Sunday, July 8, 2012

MKM Blog Open Thread (July 8, 2012)

Welcome to your MKM Blog open thread for July 8, 2012, the day Jeffrey Tambor turned 68, Wolfgang Puck turned 63, Kevin Bacon turned 54, Toby Keith turned 51, and Lenny Dykstra turned a toilet paper roll and felt tip pen into a crude but effective shank. 

Hey, everyone, it's Sunday!  Celebrate the Lord's Day the only way he would want you to, like this:


30 comments:

  1. I guess my favorite part of Kinja is how it's exactly the same as the old system, in that terrible comments are removed or otherwise obscured from view. Right?!?!?!

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    1. If that post was a comment, it would get removed. Just awful.

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    2. Oh please. Spend nine seconds scrolling down the comments in this and tell me things are really all that different.

      (Sorry Newell, it was just the first post that came to mind.)

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    3. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    4. MKMUB_ninja sent this comment to #offtopic

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    5. A little harsh on my part.

      Short version: Put your name on it, or no one will engage you here.

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    6. MKMUB_ninja sent this comment to #keepavoidingthepointraisedaboveandmaybeeventuallypeoplewillforgetthatitmakesyoulookstupid

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    7. anon

      Gonna do this one time only. Your link was to a fairly innocuous example of a pre-Kinja Deadspin thread. No +1's, a couple of grins. And this:

      TrotsHat @Sean Newell

      Sean, don't you understand?

      This is a hint that the next line:

      You're a Rays fan who wrote this out of horror for your team's loss.

      is not, in fact, TrotsHat opinion. It is a recap of the general thrust of the pink comments.

      The pink comments? They depress me.

      The last two sentences serve to verify that TrotsHat is not taking a swipe at Sean, but is in fact picking at the pinks.

      Which was the point of the old system. Only starred commenters had to see the crap floating below the surface. Now it's visible for all of us. I, for one, would prefer not to have to see it.

      There may be some thread on some post somewhere in pre-Kinja Deadspin that bears a resemblance to what is now occurring. Good luck finding it.

      The overall tone of Deadspin threads has become argumentative, course, and full of people taking non-serious posts seriously. One hopes this will change as the algorithm is tweaked, but one cannot be by any measure close to sure.

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    8. No, Erg. That's complete nonsense. Look at that entire thread. Easily two thirds of all the comments in it are attacks directed at the author of the post. Not just the pinkos: all the comments.

      There have always been morons. Do the math: there aren't even necessarily more of them. The difference is that there are now far fewer good commenters, because they've all taken their balls and gone home to stew in petulance. Which they're entitled to do. But the primary thing that Kinja has done is butthurt a bunch of Deadspin regulars; the idiots are still idiots.

      And I'd bet my eyeteeth that 99% of the burner trolls are regular Deadspin commenters. So there's that, too.

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    9. I know those comments were shitty, it's a weird thing actually. I could have moved them, but I also feel like if someone thinks something I wrote was shitty, then I'm not going to move/delete/etc it just because of that. They're entitled to say so just like I'm entitled to write a hackneyed screed about Canada that virtually none of them got.

      It's a tough balance that I haven't really figured out honestly (and I did not like the ninja/faeries moderating in my posts because I thought it looked unseemly).

      Anyway, with regard to Kinja, I think it's doing ok. Both those comments had multiple replies and were still not all the way up top (and there were only 11 threads on that post anyway). If they had been ignored, they would have been buried.

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  2. I liked BBAM's joke yesterday. That didn't go over well with a burner.

    However. I felt it may be pertinent to address some of the allegations that were made against me.

    1. Regarding the override of my +1: It's staying. Moving on.

    2. Regarding the "whiny" allegation: What some may consider "whiny" behavior, I like to think of as "hyper analytical and overly critical."

    3. Regarding the "old" allegation: I just turned 26 a month ago. I don't think this qualifies as "old." Sure, sometimes I may feel older than I am, but I don't think that's enough justification to use the "old" label on me.

    4. Regarding the "brodude" allegation: I spent the better part of Sunday and Monday night playing the Skyrim - Dawnguard add-on. In an hour, I will be going to brunch and when I get home I am going to spend a few hours planting grass seed in different patchy areas of my backyard. (Seriously, those dirt patches are frustrating as hell) My big excitement next weekend is that I am going up to Road America to watch my dad race vintage cars for two days. I hardly think this qualifies as a "brodude" lifestyle.

