Meta: HTTV Kickstarter
I'm here to discuss the 800 pound gorilla on the right side of the Blog. We're several days into the kickstarter for HTTV 2014, and we're still sitting at around 70% funded. I don't recall the exact figures, but it seems to me that in years past, the kickstarter has been fully funded shortly after the link went up. So I'd like to ask the board, have you participated in the kickstarter in prior years and are holding back this year? If so, why? Is this just part of the general malaise that follows a 7-6 year? Is it too early in the year to be excited about football?
I'd become so tired of the whole thing by the time you were dinged on the front page that I didn't say anything at the time. I didn't like the way you were treated, but man was I sick of meta blog talk.
I upped you because I respect your opinion, even if I don't totally agree with it. I think the drive-by negging that happens on posts like this usually occurs with a bunch more traffic during the year; if you are posting in late May on a UM football blog you are a bit of a lifer. :-)
Sorry for misreading what you said. I do think that there is a small subset of the blog that is more pro Brian than pro UM sports coverage, but I think most people just enjoy this place as a nice area to discuss UM sports and not be dragged into needless threads that end with offensive comments and reactionary BS.
The content on the site has been hit-and-miss recently, and that's fine. I don't expect gold every year. I do still believe the site is the best one for UM sports online, and that isn't so much a knock on the other big sites (which I find perfectly fine), but a testament to this place's ability to remain of a pretty high quality after, what, 7+ years?
I normally steer away from conversation of The Purge, but if I may offer my quasi-insider take and then I'll sit quietly in the corner for a while.
This is a labor of love for everyone who works on the blog, and I'm not talking from a financial sense. Sure, none of us do it because it brings us unimaginable riches. But I'm saying that we all genuinely love Michigan sports, and especially Michigan football. The malaise you speak of doesn't skip us. In fact, if there is a person who takes Michigan football bed-shitting more personally than Brian, I haven't met him.
So, when you combine your job with your passion, and one going to shit causing the other to suffer, it sucks, and forces people to redouble themselves into said shit. It's one thing to be able to turn the TV off after the Penn State game, throw the cat through the dog, and go drink your sorrows away and try to forget it. It's quite another to have to sigh and jump into tending a message board full of people who want blood, then to have to write about it, then to have to rewatch it a dozen times play by play. I'm only tangentially associated with it (this is obviously not my day job), and last year damn near killed me.
So in a situation like that, no one is immune from allowing long-standing personal/professional disagreements to boil into each other. I've had people call me a hack and undermine my (admittedly non-serious) work, and it pissed me off to no end despite it being just a hobby on the side. But I continue to write because it is a chance to share my fandom with others. There are many times I want to walk away (lord knows it would be easier), and sometimes the ability to cope with the difficulty of being a pissed-off fan and a professional discusser of fandom requires steps that take away from the things that cause one to bleed into the other. And so it is with the inter-personal conflicts that span tat gap between fandom with the management of the blog.
The bottom line is that Brian (and the rest of us) sometimes takes uncomfortable steps that make it possible to function as we need to. If that means banning people for personal reasons, sometimes that will happen. It doesn't make it great. But it is necessary for us as fan-bloggers.
So while I think The Purge went farther and became more personal than it needed to (which I've told Brian), you have to look at it from our side as well. People come here, at least to some extent, because it is a group of Michigan fans writing about Michigan, so you can't be surprised when they react the same way you'd expect any Michigan fan to react in the face of 27-for-27.
I agree that it probably wasn't the best way of handling the situation on Brian's part, but I guess I didn't see the dramatic difference between Brian going to each comment in the original post and saying what he wanted to say individually. His point was he was explaining his counter-argument to the common arguments against unionization, and he took representative samples from the blog. His method wasn't the best because it singled out certain users, but his snarky responses are par for the course around here. Again, you an entitled to feel how you do and that's fine, but had Brian taken one of my arguments and front-paged it I would have figured that's a possible by-product of posting on a public forum.
In that case, THAT one I don't feel bad about.
Brian's article on that subject (http://mgoblog.com/content/fisking-internet-capa) was basically just refuting the arguments of various posters. He didn't attach names (though he linked through to posts).
