I enjoy you.
-Brian
December 7th, 2013 at 8:48 AM ^
and then bought him a drink while we were standing at the bar. Nothing bad happened.
Which was sort of disappointing in a way....
December 6th, 2013 at 1:58 PM ^
I particularly liked the part with the "this guy" hyperlinks go to an access denied page. I don't know why but that cracked me up.
December 6th, 2013 at 1:59 PM ^
The 20/80 rule: 20% of your problems cause 80% of your headaches
December 6th, 2013 at 2:01 PM ^
Looking forward to whenever voting comes back. I will continue not using an avatar in the meantime.
December 6th, 2013 at 2:01 PM ^
...Smiths references.
December 6th, 2013 at 2:11 PM ^
I too was hoping for more Smiths.
December 6th, 2013 at 2:01 PM ^
Seeing if I'm Banned.
December 6th, 2013 at 2:04 PM ^
Did someone hear something?
No?
Okay. Must be my imagination.
December 6th, 2013 at 2:04 PM ^
How in the hell did you make the cut?
-kidding, of course
December 6th, 2013 at 2:18 PM ^
I have no idea how I made it. Maybe the commentors hate me more than the Biffs and Mods?
December 6th, 2013 at 2:32 PM ^
I think that's true. You always made me laugh, even when you went full insane for a while there. LOL
December 6th, 2013 at 4:28 PM ^
December 6th, 2013 at 4:34 PM ^
I go in and out of that phase.
I took a LOT of drugs back in the day.
December 6th, 2013 at 2:08 PM ^
While I disagree with some of his theories, complaints, and even the way he goes about what he does, I do strongly empathize with him. I know I've been more out in the open as a poster, and I have a blog I just started this year, and I've been on the opposite side as most of a hot topic issue, but the amount I get has left me at times lashing out at others and taking a harder stance on issues and feeling the need to be defensive when people not only attack my side of the debate, but start attacking me and my credibility and all that.
Now, I can understand not liking me (or Brian); I can understand not liking me and coming to this site, because it's not my site. But I don't understand people not like Brian and staff and coming here; I really don't understand following someone on twitter and calling them out when it's very simple to just not follow them.
All that said, the season, especially after the way many of the seasons have turned out in recent memory, has been a drain. While I'm not nearly as invested into blogging as Brian is, I often times contemplate what I wish my future in this community (not just MGoBlog, just blogging in general) to be. And again, I get a very, very, very small fraction of what many others get.
I guess what it boils down to is that I understand the frustrations. I understand because I've felt just a fraction of it and hated the weight it felt to me (and it didn't help knowing that - in my position and I'm sure to a large degree Brian's - that you know you shouldn't feel that weight but you still do).
I think it's fair to say that we all take this stuff pretty seriously. Most are smart enough not to take it too seriously (that's a very relative term when it comes to us as a group), but I think it's always worth mentioning when it comes to thinking before posting. Sometimes that's difficult. Sometimes emotions get the best of you. I know they do me. Sometimes you just hate someone and want to call them out whenever an opportunity presents itself. But there really isn't a need. This fandom, it's honestly a much happier place when you look for things you like about it than things you don't, especially with things that don't actually involve the 3.5 hours on Fall Saturdays.
FWIW - I not only think a state of the blog thing is appropriate, it should probably be done every 4 or 6 months in my opinion. I do think people tend to have a lot of questions and often do wonder how the writers and the creator of the blog they love are doing and are thinking. They also like to try to understand all that has happened and that you are trying to do for the future. So, not only do I think this post is good, I think it should be more frequent.
December 6th, 2013 at 2:17 PM ^
The small-minded thrive on putting others down to lift themselves up. The most dangerous thing about a great sports site like this is that we have no control over the outcome of the subject matter. When the team is losing and worse, not at all entertaining, morale just tanks. Seems to me that the small-minded nurse their rage and lash out in a pathetic attempt to cheer themselves up.
Thanks for all the hard work the writers and knowledgeable commenters put into this great site! I look forward to the return of comment moderation.
December 6th, 2013 at 2:19 PM ^
amount of quality you produce. Because you both take pride in producing and sharing content that has real substance (unlike people like me who lob in an inane comment or two every few days), it is offensive when a fly-by commenter begins an argument without substance.
I have been to your blog several times through links on this site. The content produced by you, Brian, Ron Utah, Magnus, ST3, Mathlete, BronxBlue, CRex, Seth, Ace, BiSB, or LSA2000 (I am sure I missed a few) is why most of us come to this blog. Keep up the great posts and keep directing us to your blog (as much as Brian deems appropriate on his) and you will surely develop a significant following.
December 6th, 2013 at 2:27 PM ^
exactly. The amount of fantastic, insightful, and thought provoking material on this blog keeps us coming back. I love this blog, and to say that it is the best Michigan blog around is an understatement. Thank you for creating it, maintaining it, and keeping it classy!
