#fort greene in the hood

This post was supposed to be (a) sorta fun and (b) potentially a jumping off point for a discussion about quality of life issues in Fort Greene, albeit in a somewhat sensationalized format. The elimination of the OT was not based on never discussing issues such as this, it was about a small subset of readers taking up too much oxygen on the site discussing things that had no topical bearing and, frankly, acting in a proprietary way that was often alienating to newcomers. We will certainly admit that the readers who expressed frustration at the dominance and mob mentality of the OT commenters have failed to blossom into active commenters as quickly or as plentifully as we would have hoped, but that doesn’t mean that it was a mistake to end it. While we will also admit to a certain clumsiness in bringing about the end of the OT, we still believe it had to be done. (And to be clear, since many people still think it was driven by a desire to kiss up to advertisers, it was about trying to enhance the sense of community. Many OT commenters still have a mistaken sense of their collective impact on traffic–a few hundred comments a day actually doesn’t matter very much to traffic or the bottom line.) While we have quite a lot of affection for most OT commenters on an individual level, let’s face it: It had gotten totally out of control, both in terms of behavior and volume of comments; our frustration was hardly unknown and yet the OT gang made no effort to try to police itself of bring its bad players into line. 15,000 or so people read the site every day and too much of the tone was being dictated by a small group of people. Admittedly, we could have tried just banning the small number of truly disruptive forces–but, actually, we did try that upon occasion and inevitably we’d get emails from members of the group begging for clemency. It was exhausting. Babysitting the comments in the OT was a fruitless though time consuming job that we no longer have the patience for. We can understand why many people had hurt feelings about the way things went down and we’re sorry about that, but it had to be done.

And speaking of being time-consuming, that’s all we’re going to say on the topic for now so we’ll apologize in advance for not engaging in any further back-and-forth in this thread.