MINE was the article (http://mgoblog.com/content/bust-capa) that basically said that drawing other conclusions was stupid, but I wasn't even talking about peoples' opinions of what college sports SHOULD look like. I was simply analyzing the case from a purely legal standpoint, and posited that legally speaking, the decision was almost certainly correct.
Oh that's fine, I didn't really expect anyone to feel bad for me. And I didn't really expect to start a big debate, I was just posting my reason for avoiding it.
And I generally like Ethan Hawke.
Was at the movies this weekend and saw previews for The Purge #2. Looked horrible.
well, anything is going to pale in comparison to the movie you were in
That's true. I loved Bill the Butcher in "The Crucible."
...and "The Crucible 2," where Giles Corey comes back to life and is sent to the wall, where he becomes Maester Aemon.
Thanks for adding your insider-y take about this blog. I think people forget around here, like we tend to forget about opposing players, that everyone is human around these parts, not little avatars that live on a server. People react emotionally, sometimes logically and sometimes illogically, and in the end the goal is usually to produce the best, most positive experience for everyone. I always thought the OP was referring to the Union call-out, which I thought was a little silly on Brian's part but, I don't know, it's the internet so don't be surprised that your opinion might be thrown back in your face.
With the Purge, there were people complaining about how personal it got, but at the same time I think there was a need to remove a subset of the "old guard" that just wanted to shit on people and start fights. This place is great because it doesn't have that many trolls, and when they show up they are usually removed quickly. Just because a guy built up a warchest of meaningless points over years of posting doesn't make him/her impervious to becoming an unnecessary element of a community. I, for one, liked the removal of these users, even if there were a couple of unfortunate victims.
And here's the thing about banning long-time users: they can still rejoin with a new account like three minutes later. No one is prevented from participating on the board. I doubt we could do so even if we wanted. We ban personas. Often, those personas take on a life of their own, and nuking them almost frees the users from the conflicts that arise around that persona.
On the Union fisking thing, I don't feel bad, primarily for the same reason. Getting your username called out is different than being called out by actual real-world name. It was a little out of character (Brian doesn't engage with board posts very often), but I didn't think the responses were inappropriate content-wise.
Yeah! And even if I get banned from Chuck-e-Cheese for life, I'm still going to get back in there so I can play skee-ball by wearing a different rat costume!
As you mentioned about yourself, I take little of this personally, but if you take a look at what mod actions were taken the night of the PSU game it was LSA and I dealing with a message board full of people that want blood. Outside of us I don't see what went on, but that was a stressful night that certainly felt like we were handling it and maybe without the full support of the MGoBlog Twitter feed.
I also have a different quasi-insider version of The Purge. This isn't to challenge you and your info, just to say that there are people with different info/opinions.
I was there as well nukin' threads and Bolivianing trolls, though I didn't really post in the Mod Action Sticky (I didn't think many people would come back and be like, "what happened to my 'TEH OFFICIAL THROW AL BORGESS INTO A VOLCANO THREAD' thread?'). And I discussed the possibility of locking things down with Brian after the game, but we doubted it would do much good. I took his "let it burn" thing as being a sign that we shouldn't feel the need to try to put all the fires out, because at some point there just aren't enough buckets.
I don't have any insider info on the Purge. The Brian/WLA stuff predates my time, and I don't see most of his interactions with people. I'm just trying to level-set with people that we're human, and as such are subject to the same kind of stuff that makes any of us want to rage-quit things.
Brian's prior bashing of posters and his on-going negativity toward Hoke and the prospects for the upcoming season have dampened enthusiasm, and therefore hurt support and sales.
I hate to say it, 7-6 had WAY more to do with diminished sales than a couple of posters being called out by Brian (I'm guessing virtually nobody here really remembered the particulars of that little event until today) and the perception that he's down a bit on Hoke.
Hasn't Hoke earned some negativity though? Or at the very least, pessimism?
My point is that negativity is not good for a business of this sort.
The blog has grown and new people have tried to join, but the old guard keeps screaming get off my lawn.