December 6th, 2013 at 2:25 PM ^
Great post, completely agree, and I completely agree with Brian, too. My apologies if I've ever been a part of the problem (though I'm not sure if I'll ditch the av. I'm too used to it after five years...)
And I do believe if one looks at Article II, Section 3 of the MGoConstition, one should now find this:
"Brian shall from time to time give to the MGoCommunity information of the State of the Blog and dictate for their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient."
December 6th, 2013 at 4:28 PM ^
People should have awesome, distinctive, and whenever possible MMB related avatars, because if you're not being a giant asshole, you have nothing to fear.
December 6th, 2013 at 4:32 PM ^
More damn (productive) sound, etc.
December 6th, 2013 at 2:05 PM ^
but I think if a voting system reappears everything will calm down. There are probably hundreds of extremely level-headed people who read the forum who would -1 all the yucks who are losing their minds and just constantly turning every Borges and/or Brandon Brown thread into drivelling flamebait.
I appreciate all the work the MGoStaff puts in. It's a damned free website, if people don't like it go to a better Michigan website. Oh wait! There isn't one.
December 6th, 2013 at 2:12 PM ^
The only thing I really worry about with the return of voting is the fact that the people who only know/got used to the site without it are just going to abuse the hell out of the downvote. Compulsively downvoting every post from someone they disagree with, even if it's a cogent point. That kind of thing. You could see it happening towards the end of the old system, just a constant -1 point trend going down the line across a thread at quick succession. That's not what downvoting should be for.
I really liked the way the voting system went from all-out negbang/posbang to the -1/+5 range, as it separated the wheat from the chaff without being overly punitive. Even if it did end the Golden Era of the I'm-Here-For-The-Posbang.
December 6th, 2013 at 2:22 PM ^
I agree - I felt like many reasonable comments got grayed out because of simple disagreement.
I think instead it should be a simple system: three buttons.
Agree, Disagree, Troll.
Troll should only be used when trolling, not because someone disagrees with your point.
December 6th, 2013 at 2:28 PM ^
I probably only speak for myself here, but I think unfairly grayed-out comments are easy to spot - they're usually followed by non-grayed-out comments of a reasonable tone. Plus you could see the headers.
Ultimately I think my broader opinion is that practically any moderation system is better than no moderation system. I'd rather have the problems that come with one than the problems that come with not having one.
December 6th, 2013 at 3:09 PM ^
That people might imagine that every comment is or ought to be something to agree or disagree with is a bit troubling all on its own.
Seems like there should be a way to upvote a post that doesn't constitute an opinion at all, just because it's a useful piece of information. Those are often the best contributions of all.
December 6th, 2013 at 2:40 PM ^
First off, I've visted this site almost everyday for going on seven years now (not sure what that says about me), and I wanted to thank Brian and everyone else on the site for their hard work. I tend to post sporadically, but I'd been completely turned off to it this season because of the constant bitching.
I welcome the comment moderation system back wholeheartedly, but do I agree that if it's possible, changing the greyed out commment threshhold to soemthing like -3 or -5 would help pointless negging hiding posts. I found that to be an annoying phenomenon back when we had moderation.
December 6th, 2013 at 2:53 PM ^
you could set your own threshold for greyed-out comments. I liked this, because I found that a minus-one wasn't necessarily sufficient to flag a comment worth avoiding, given the tendency to neg based on mere disagreement.
December 7th, 2013 at 9:22 AM ^
This was the worst aspect of the ability to neg, which is why I strongly believe that negging should not be free. It should cost a commenters points to neg somebody else, and I think the cost per neg in points should be higher for newbies and/or those with very low point totals. Those who've established themselves as reasonably rational, non-dickish commenters should be charged the least; perhaps over a certain point total negging should be free since it's unlikely to be abused.
The internet in total is an unimaginably vast and complex ecosystem, but since it's populated by humans it's going to exhibit all the normal idiocy, beauty, stupidity, and genius of human culture in the physical world. Humans are intensely social primates highly attuned to group dynamics and are normally very conscious of their status—or lack thereof—within their group, and how their group measures up to outside neighboring groups, and these drives underlie the primal urges of sports fandom.
The anonymity of the average posting board allows the uninhibited display of one-upmanship, aggression, threat-posturing, and slander, and unless there is active and assertive moderation 24/7/365, even sites that require paid membership for commenting will quickly devolve into bottomless cesspools of vile dumbness.
This shouldn't be surprising; think of what our real world would be like in the complete absence of any formal and duly-constituted policing agency.
December 9th, 2013 at 1:03 PM ^
December 6th, 2013 at 2:05 PM ^
The forums got so messed up during football season absent the user moderation tools that I actually found myself frequenting 11W to get more intelligent, non-insulting dialogue about Michigan football. No offense to the good folks over at 11W who run a tremendous site, but that's kind of depressing when you think about it.
