The End of the Open Thread
This is a tough post to write but it’s a long time coming…Sometime back in 2008, in an attempt to keep the comment threads associated with individual posts on topic, we began running an Open Thread post every day. The theory was that the OT would be a place where people who wanted to discuss…
This is a tough post to write but it’s a long time coming…Sometime back in 2008, in an attempt to keep the comment threads associated with individual posts on topic, we began running an Open Thread post every day. The theory was that the OT would be a place where people who wanted to discuss anything off-topic could go and do just that. It was also an attempt to accommodate the site’s most active commenters who, quite wonderfully, had begun to forge quite meaningful online and offline relationships. As time has gone on though, the Open Thread has become both more insider-y and, often, more toxic than we had initially envisioned. We hear frequently from readers bemoaning the negativity, profanity and clubbiness on the Open Thread and stories of other long-time readers who have all but abandoned the site because of the tone set by the Open Thread. So we’re stopping it.
The decision is made difficult only by the fact that many of the participants, some of whom we’ve come to know personally, are some of the most longstanding and loyal readers of the site. Most of them are wonderful, interesting people but we agree with the critics who say that the Open Thread culture has become at best exclusionary and at worst offensive and inhospitable. There is no reason why a small group of people needs to carry on its discourse on a stage in front of a couple of hundred thousand people every month. There are ample social media platforms that are more appropriate and, frankly, better equipped technologically for this type, and size, of discussion. To that end, we have created an Open Thread page on Facebook that all are welcome to visit.
Going forward there will be no Open Thread on the blog and we will be actively monitoring the other comment threads and forum posts to ensure that they stay (relatively) on topic and respectful. Repeated attempts to highjack any of these discussions will result in users being banned from the site. If you have not already noticed, the new commenting system, while not perfect, does enable readers to flag comments and posts that are inappropriate so please feel free to alert us that way if a thread starts going off-track or a commenter starts acting inappropriately.
We hope that this will be an important step towards cultivating a more welcoming sense of online community that every person who visits the site will feel comfortable partaking in. We hope that we can get back to a time when discussions focused on old houses, neighborhood news and Brooklyn quality of life issues. If you’ve been sitting on the sidelines for a while, we hope you’ll come back into the fold and contribute your two cents.
Good to see you NOP. 🙂
Jon- not for nothing, and you know for a fact how many times I stood up for you and brownstoner- but the OT was not the distraction. YOu’re reading comments from many people, including those who were not OT regulars and it is all about content content content. If the OT is a distraction then you should be looking at why the other threads are not pulling in comments. Maybe because they simply aren’t as interesting. And stop using the word “purge.” We didn’t poison b’stoner.
Wow! Way to make OT regulars want to support your blog! (NOT!)
I don’t think those sites use disqus. It’s a third party app and everything goes to and from their servers, not Jon’s.
Yeah- me too. After wanting us to help evaluate and be supportive of the new site, losing us is a risk he’s willing to take. Nice.
We’re not discounting what the regulars add to the rest of the site. The OT is a giant distraction with little constructive content and lots of negative content. In an ideal world, regulars would channel that energy into discussions on other posts and, if they are bored by the other posts, try to suggest things to reblog or send in more tips that can be turned into posts. The last thing we want is for regulars to abandon the site though, obviously, that is a risk we are having to take to purge the site of the distraction that the OT has become.
Does it get me a new house? I saw one upstate that I want 🙂
I’m the silent type *eyes rolling* 🙂
Exhaustion