Well, I’m OK with bluntness, so let me bluntly say that you are wrong. It was not bluntly expressed. It was rudely, aggressively, dismissively, and counter-productively expressed. Saying to someone’s (virtual) face that they wrote a failed column for papers that served as bin-liners is not blunt. It was a series of repeated personal attacks. Several other people in that thread gave blunt, even harsh, criticism of the proposal that did not devolve into personal attacks.
I guess I’m not clear on what’s so bad about that. Let’s just take that at face value: Ed needs the cash for whatever reason. He’s offering a new product and doing a little market research to see if people are interested. If you are (I’m certainly interested), great. If not, okay, that’s fine. But why are you ‘put off’? That feels like being put off because Mountain Dew released yet another flavor that you have no interest in, or Taco Bell has found another way to combine its ingredients.
nvm… xx
I agree with every bit of that. Ed/Cecil has provided all of us with lots of entertainment, and this board would never have existed without his column. If he wants to make a little extra money in his retirement off his column or this board by voluntarily having people who want to pay a little extra, while also getting out some new ‘Cecil’ columns, more power to him. If you don’t want to pay for the extra forum privileges, you don’t have to.
It’s totally inexplicable to me how many people took umbrage with this.
To me, and it’s completely possible I misread the post, it wasn’t clear what the point was. “The board needs money and this is my proposal to help monetize” vs “Would people sign up for this proposal, with the money going to me” are very different proposals. The rude language aside, there is a history of Ed coming in and making the changes he wants while ignoring the user base (with the Barn House maybe being the easiest example) in what appears to be an attempt to solve whatever problem or goal he has. It’s not unreasonable to say “Hey, fix the membership first and then I’ll think about giving you more money for something else”.
I agree, that’s not unreasonable at all.
But it is unreasonable to say “Hey, you useless pile of donkey dung, you’re a failure, stop trying to steal my money so you can buy yourself hookers and blow while bleeding the board dry.” ← obvious hyperbole for effect
I already posted this twice including the original thread in which Ed just ignored it. If membership money went to the board, and the boardroom thing was just for Ed’s column, I was fine with it. I told him I would back him totally. He did not make that clear at all. I understood him to mean that all membership money plus the boardroom money would be in one pile. If the board was in imminent danger of needing cash, I didn’t want any of that money to go to Ed’s column at the expense of the board. Say we needed $100 in memberships to break even but we raised $200. When the owner looks at the bottom line, I want them to see the message board made $100 profit, not that we just broke even because Ed needed $100 for his column.
While the board may not have started without the column, it sure seemed to survive the death of the column just fine. Members paid up, everything was fine. She may have, but I don’t recall Tuba telling us we were on the brink of collapse and posters needed to come up with double the cash. In fact she set up the whole changeover to Discourse without asking for money. A year on discourse and despite people wanting to donate money, we are told it’s not possible and all that is on hold, so obviously no big hurry for money. After her death, Ed steps in and a year later suddenly we need money again and the only thing he will accept as an answer is the return of his column to save us all. He asks for input and then shoots down every bit of input offered that doesn’t align with his goal of restarting his column.
Now, we wait and see. I’m sure Ed, seeing as the Dope is a labor of love for him, will present a totally unbiased opinion back to the Sun-Times.
What @Grrr said. I’d be happy to pay double the suggested yearly rate of $30 if it meant the board could continue. We have too many years of history here to let it go without trying!
I thought about this a long time before posting this. I’ve only been on the SDMB for 5 years, so I’m unfamiliar with whatever old issues are still simmering for long-time users. It seems to me, though, that Ed has become a lightning rod for whatever people don’t like about the SDMB. Maybe we should remember a few things:
Ed Zotti didn’t create Cecil Adams-- an omniscient columnist who was never wrong was the brainchild of a Chicago Reader staffer–but it was Ed’s incarnation of Cecil that made the column so popular: it appeared in 30 newspapers and spawned several successful books. Then newspaper readership fell, and the Straight Dope site took off: 10 years ago it got 3.2 million unique visitors and 10 million views a month. (Read more here.) And who was responsible for that? Ed would be the first to credit his staff and the SD Science Advisory Board, but there’s no denying the importance of his role.
The point is not that Ed should be enshrined. It’s that none of this would exist without him.