I was an MGoBlog "lurker" for about 18 months before I opened an account and started posting last January, so while I don't have the whole history I've certainly seen the quality of the forums change over the last 2-3 years. Really hope that some of the changes Brian mentioned get this place back to what it was like in late 2011/early 2012. I'm sure others would rather see it be more like it was in 2008 or prior, but you get the point. The last 3 months were pretty brutal in these forums.
December 6th, 2013 at 2:31 PM ^
The funny thing is Ive noticed a couple problem posters common between the two sites. One Michigan poster at 11W that quickly got downvoted and banned is the same poster that was loudly complaining to Ace last week about the fact that he would do an article here with Ross from 11W and that we didnt care about the OSU viewpoint here.
December 6th, 2013 at 3:59 PM ^
As much as I hate the team they support, I have to give the regular posters and mods over there credit. They really do a great job of soliciting opinions and good dialogue from Michigan fans, as well as fans of some other programs like NW, Nebraska and Alabama.
Obviously they have some idiot posters same as we do over here, but I found that if I was generally respectful when making my points, I could draw a lot of upvotes and get good conversation going even if I took positions that went against the grain of the OSU fanbase. More times than not, if someone went and negbanged me just because I was a Michigan fan, a number of other posters would tell the person in question to pound sand.
Sadly, I've seen some MSU and OSU posters on this site recently with relatively good intentions get skewered for no reason other than they weren't Michigan fans. To me that's bullshit. Half the fun of sports is getting some good jokes and dialogue going not just with your own fans but with the fans of other teams as well. I root like hell for OSU to lose every week but I'll still talk football for hours with an OSU fan if he/she isn't blatantly trolling.
It's part of what makes sports fun, and when we treat rival fans looking for good dialogue like shit all we're doing is creating the Michigan equivalent of RCMB. If I wanted that, I'd go post a bunch of juvenile crap on the Michigan 24/7 site.
And you're right about the problem posters showing up on both sites. A few months ago, I saw another incarnation of "Ghost of" show up at 11W under the moniker "Ghost of Woody". Didn't take long for him to turn that site against him as well.
On a sidenote, it would be great if Ace or Brian could next year do a similar version of the "Sun and Blue Tuesday" feature that 11W was running during football this year. The back and forth dialogue between Ace and Johnny was a good read each week over there.
December 6th, 2013 at 5:25 PM ^
Agree..having Ace do a Sun and Bluesday type feature over here would be great. By the end of the year, it was one of the favorite features of the 11W board. The posters over there love Ace...he gets treated better over there than he does here sometimes.
December 7th, 2013 at 9:30 AM ^
In any population, it seems as though there's always at least one guy who simply can't not be a loudmouthed obnoxious asshole. The guy who has an unquenchable urge to go to a bar, get shitfaced, and talk crap to total strangers. The guy who inevitably exhausts the patience of the other patrons, and then gets thrown out on his ass into the parking lot but not until he's already gotten beaten bloody by the bouncers.
December 7th, 2013 at 9:38 AM ^
December 6th, 2013 at 3:08 PM ^
I agree. LONG time lurker...still am for the most part. But you're spot on. The board and comments sections have been really rough to visit this FB season. I kicked in a few bucks to the donate button to help the up vote/down vote project.
December 6th, 2013 at 2:07 PM ^
Eh -- I can appreciate that you don't like the direction that the forum has taken with regards to tone, but if you are going to bring back that voting system, please at least make it so that you can only downvote a certain number of posts per day or that you have to spend your points to do it. Count me as one who likes the forums better than they used to be, despite the additional vitriol, because butthurt douchebags no longer have the power to make posts disappear that they disagree with. I got really sick of seeing posts labeled "trolling" or "redundant" that obviously weren't, and were only downvoted because people didn't agree with them. I don't think that you used to have a more courteous exchange of ideas as much as you had groupthink.
December 6th, 2013 at 2:30 PM ^
December 6th, 2013 at 4:19 PM ^
I think that system, or something similar, would be good to return to.
December 6th, 2013 at 4:51 PM ^
It'd be even cooler if you could vote as much as you wanted on any one post, with each vote giving or taking away points from the poster, with that stipulation that every vote cost you points as well. At the very least it'd be interesting to see if I had a tolerance threshold for just going FFFFFUUUUUUCCCCKKKKK YYYYYOOOOOUUUUU and clicking the down arrow 5,000 times.
December 6th, 2013 at 2:08 PM ^
#teambrian
December 6th, 2013 at 2:10 PM ^
M-Wolverine got banned??
December 6th, 2013 at 2:22 PM ^
Maybe we need to start an homage thread filled with off-topic images and videos.
December 6th, 2013 at 2:10 PM ^
December 6th, 2013 at 4:26 PM ^
December 6th, 2013 at 2:11 PM ^
The key to getting the most out of this site is to absolutely never read the comments.
December 6th, 2013 at 2:12 PM ^
December 6th, 2013 at 2:20 PM ^
It is sad. This site, or at least the commentors, are less of a community than when I joined. Now, when people dismiss these comments like they were on YouTube or mLive, we as users are doing something wrong.
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