No. It’s “I know a little German. He’s standing over there waves”
I appreciate the job that the mods and admins do on this board. But you don’t provide content, as moderators and admins. You may provide content as posters. But frankly, you’re traffic cops and occasionally bouncers (and the mods aren’t even bouncers, though they’re on the Bouncer Council, so to speak). That may keep the belligerents from taking over, and in that case does add value, but it doesn’t create content. You are not editors. It’s not as if you take diamonds in the rough and enhance them into “What If Someone Else Had Written The Lord Of The Rings?” The posters on this board are more than just people who come to sit on your furniture and waste your mortgaged business space. The things that the poster here write attract other posters who write their own things which attract other posters who write other things…I’m guessing that probably 1/5 of the active membership at the time that P2Post got started were here because of the aforementioned LOTR thread. Some are here because of something Liberal wrote, or because of one of lieu’s toilet threads, or because they someone quoted in their livejournal something pithy and deep that swampbear posted in an MMP, or because they heard about TokyoPlayer’s good news and are following the saga of Beta-chan.
We’re not just consumers here. We’re producers. Granted, we’re producing in the playground that’s owned by Creative Loafing and the Chicago Reader, but WE are one of the major factors in what advertising eyeballs you’re getting as much as Ed’s alter ego is. Maybe more…like I said, I’m guessing 50% of the posters here couldn’t even tell you if their weekly (assuming such exists for their area) carries the Straight Dope column.
We the posters are the restaurant owners in that we provide all the content. The mods and admins are landlords, in that they provide absolutely nothing but the infrastructure.
Ed’s vanity forum was the equivalent of an absentee landlord who rents out commercial space to an upscale restaurant, and then without warning or consultation adds a drive thru or a tacky neon sign out front. I have no doubt that the restaurant owners would be pissed.
I assume you are not including me in the category of moderator or admin, seeing as how I am neither.
But to go back to my restaurant, I as a diner am the one shaping the content of the menu by what I order. If all the customers were there saying “we refuse to eat this persian crap, give us cheeseburgers” then the restaurant would be out of business. So it is due to my appreciation of fine persian food that the restaurant can survive. My desires for persian food is what keeps that restaurant alive.
Well, the owner of that restaurant does nothing but sit on his ass all day. The cooks and waiters are the ones doing all the work. The cooks should be the one posting advertisements, not the owner.
But anyway we can argue the fine points of the analogy all day. It is incorrect to say that all the owners do is provide the infrastructure. They also determine the types of forums allowed here, the types of discussion, what kind of discussion is allowed, etc. That does as much to shape the content as the posts by members.
I don’t have a dog in this fight, especially since the situation seems to have resolved itself to some degree, but this isn’t necessarily true. Sometimes it’s just the management or a new chef or the price and availability of raw ingredients. There’s a restaurant we used to frequent, that had little asterisks next to several menu items, indicating they were the most popular. I used to order one of those items consistently. Then one day, for no apparent reason, it disappeared from the menu. And it wasn’t anything exotic, either – it was a chicken ceasar sandwich! When they took it off the menu, I tried a few other things, none of which were appealing to me, so I quit going there any more than once in a very rare blue moon.
Well, it’s not just one diner. It’s the set of all diners, in combination with management decisions. I as a diner can have a small influence on the menu, but the preferences of the majority of diners will have more influence.
However, i do think your example shows another example of how a restaurant is similar to this message board - the management of a restaurant can change its menu regardless of popularity of menu items. In the same way that the moderators shape the discussions here as well as the posters.
Again, we aren’t shaping the content; we are creating it out of nothing. In your analogy, we decide on the menu, go out and buy the groceries, bring it back and prepare it, and then server it to the customers. And we are also the customers.
The board staff is the company that supplies the tables and chairs.
The moderators cannot possibly shape the discussion of threads they do not participate in. What percentage of threads would you estimate the mods participate in?
Take the Game Room as a quick example; particularly the NFC East thread. How, exactly, are the mods shaping that discussion?
oo oo, can I pu-leeeze be the astonishingly cute cashier, the one everyone flirts with, please pretty please?
God these analogies get drawn out.
The Red Cross is demanding access to the analogies currently being tortured.
Yes, but it’s an enemy analogy, so the Geneva Convention doesn’t apply.
Again I disagree. The conversations that take place here are heavily influenced by the number and types of the forums. When I go to the front page, the descriptions of the forums give me an idea of what kind of discussions are expected here. And the moderators enforce the rules that determine how far you can go in the discussions.
Examples: if Great Debates didn’t have the “no personal insults” rule, then the discussions in there would be quite different. The presence of the Cafe Society forum means that there are many more threads relating to movies, books and TV shows than there was previously to the existence of that forum. etc.
OK, all right. This thread deserves to die a quiet death anyway. I’ll move on to other things.
Damn you!!! (good line)
I’m confused. So…are we going to cook and serve the unicorns in a Persian restaurant, or what? And if so, are we responsible for cooking said unicorn, or are we merely going to eat it?
Either way, I like medium rare.
I disagree because the analogy has no fine points; it’s a formless gray mush of wrong. The only remotely-restaurantish aspect of this board are the forums dedicated to the columns, where 600-word “meals” are served up and chewed on. All other fora, up until the new and still-shaky “Barn House”, are strictly the original creations of posters. There is no expectation that the moderators/admins/Creative Loafing employees are required to entertain us by starting threads for us to comment on. Rather than a restaurant, the better analogy is to a convention center with many hundreds of rooms where anyone can hang out a sign: “Interesting topic being discussed here” and might or might not attract drop-ins. The role of the people who run the place is to keep the lights on and the vandals out. They can choose, of course, to play a more aggressive role, deciding that all room discussions must meet with their approval, or that room discussions can only be started by them. There are boards where this is the norm, though these are not boards I’m personally interested in visiting.
They’ve sorted the discussions into very broad categories, is all, and that was a good decision. Facts in one forum, debates in another, unchecked insults in a third, etc. Beyond that, if they can keep the server running and the obvious trolls/spammers out, I don’t personally need or want them to do any more, nor am I inclined to give them more credit than they deserve. What you’re describing (types of forums, types of discussion, kind of discussion) is the infrastructure, and it’s not even a complex infrastructure, at that.
If we eat the unicorn, can we count it as “horse” in the Omnivore’s 100 thread?
You mean, with the meat slightly pink? Or invisible?
Hi, everyone. It is such a great day in Straight Dope Land. I’m very happy. I love things. Flowers make me smile. Trucks go “vroom vroom.” Happy day for everyone. Smile Smile. Everything makes me smile. Smiling makes me smile. Happy day. Everything is beautiful and wonderful and great and neat and fantastic and terrific and super duper neat-o cool. I’m just so happy. Admin is so wonderfully awsomely terrifically beautifully neat-o.
Happy happy. I love to smile. I love happy.