Why are good, GREAT, writers, some of my very favorites, announcing that they are leaving Open Salon?
WHAT?
I get that this forum can become time-consuming---as it has been for me at times. When I should be working on my novel, it’s easy enough to slip away and read really great stuff, and comment, and simply focus on drinking tequila and enjoying myself.
It is a delightful world to slip away to……with so much terrific writing, so many disparate thoughts and ideas and life-styles enriching my consciousness.
Yeah, I get that it can be a total time-waster when we have other, more important things to do. So when someone has to leave because they have to focus on their work, and this is a deterrent to that, I get it. Kind of. But not really. I want to say, “Have a little discipline, bucko…honestly. Why all the drama? You can hang here and still do your real writing.”
The drama that I do not get is a great writer leaving because they weren’t “appreciated” by the editors of O/S.
Token Tarheel provided us with really valuable statistics that show that there are many hundreds of posts EVERY DAY. With all of the posts, and the obvious mission of trying to get outside readers in, it’s no wonder that the EP’s are geared to fulfill criteria that have nothing to do with us, the folks that read and comment and post every day.
So if you are hanging your hat on getting EPs, than that’s a flimsy, unrealistic hook, my friend. It pays nothing, and while your fans will surely congratulate you, it will quickly pass, and your fans will stick around and keep reading you, regardless.
We have a terrific and supportive environment here, kids. A writer’s forum where you get feedback, or don’t. If you don’t, maybe you should read and comment and engage the folks that DO get lots of comments and ratings.
And write better. Suck it up, and simply write better, or if you are already a really good writer, engage.
Either way, check in with everyone and rate the stuff that you like (even a little) and comment.
I honestly felt a great relief when I stopped thinking about the EP, and starting thinking about getting comments from folks.
But back to why I wrote this late-night rant: I hate to see folks that I love leave here. I will miss them tremendously, but I won’t let them go without a fight.
Game on, boys….you know who you are!
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I live for the comments I get, yes, I can obsess as good as the next one, but really, isn't writing about, well, WRITING?? I write here because I can get immediate feedback and that tells me something about what I've evoked. I like that.
Bleah. Sorry I ran on but I do so agree with you.
Grif----I love to say, "Ball up." (yes yes I do.....)
Mypsyche----I totally agree. Sniveling about not getting an EP is so fucking played, don't you think? It really is about the comments.....and hey! Here I am, responding to comments from the cool kids.
Natalie---I totally dig your writing, did you know that? Thanks for checking in.
P.S. The only pop issue I care about is Coco. Fuck you, Jay Leno, you whiny little pissy-pants.
And clearly it won't, but I don't care at all. There is tremendous freedom here to post all and any types of bullshit that occurs to us, folks.
Therein lies the beauty of the place. I say, embrace it!
Skip the front page and dive in.....there are tremedous rewards with little effort. I am endlessly amazed at the delightful and beautifully written posts that *I* read every day!
I gotta say that it's occuring to me that there is some unnecessary drama here.......right? I mean, honestly, new thought: if you're leaving, REALLY leaving, totally pissed off for whatever reasons, why not just go?
Man, I am such a tool sometimes........
Clues? T'would be grand to read it.
Again, I feel like I'll miss these guys (especially Floyd) but there is a creeping sense that I'm being played.........?
Ball up, mister, and state your case, or step the fuck off.
What are you trying to say?
:-|
The feedback that we get from other writers IS the reward.
When folks seriously internalize that notion, they will find tremendous rewards, rewards that I guarentee you they won't find anywhere else.
And as for being in San Blast too long-----baby, I spend almost every afternoon on a gorgeous beach drinking cold beer with delightful friends. Still in a cast with a broken ankle, so I can't take my board out, but I enjoy watching everyone else enjoying the surf. I still have to work to earn a living, and it's tough, but I have a really cool life here. (And I welcome you as soon as my guest quarters are finished......seriously.)
The point of this post is this: Stop fucking fretting about EP's!
Write what you love and immerse yourself in the writings that others love.
How are you missing this point? Fretting and getting all competitive about this shit gets you nowhere.
Enjoy the site! There is nothing like this site for writers wanting to engage and interact with other writers. Who gives a rats ass about EP's????????
Get the fuck over it.
And that's enough preaching from the old fart.
What?
Posters that feel that they are unappreciated are clearly making a grand exit, and I've fallen into the trap of celebrating them and telling them how much I do NOT want them to leave.
Which, clearly, is what they were looking for.
I am such a friggin' tool.
I feel pretty played here.
I am specifically, NOT leaving.
Whether anyone likes it or not.
;-)
Whoo hoo! (and how do you feel about Mexico? I'm hoping to do an OS meetup here on the beach in San Blas....maybe in the fall?)
Again.....I've said this repeatedly, but it's true. I feel like such a tool.