The SDMB didn’t survive the death of the column “just fine,” @mordecaiB. And TubaDiva DID warn that we were on the brink of collapse . She did so in August, 2018 and asked for ideas.
It’s obvious we can’t continue as we have; that’s not profitable for the owner of this site.
While they look at the situation and work out what they’re going to do next, we can’t just be sitting on our hands.
So no, this isn’t an Ed thing. Those saying the warnings of doom are getting old might consider that the reason the site is still around is not because of the persuasive abilities of Ed and TubaDiva
Among the responses to TubaDiva’s post was this reply from Lancia:
“… the board has changed so much since I’ve been here that, in some ways, it’s a different message board… I love reading older threads because the tone is usually different. There was lots of snark, to be sure, but less bitching and [more] actual conversation. I’d like to see a return to that.”
So, yeah, times have changed. The only way forward is through openness to new ideas and adaptation. Ed needs to recognize that. But the tone of the SDMB responses has changed, too. Maybe we should think about that as well.
I just want to say I really like your post, @nellybly. Thanks for taking the time to think about it and write it out.
Bluntness aint bad and on reread I accept your verdict. Wrong I am. Probably the excessive harshness of how it was phrased rolled past me as it was, frankly, what I had been thinking as well, but wouldn’t say. And was a bit of a tonic to what seemed like a chorus of “thank you for coming to save us Cecil!” (And violent shouted expletives it still was not.)
What rubs me the wrong way? Do you have some old former friend or generally estranged family member who you have history with generally only calls you up when they want something from you? Otherwise they really don’t act like they like you? Can’t be bothered to talk to you? Does it rub you worse when they try to package their ask as them doing YOU a favor?
This had that flavor to me.
Mind you I’ll usually do them the damn thing they want. And smile. Because I can and the ask usually isn’t such a big deal for me to pull off. (Just dealing with my wife being mad at me for doing it.) History be it familial or otherwise is still history. But the sense in those cases and in this one is of being used by a user and even if I knowingly allow it I can still resent it.
Does that at least make sense?
It sure does to me.
I read Ed’s OP, which smelled “off” to me. Kinda like he was brainstorming as he was typing then hit [Send] on clearly 10% baked ideas. Not nearly half-baked.
I lasted another 10 or 15 posts before I bailed out in resigned disgust but switched the thread from [tracking] to [normal] before I left. I haven’t been back, even when I saw the closure in Latest. Everything I know about our collective reaction to it I learned in those first ~15 posts and here in this thread which I have read entire.
A confused idea poorly presented to an unwelcoming audience is a recipe for everybody to walk away angry and confused. Said recipe duly rose to the occasion.
In any thread one can blame posters with chippy shoulders for being unprovoked jerks. But sometimes the OP really sets a troublesome stage. As wise @Broomstick said upthread, this topic isn’t the usual meaningless hot air we love to share; it’s a matter of life and death for our community. Damn shame the well has been thoroughly fouled (not necessarily poisoned) at a time like this.
Wow, this may be the only time I’ve ever changed someone’s mind on this board. Maybe I should quit while I’m ahead and stop posting now 
(Seriously, I appreciate your willingness to revisit your initial reaction. It’s vanishingly rare, more so than ever).
I’m coming in late to this – see what happens when you skip a couple of days? - but a couple of thoughts.
First, I started reading the original thread with a spirit of interest, but as I saw some of the questions go persistently unanswered, I started to get a little tired of it. Or maybe I should say misanswered…in particular the merchandise question, where I think Ed really doesn’t understand how easy that would be, and how even if some membership were cannibalized for one year, that would be very few cases, and nothing would stop those people from continuing to buy merchandise or become members in later years.
But also, the fact that they might be able to collect money for a special forum, but not from general members, left me scratching my head. Honestly, how much money have they already lost because they haven’t figured out how to turn on the subscription pipeline?
The other thing I’ve been thinking about for a few years. We’ve been hearing for a while about the axe hanging over our heads as the corporate overlords think about what to do with the board. And yes, in 2019 the new ownership group did come in. still, one thing I wonder…this is a company with $300M+ in revenue and expenses probably in the same neighborhood. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that there is no P&L for this message board, and that whatever revenue it makes is buried in a much larger ad revenue line item, and that the minuscule expenses of running it are buried in some large web hosting budget line. That’s not to say that it’s not at risk, but given the things the newspaper business is trying to figure out right now, cutting versus keeping the board will make essentially no financial difference to the owners. The only real risk is that one day in a meeting someone says, “hey, what is this thing anyway?” and then away it goes, just to create a sense of progress. Would it be better to be able to say that hey, this thing is making a small profit and requires no maintenance? Sure. But I guess my point is, the axe may be falling regardless of what we do, mainly because someone suddenly noticed the message board.