    5. Regarding getting over the +1 "bullshit" allegation: Not going to happen. It's here to stay.

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    1. Can I ask why you don't just dismiss that reply? Not trying to nitpick you, I'm just honestly curious why more people aren't taking advantage of it.

      Or does BBAM have to dismiss it, since he's the person who started that thread?

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    2. VINTAGE racecars? Don't get any motor oil on your madras shorts brochacho!

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    3. @Anon

      No, I can dismiss it if I want. I know the popular stance here has been a "Dismiss them, or they'll never learn" mentality, but this person clearly understands what commenting is like on Deadspin. I decided it to leave it (for now, I really haven't put much thought at all until you asked), because a dismissal could be perceived as a reaction - albeit a very minor one - to their existence. As long as nobody else responds, and I never acknowledge or reply to it, that seems like the best way for me to not engage the troll in this instance.

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    4. G-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-guy hoo hoo hooJuly 8, 2012 at 8:18 PM

      @Hammerclaw -

      That's your prerogative, but it seems misguided to me. We've all agreed that a major influence on pinkos in the old system was that their comments were invisible until they started making the right kinds of comments. Why can't that be true with replies in the new system? Dismissing sends a pretty clear message: "That's not going to cut it." Leaving it alone sends a very ambiguous one: maybe you read it, maybe you didn't, maybe you're too cowed to do anything about it (not saying you are, but how's the troll supposed to know?).

      Do what you want, but dismissing seems the way to go.

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    5. Guy who is not really Lionel Osbourne but will pretend to be him for the sake of making a bad jokeJuly 8, 2012 at 8:29 PM

      Whoa. 26 ... like, in human years?

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    6. @G-g-g-g-g...

      Like I said, if it were a seemingly new commenter who didn't know any better, I would have just dismissed and moved on. That wasn't the case here. Whoever this was, they are clearly familiar with commenting at Deadspin. There are no lessons for me to teach here because I am just another commenter, and I don't think it would accomplish much more than letting the troll know they annoyed me with their reply. If a ninja were to step in and do something about it, that would teach a lesson, but I think that knowing that it was just an average commenter diminishes the effect of the dismissal in this instance. I didn't dismiss it because I think that letting a troll know that I cared enough to dismiss it seems just as, if not more likely to encourage them to do it again.

      If this turned into a frequent pattern of trolling, I would start dismissing everything. In this instance, I am just going to leave it unless BBAM wanted me to dismiss it to keep his reply chain clean.

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    7. Nah, don't bother, that's already a whole day ago. I'm probably going to be more vigilant about dismissing morons in the future, though, like the JMU guy who first replied to me. I honestly forgot that was an option after I first saw it.

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  3. Whoever is doing the Kinjarrhea thing is not helping. The time for airing out Kinja gripes in the comments on Deadspin is over. Send emails, talk it up in Faerie threads, DUAN away, vent about it on MKMUB or Twitter, but keep it out of Deadspin posts. Seriously.

    Seems pretty straightforward: if you want to comment on Deadspin, if you loved the old Deadspin and all the great jokes and want to preserve what was great, you should only be doing ONE THING when you comment on Deadspin, and that's making jokes. How hard is that?

    Make jokes. Make good jokes. Dismiss the bogus replies. Ignore the bullshit. Send out a +1 or Ha! or whatever to jokes you like. Everything else that is done down in the comments, every last thing pushes the comments further away from what they were.

    You either want Deadspin to be a place to go to read great jokes and make great jokes, and support that vision by doing JUST THAT, or you enjoy drama and controversy and don't really give a damn after all. We'll know you by how you behave in your comments.

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    1. I used to agree with this sentiment. Then I got a couple more sarcastic Burners telling me how unfunny and stupid I am. I'll keep dismissing, and I'll keep joking, for now. But this shit will never, ever go away.

      It's not even about getting +1s anymore, it's about having the freedom to work on a joke and post it without getting shit on. Nobody thinks this will get old?

      And before any anonymous guy (or Deadspin staffer, for that matter) says things are just like they used to be, how many times did guys like EMS get dumped on with impunity?

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    2. It's like Analysis Rube multiplied by a thousand overnight.

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  4. I just read that McCarver post from last night. Thought I was reading Yahoo comments.

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    1. I've been reading Deadspin for far longer than I've been a commenter, and that was the worst I've ever seen. Our worst fears have been realized, I don't think there's any debating that now. To click on a post and see those burner avatars lined up is as painful as watching Stephen Hawking try out for the U.S. Men's Gymnastics team.

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    2. The Real Phin, For RealJuly 8, 2012 at 2:23 PM

      The fun is completely gone.

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