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.
Hi everyone! Just heard the news. As some of you know I have been posting on this site for a long time, mostly on the individual threads and compulsively on MM’s threads. I more or less ignored the OT because it was too time-consuming and well, clique-ish. I like to post and then come back an hour or two later to see what’s new on the site. I have jumped into the fray the past few days and it has been sort of interesting, although also annoying. I disagree that newcomers were welcomed in the OT, I think it fairer to say they were selectively welcomed. And certain posters did monopolize the conversation.
I would recommend that you all look at the other threads more. some of them are really interesting and often no one comments but me and maybe one or two others. I do agree that the level of discourse on the OT was often crude and offensive, that’s why I rarely joined in but I am surprised that people complained about it.
while he mines us for our ideas and opinions one last time. Otherwise why have a comments section instead of just an announcement?
Day is not done. Get back here, cobble. You can weep silently in full view of several hundred thousand people.
Then those people should never go to Curbed. From what I’ve seen, brownstoner was a lot better than what goes on on so many blogs.
their participation, not visitation, is down. not solely blaming on OT but do believe it is alienating and scares people from participating across whole site because they think one of the regulars will chop their head off for saying something…obviously from some of the other comments here the editorial content has become less inspiring to some, and that we can try to address; the fact that the site has listings and more ads, well, that’s life–it takes a lot to keep the site going.
benson- I got to hand it to you- well said.
Me too! Get me the name of your therapist 🙂
traffic on the homepage has been basically flat for the last year and a half…on days when there are 800 comments in the OT it has no measurable impact on overall traffic.
of course we hope that traffic goes on up the site–that’s always a hope–but honestly that’s not what this is about. it’s about the vibe, which we can also do something about by improving some things on the editorial end as well.