I am with you on the comments. Behind each one of those comments is someone unique who read my post. Of course it was pointed out to me that I had diarrhea of reading and commenting. I guess everyone needs to feel appreciated in some way or other. For some it is a cover and EP as it seems to be for Chuck. He got around 94 comments on his poem of question and 83 Rates. Maybe tarheel should do a statistical analysis on Chuck's comments and rates per blog. I would be over joyed if I got that much rating and reading on a poem but that's OK - poetry doesn't fly too well here and is not the meat and potatoes of this place. EP's and covers on open salon do not buy books, readers do. There are readers here. I agree with anyone who thinks that many who leave will be back after a somewhat dramatic declaration like Chuck's that elicited how many comments? - got how many rates? - everyone loves attention and a plead not to go and Chuck has quite the audience. I know because I am the she who knows and as Chuck wets his depends as he sits in a lonely monastic cell and takes multiple photos of himself in his web cam, he will realize he misses his faithful readership and all the instant gratifying rates and bolstering comments he is liberally graced with here at OS. Yes, being faithfully read is an act of kindness, rating is a consideration, and a thoughtful comment is a personal honor and gift of someone else's time and mind.
Sorry.
EP sucks. You can't wash that stuff off with pencillin in great quantities!! ;)
Anyways, people leave sites, they come back, they discover that this addiction goes deep into the soul. I've walked away for a bit at times, it happens.
But here, on Open, those folks who don't think they're getting read because the rates and comments aren't hitting or whatever, need to put a counter such as statcounter.com on their articles, I've done it and when you start seeing hits from all over the world, you begin to realize, "Someone is reading me!" and you get a boost.
Hell, I get more readers on some of my crap then a lot of "authors" do with all 6 of their "Ground Breaking" novels.
Yeah, the pay sucks, but I don't do this for the money. I do it for my one fan in Vietnam!! ;)
Seriously, though, thanks for kicking in, but you're beating the same dead horse: I've said it repeatedly, and I'll say it yet again.
Forget about the fucking editors here!!!!!
Write and read and comment and enjoy.
No one will EVER make a single nickle or peso here, so stop with the fucking competition. Waving your arms around and crying, "Look Mama, LOOK!" will not get Mama's attention. (and it may well piss her off and you can forget about the cookies and milk.)
".......Chuck wets his depends as he sits in a lonely monastic cell and takes multiple photos of himself in his web cam, he will realize he misses his faithful readership."
Too too too funny!!!
Incidentally, no one has remembered to tell me that I am a genius today. How am I supposed to endure such treatment? I think I will have to leave.
Some have said they need to publish elsewhere, like books or other things. Imagine you're Mark Twain and you really like this new technology stuff and have been happily blogging away, but you haven't had time to work on that Tom Sawyer piece you've wanted to finish.
Imagine Fareed Zakaria or Christiane Amanpour or Rachel Maddow and they're not getting on the cover and you say "Just look at these stats. What makes you think you deserve better than these others?" Some people aspire to be the go-to place for news and commentary. They came here thinking they might be recognized. But for all its egalitarian nature, this place commits to no one.
(Not quite true. Some are committed to but you see no indication of it. You just see them featured more than others, and I allege that it's not because they're winning fair competitions each day, it's because they have won some competition without it being said, and they're on a list that gets read more often.)
If I were someone aspiring to be known and I were up against that fight, I might eventually just leave. Odds are, one day you will read such a message from me because I don't like the policy of over-featuring people without saying why you are [that's a bug they should fix, either by not featuring those people unfairly or by saying they are featuring them because they have achieved special status]. I have no problem with special status. I seek special status myself. We all do, I bet. But secret special status in the guise of competition I have a lot of problem with. Ultimately, I myself will probably leave because I doubt I'll get that special status. That isn't saying that I think they owe me special status, it's saying that's the natural result of economics. If they value me at the level I feel intrinsically I should be valued, they should reward me. If they don't, I will eventually find somewhere else that will. Anyone devalues themselves when they allow themselves lower recognition and status than they feel the truly warrant. They should seek a place where they are appreciated, not shrug and say “I guess this is what I deserve.”
The Fareeds, the John Stewarts, etc. among us need to find their home, not be cajoled into thinking they should be happy with a few ratings points and the adulation of friends.
Open Salon cannot be all things to all people. It is important that people leave if they don't get what they want. It is important they say that's why they are leaving. Because as long as they don't and they just quietly slip away, we indulge the illusion that everyone is getting what they need, and we never have to give any price to anything.
Our country is melting down right now because we haven't confronted the fact that we can't afford everything and must make choices. Our environment is losing for similar reasons. People must take stands and not indulge the dangerous illusion that there is infinite resource and that everything is as good as everything else.