Of course, we’ve never had real clarity into what the owner thinks, so I could be way off.
No, fortunately I don’t have anyone in my life like that. But I get the concept. It would irritate me if I did. But the reason why is that I’d expect to have a personal relationship with that person, and not just be a piggy bank or whatever. I don’t have a personal relationship with Ed. I don’t care if he needs more money from me (infrequently) if it’s pitched in a way that he’s going to do something to earn it, and I have a completely uncoerced option.
Look, Ed the admin here bugs me. He doesn’t make an effort to be part of the community, but he drops in from time to time, makes a mess, and then disappears again. That’s irritating. But this - offering a new product? Nah…
YMMV, and it obviously does…
Great minds think alike. The days of newspapers (or any business, really) being big with huge staff numbers to the point of having people where no-one actually knows what they do all day are, for the most part, long gone - so it seems extremely unlikely there’s some guy stuck in a basement office whose job is basically to keep the boards online when he’s not playing World of Warcraft because the pneumatic tube message system doesn’t really need much attention anymore.
I agree with you about the costs etc most likely being buried in some larger generic web hosting/IT budget item, and any ad revenue probably gets collated under digital advertising or something too.
IMO the biggest threat to the board’s continued existence (after losing a critical mass of members for whatever reason) isn’t money or lack thereof, it’s someone in the owning company’s C-suite discovering the boards exist and saying “Why are we hosting a discussion board in the 2020s that’s not related to the newspaper we publish, and instead is a bunch of random internet people talking about weird shit and occasionally mentioning a 50-year old column that’s not being written anymore?”
Then again, it’s also entirely possible the people with the chequebook are entirely aware the boards exist and like having it around for whatever reason - perhaps someone influential is a member/poster here, for example?
It’s all just speculation, ultimately, since we don’t really have a lot of hard facts to work with.
The increasing verbal arms race on the Dope is reflective of the increasing vicious, polarizing effects in society at large.
And if it had been expressed in that manner it would have been OK, an actual useful contribution to the dialogue but descending to pit-level language in the thread was, IMHO, out of line (and it’s not like I haven’t unloaded on people in the Pit… but in the Pit and not other forums).
I got that more as a “reading between the lines” thing. But that was definitely the vibe I got from that poster.
Getting leads for stories is a thing they could do. But I’m surprised they haven’t busted an even easier move: put a big Sun-Times logo/ad at the top of the SDMB home page with links to today’s headlines.
I don’t seek out the Chicago S-T for my news reading needs but if there was a prominent link here I’d probably click on it sometimes. That’s just pennies, I know, still seems odd they don’t do that.
Maybe, maybe not. I would need to see a poll before making that assumption.
Well, yeah, that’s exactly what gets so many people exercised.
We’ve never been told anything about the relationship between the SDMB and its ownership. Ever. Not once in the 20 years I’ve been reading. I’m not talking about the dollar figures, which I assume are not for sharing, but just what the standing is of the Dope. Where it sits in the organization. Who it reports to. What it needs to do to be viable. What the ownership wants of it. How much independence does the administrator have. What the administrator is, officially, in the organization.
It’s all smoke. We’re a community … until, suddenly, we’re peons dependent on the good will of the liege, who has ridden back heroically to save us in some weirdly convoluted fashion that we aren’t allowed to ask questions about but must participate in.
That’s where the anger stems from. It is entirely to be expected. Every change on the board has been fiercely disputed over the years. How could this one not be? Who couldn’t have seen both the joy and derision coming, since it’s merely a duplicate of countless earlier events?
People, at least a possibly sufficient number of people, want to keep the community alive. They are willing to do most anything to help. All they ask in return is to be informed and consulted as equals. It never occurred to Ed to do that. That says everything.
He can still turn this around. Maybe someone from the old-timers who actually know him and have worked with him can get the new reality through his head. If there’s none left and he’s on his own, then so are we. The rain will fall on the just and unjust alike.