![]() At the time, Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton, a self-described “regular Gizmodo and Gawker reader” wrote “there’s a whole world of ways a news site can improve the tenor of its comments while keeping itself reasonably open. In 2009, Gawker Media tightened its commenting system, which led to fewer (but better) comments. The site often experimented with new models for its comments. The comments often made ’s snarky articles better, and some writers were hired because of their contributions. The same was true for the earliest years of the comment section. ![]() These people all seemed to know each other, and share the same understanding of the city’s unspoken young professionals’ mores, and all somehow had a line that was better, smarter, and more on-the-nose than the one that came before it. It was surprisingly edgy, surprisingly highbrow, and unsurprisingly disdainful of the middlebrow. …It was coded specifically to the young and smartassed of New York City, and the way they lived in it. Have something to add? Gossip of your own? Just pissy? Now’s your chance to come stand on our soapbox.”įoster Kamer, once of and now executive editor of Mental Floss, reminisced recently about the site in its earliest years: It wasn’t until September of 2005 that then-editor Jesse Oxfeld announced that “readers will be able to comment on every item posted to Gawker. When the site launched in 2003, it didn’t initially have a comment section. wasn’t always engaged with its audience. Remember when staff members were assigned “ traffic-whoring” duties? Or how Gawker Media built the commenting platform Kinja as a way to test new methods of audience engagement? It was the type of publication that threw spaghetti at a wall to see what stuck, and developed designs that many other news organizations - some of whom criticized the site - copied to varying degrees of success. Whether you think Thiel was a “vindictive billionaire,” as The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan put it, “a sociopath trying to light your family home on fire” - that was Jessica Coen, previously of Jezebel - or simply a man trying to protect online privacy, as Thiel put it in his New York Times op-ed, that doesn’t detract from what did really, really well during its 14-year run: it knew its audience, learned (and hired and got tips) from that audience and experimented time and time again. ![]() Much has been written about over the past week, ever since the site announced that it would shut down under increasing financial pressue due to a $140 million verdict in a case secretly funded by the billionaire Peter Thiel. The reason we were able to have a healthy, respectful dialogue, I suspect, is that we were able to see each others’ faces and judge nuances within our conversation, nuances that don’t necessarily translate to snarky online forums. She took it, and we ended the flight thanking each other for an enjoyable few hours together.Īfterwards, I tried to picture us having a similar conversation online, through mediated commenting forums or underneath an article. ![]() I had just read an article in my New Yorker about a robot that teaches kids how to code. I said Jesus wasn’t part of my religion, but that I really liked learning about lots of religions and finding commonalities with people that I don’t generally have the chance meet outside of airplanes.Īt some point, she mentioned she was a teacher. It wasn’t a mean-spirited question she was genuinely curious and felt comfortable asking me. She asked about my relationship with Jesus Christ. I mainly asked questions, she mainly answered. ![]() Two of her children had attended seminary. She was a devout Southern Baptist from a rural part of North Carolina. We made some initial chit-chat about disliking airplane rides, then we both settled in for the lengthy flight - she read her Kindle, I thumbed through my backlog of New Yorkers.Īt some point, we began talking. I sat next to a woman who brought an assortment of religious material to read on the plane. I’ll start with the plane ride, which was from San Francisco to Raleigh-Durham. The two are related, though it might not seem that way at first. This is a column about ’s demise, but it is also a column about a plane ride I took last Friday. ![]()
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