"For me the message is clear; I wrote a poem hoping my words would help bring a different dimension to the understanding of the suffering that is not only Haiti, but is of this world. The editors decided this was not important or relevant. I got angry. I fumed and then I understood."
I have been a poet too long to know that poetry collects dust unread by the masses. I write poetry because poetry appears to be part and parcel of me and an internal drive. Poetry is something that is totally mine and does not cost a cent to do but gives me a meditation and happiness to produce. At least, as writers, we really need nothing but a pen and paper to be happy. Yes, I am so old that I first started writing with a pen and paper...I have been compelled to write all my life with or without an audience. Certainly, I understand aspiring to be a Pablo Neruda writing both passionate political and love poetry recognized by the world and awarded with a Nobel Prize but I am where I am and my poetry serves me well as I am.
OS is not an end all but it is a place that is inspiring for me. No where else are there so many other writers and artists that share a similar spirit. We are a virtual artists and writers colony. Right now, I think I can still be part of the colony and also pursue writing in the real world - at least, I have plans, hopes and dreams that do not depend on OS.
@Ginny Rose - and speaking of depends - the imagery and words are taken from one of Chuck's own recent posts - yes, he inspired my vision:
http://open.salon.com/blog/mean_mr_mustard/2010/01/20/does_she_who_knows_know_that_os_knows_that_she_knows
In the gym world, we have a saying: "Leave your ego at the door"...I sometimes have trouble doing that at the gym, I can be such a hot dog and do feel in my element with the iron. I also need to keep that thought in mind when I come into open salon - and leave my ego at the door.
Other times there are complete dog turds on the cover, and there seems to be no reason for it.
This lack of consistancy is exactly why I gave up wanting/hoping for one. And while OS never promised to be all things to all writers, it is a lot of things to a lot of us. That's all I'm saying about this!
Rated.
But then when you see what actually ends up on the cover, it's an insult to one's intelligence to be told that this is "the best," when we know that it is not. I think what people are looking for in a cover is a set of posts that appear to have been selected by a literate adult who values good writing and good ideas. Is that too much to ask?
And when you see so many great posts pass by virtually unnoticed, you realize that there is something about OS that fundamentally doesn't work.
The problem is that OS is largely the same now as it was at the start. The cover layout is about the same, and we have the same primitive search tools (as Token Tarheel has noted before). So you have a site that worked well with 300 members, and one that doesn't work well with 3,000 members.
The people who leave OS are just the tip of the iceberg, just what we can see. What we can't see are all the posts that DON'T get written because it's not worth the writer's time to craft a good post and then have it seen by only a handful of people.
I don't post very often any more, and I certainly don't write posts that take a lot of time to research. It's just not worth my time. And I think a lot of people feel the same. Not many people are willing to spend many hours on a quality post only to have it zip through the activity queue in five minutes and disappear -- and not even get an EP in the process. I'm not even talking about showing up on the cover -- I'm talking about just getting the words "Editors Pick" on the post.
Bad editing and poor search tools drive out good posts and good writers. What will happen is that OS will increasingly get more of what it rewards: "breaking" news, celebrity posts, YouTube videos, posts from the "chosen people." That's not what I signed up for back in April 2008. I'm not going anywhere. But I'm not doing very much here either.
But I'm not leaving. :)
Carry on.
Carry on.
A lot of times the cover posts don't get rated because they aren't good. I'll be happy to name names. Christopher di Spirito's posts are largely poor-quality copy-and-paste "breaking news" pieces. In one 30 day period he had 13 posts on the cover.
Many of his posts are rather nasty rants about someone he doesn't like. He had one cover post the point of which was that some beauty queen who opposed gay marriage should become a porn star. I think it might have had around 100 words of text. Please tell me -- how does one "rate" that post?
Here it is, just in case you missed it on the cover:
http://open.salon.com/blog/christopher_di_spirito/2009/11/23/trump_to_carrie_prejean_try_porn
He had another cover post in which he called Michael Vick a "punk ass motherfucker." Did you happen to rate that one?
His most recent cover post was a breaking news story about the earthquake in Haiti. Imagine that! An earthquake in Haiti! I never heard about that until I read about it on the cover of OS . . . . Did you rate that one?
By the way, I see that Christopher deletes all of your comments now. Well, at least you can still rate his cover posts.
And then I recall the cover posts about sex toys, the funny three year old YouTube cat video, and the post about women waxing their pubic hair. And we had not one, but two cover posts that were basically campaign ads for gay marriage in Maine, including web sites where we could donate money.
Need I go on?
shit, let's boogie.
We need a big, hilarious Saturday Night dustup. hmmmmm....something with food and rum and people really doing something that matters...
(and have a michilada for me. spent 5 years working in Mexico City in the 90's. loved it!)
But I try not to let the politics and the ruminations of the place get to me. I came here to write some and read a lot. Unfortunately, I think some people came here just to write and didn't think they'd need to interact as well.