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quote:Yup. I like 'lith because it's knowing enough NOT to be Pseuds corner, not everyone here reads the Guardian, and there isn't that much 'sneering-I'm-so-much-smarter-than-THAT-numpty-ness'.
Also not really a fan of Naomi Klein. Read No Logo, checked some facts, agreed with a fair few points, forgot about it.
Stick the board on the top of the Nav, it's why people come here, turn the Zine into something more like a blog, with big features and few people doing the editorial (like the countless other webzines), build an easy-to-load-up-gifs-and-stuff format into another section so people can do Tarot cards and the like.
(OK, none of these ideas are scandalous, how about we ban anyone who isn't a pinko-communist-nimby-student? )
Also, 'Lith is hard to get into. Why?
Oooh. Loads of quesitons and suggestions.
As to the lith becoming pseuds corner. My feeling is that an appropriate form of behaviour on the board would be the treatment of someone as an individual no matter who they were.
But it's also useful to know who someone is. I'd love to have a conversation with Douglas Rushkoff here, for example, about things that related to his work and which I was interested in - and I'd like to KNOW it was him, so that I could follow up on points he'd made outside of the board in one of his books. But I'd not be interested in sitting around watching as thirty people fellated him and tried to get him to sign their copies of "Cyberia". That's not the point at all.
There are several reasons why barbelith is hard to get into at the moment.
1) The new limits on posting will stop people writing excessive crap for the first month of the board. This might even continue longer if everyone thinks it makes the board a better place to be... Or it might be turned off within two weeks if it's a complete disaster. Either way, we can't allow people to just make another suit when they want to post more... Completely misses the point of the exercise.
2) One of them is that if we are moving towards a more egalitarian software which allows voting and individuals relying on one another, then we have to make sure that people don't have multiple suits. For example - in the medium term you'll be able to put yourself up for a moderator role and then be elected for that role by other members of the board. Obviously we can't have people signing in as twenty different people and voting for themselves...
3) How big does a community have to be to work effectively? If we had four thousand members would the conversation be better or worse? Conversation may not be ideal at the moment, but at least it's a manageable size for a community of people. I'm uncomfortable about the idea that we let the world set up camp here and make the site less and less interesting.
I think you've made some really good points about the webzine - I'm going to talk to people about this in greater depth, but I think the webzine may soon sit behind the board as the less important part - with an end to eventually being incorporated within the board structure... |
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