""Look how dumb the idiot portion of my fanbase is"
Fixed that for you.
Either way - if you have a business and a significant chunk of your customer base are idiots, it's probably best not to tell them as much.
You can call me an idiot, that's fine. You're not trying to get me to buy magazines from you, though.
I'm going to start a Kickstarter fund to buy you all airplane tickets to Nepal, where you can all hug it out and make a movie about how blog interactions affect nerds in real life.
I'm typically lukewarm to the majority of Magnus' posts but goddamnit if he didn't just win this thread, and win it outright.
I also acknowledge the Malaise (coined by Magnus) and as a result am not very enthused about this upcoming season. And to be honest I found the last few years I didn't read the book much other than a few skimmings after the initial "OMG IT'S HERE!!" feeling wore off.
I'll still make a Kickstarter pledge, more so because I don't want the whole enterprise to fail as opposed to my desire to read the thing cover to cover.
I have been reading the blog since 2010, love everything about the site, and I really enjoyed the magazine last year. I haven't purchased it this year, just because I really don't feel like I need a preview of this year's team. I think most all of us who have participated in the past and haven't this year probably have that in the back of our minds. It's not hard to predict this team:
- We had the worst OL in school history a year ago and lost an All-American 1st rounder and a 3rd rounder from that group. It's not going to be pretty.
- Doug Nussmeier says we are going to run it down people's throats this year. Al Borges said that in 2011, 2012, and 2013, and yet 2011 was the only semblance of a RB featured offense since 2007.
- TE's: We don't have any until October.
- DL: Frank Clark is going to break out (just like he did in 2012 and 2013) /s
- Up-tempo offense, it will shred us again for the 27th time since 2007.
- I'm never really interested in the B1G opponent breakdowns, because I already know a great deal about those guys. This year's non-conference slate has made me completely disinterested in that entire section. However, I think Utah may end up being a game like last year's UConn game when it's all said and done.
I don't care anymore. there i said it. I have better things to spend my money on, like food, housing, hockey, beer, race entrance fees.
I signed up when it was launched, but I can see why others haven't. The down season doesn't help, nor does the fact that there haven't been much traffic-causing "events" to the site recently that would drive an uptick in casual fans signing up. I suspect it will be funded without issue, and I'll enjoy reading it.
I would imagine it's due to a lack of excitement and overall focus on the football program right now. I haven't ever bought HTTV (because of a poor college kid problems mixed with feeling that I spend enough time reading about Michigan sports on this blog as is), but I don't have a lot of excitement for the season at this point. I'll get excited as the season approaches, but I've been hurt too much in the recent past. Last season was the most agonizing season I can remember so all I really expect from this season is a more improved team.
FWIW, the only reason I purchased HTTV in the past is to support Seth and show my appreciation for all of his hard work and the hard work of the "secondary" contributors. Not that the book itself isn't really good-looking and informative, but I think we all know that we can get the same information here on mgoblog or elsewhere in "real time."
WolvinLA2 put the general sentiment of a lot of old-timers well in his comment above - I think Brian alienated a decent number of die-hard followers a few months ago, followers that spoke with their wallets as well as by contributing good thoughts/comments on the Board. I for one rarely read the Board anymore and almost never comment except to throw in some snark now and again. This coming from a guy that was pretty damn active on the Board since 2009. Brian did himself a huge disservice IMO but, as they say, its his blog, man.
Anyway, I encourage you all to toss some $$$ to the HTTV kickstarter if only to support the guys you appreciate like Seth and Space Coyote and Bry_Mac, etc.
Well put Cooper-Lilly. I basically contributed a fairly decent amount because I wanted to show support to the people who run this thing and this seemed like a relatively painless way to do so and get something in return.
LIke you said - I'm voting with my wallet.
As one of the "old timers" being alienated, I'm not buying it. The sales for the past couple of years were in the thousands of buyers, and as of today it's less than half that. Unless there are literally a thousand people who used to buy stuff at MGoBlog but feel bothered by a couple of posts months ago, I think the mediocre season (and ongoing trend) of the program combined with the lack of a "wow" factor is what's involved.
