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So the question is, why isn't Barbelith developing along similar paths? What's stunted our growth? I know we have a lot of talented people on here... is it that we can't get our shit together? I remember a while back we tried to produce a book and that quickly devolved into an e-zine and then just a quickly died.
Okay. Let me tell you what I know about disinformation. Firstly Richard Metzger was employed by a large multinational corporation of some kind to develop the site. They were given a significant budget to get it going and they developed it accordingly to sit in the middle of the zeitgeist of the period - based on the interest in things like the X-files. The next thing that happened was kind of cool. Basically someone important came to see the product they'd made and suddenly went "Oh fuck! You've got stuff on here about God being a spaceman! I'm a Christian and more importantly this company has a Christian reputation! We can't be associated with this!" At which point - as I understand the story - they were going to shut it down, but instead sold it to Richard for a negligible amount of money.
Now Disinformation started straight out of the gate with a commercial purpose, with bills to pay and with a man who needed to make money out of the enterprise. It started as a company and has remained a company. And actually that's quite impressive. If you go to their site now you can see how much less content is on it now than was in the past. It's basically now a subcultural shop with some message boards and a limited amount amount of content (that's more of a weblog-style now than a webzine style) on the front. It's not the site it once was, but then that's hardly a shock - the advertising market for websites dropped enormously - almost catastrophically a couple of years back at the time of the dot.com crash. Their funding will be much lower than it was back then. They've done well to survive it intact.
But that's the core of the whole thing - it's a business! Barbelith is not a business, it didn't get initial funding to be set up, it has had no engagement with multi-national corporations, it doesn't take advertising and - for the most part - it's run by the community for that community and maintained and developed by me with occasional help from Cal. We have other jobs as well. I mean we could make this place into a business but I don't think we'd make any money out of it, and more importantly I don't think it would make the community any better. I think - in fact - it would make it way way worse.
Now I'll stand up straight away and say that I'd love to spend my time developing exciting and valuable online communities that are built for the good of the people who post on them. I can say with my hand on my heart that I could have made this place almost infinitely better than it is at the moment if I had nothing else to do with my time and God knows I wish I could have done so. It's one of the things that I enjoy (and excites me) more than anything else and I'm routinely aware that I'm not able to produce something of the quality that I'd like. Still I'm also actually vaguely delighted that the community is actually of the quality it is and I don't feel jealous of disinfo one little bit. |
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