By this, I don't mean Michigan football (exactly). I mean the fact that it is EXTREMELY likely we will go 8-4 or 9-3 this year. Against an unexciting schedule. Which will likely put us behind two, if not three, of our big rivals. Which sucks.
Hopefully the team will surprise like it did in 2011 and go 11-2 (or better). But that's just it -- that would be a real surprise, and and any honest preview would treat it as such.
So I don't think--when we're 1,000 short--that it's "Meta" Blog stuff. It's UM football and it's performance (and lack thereof).
I just hope to enjoy the watching the games (and not overanalyze it), hope Hoke wins enough (pick your number; I know I have mine) to readily keep his job and thus we won't have to spend next off-season discussing whether Brandon should offer Jim Harbaugh $10 mil/year. That's my big-time goals for this year. Which is not exactly exciting when it's been 10 years since we've won a B1G title.
FWIW, I did support the Kickstarter to support the blog/content and I want to learn more about Nuss. But to find out if our 3rd string TE will contribute and how the LB rotation will develop, etc? Not something I can get fired up for to delve into this year.
You know what, everyone is jumping on the "Brian trashed his followers" bandwagon.
I'm going to stand up for him.
He was right to call people out. Some people were straight up dicks all the time and they got away with it because they had a bajillion fucking points. The board is 10x better than it was 8 months ago precisely because the banhammer got swung with authority.
It was overdue and if some people are butt-hurt about it and want to take the Mag's funding as a sign that Brian alienated his customers then go for it. But Brian did what was absolutely needed to be done, b/c the board was utter shit for a while.
Lets all be honest here - I haven't seen any evidence that Brian gives two hoots about the Board. I have no reason to believe he would have known anything about that thread bashing that recruit unless someone emailed him about it. Now I don't know this to be a fact, but he definitely hasn't outwardly shown any interest in the Board, that's for sure. The only reason he purged long-time members was because bashing recruits threatens his livelihood. And I totally understand that part - protecting one's livelihood and family is more important than anything in the world. But lets not get carried away thinking Brian geninuely cares about Board and the comments therein in general - there is absolutely no evidence that is the case. Its the Mods that do all the damn work (and get nothing in return, might I add). Were it up to Brian, I'm not so sure there would even be a Board....
Last year, the hockey/hoops preview got me excited, so without that (and with the malaise, TM) I'm just not that into it.
Plus, I've been getting HTTV and the Wolverine preview for as long as they have existed, and every year I skim more and more and get less and less out of them. I don't want to "get to know" the coaching staff and how much the D will be "more agressive" and teh offense will "man ball" down the field. I can read up on the team thru the site here- I already know the OL is gonna be a disaster and if it's not, I already know it'll be b/c of Nuss's "simplicifcation" and that the inner OL posiitons are more important to the running game. DG is a known comodity at this point and so is Shane Morris. The D returns almost everyone- so the questions are 1) will JMFR's move work out and 2) will a safety step up? I'm sure there will be a dedicated article to Peppers. At this point, I'm in a "show me" sate of mind.
It's nice to have a tactile experience on the beach in Aug, but every year it's more of the same and the result is dissappointment 7/8 years.
I'm particularly interested in reading SC's take on what Coach Nuss is going to try to do.
However, I groan to myself whenever I think of the football team. It's a tiring and painful subject that I feel compelled to return to mostly out of loyalty...Whereas I can't get enough info on the MBB team.
For the first time in my 20+ years (I'm 31) of being an M Football diehard, I'm just not looking forward to football season one bit--even now that summer has begun. (Usually by this time of year, I've got my daily countdown going to get me to the opener...not so much with Appy Fucking State!)
Howeva, I will pledge and support HTTV as always for the same reason why I coughed up $1,100 for two ENDZONE seats for this puke home schedule: loyalty.
That the first year I write content, NO ONE WANTS THE CONTENT.
I know you were probably joking, but I'm sure that's not the case since your stuff is always spot on.
But I just noticed that the pop culture reference I used to show my coolness is 17 YEARS OLD.
Damn. I might not be with it. Or hip.
But thanks.