So far, so good. Knowing full well that is site is a "beta" test site and having thus prepared myself for the worst, I've been very pleasantly surprized at just how much I've been enjoying this site. One thing I have noticed is that although final official version of this site as not been determined, I see very little discussion about what the final shape of the site should be.
First, I've been trying to get a handle on just "what" this site is. Is it a social networking site, like Facebook. No, not exactly. Is it an online forum? No, not exactly. Is it like it's big brother, Salon.com? No, not exactly. Is it a blogging tool? No, not exactly. What I think that Open Salon would like to be is all of these things and more.
So with that goal in mind why don't we, the members of Open Salon, better known as "the chosen ones", work togther to help build this site into something special. What new or enhanced features would you like to see incorpated into the site? What existing features need to be changed? Can we, the members of Open, somehow be included into the decision making process for the final version of site, because I'm sure that there are plenty of us would like just that.
I'm sure that there are many of my fellow Open members, who like myself, feel compelled to buck the system. So let's get to work.
By the way, if this topic has been covered already I apologize for repeatin things but without some proper search tools it's pretty tedious to try and find something.
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Joan Walsh
Kerry Lauerman
J.D. Noir
Lonnie Lazar
Tony Wang
Martin Fisher
Salon.com
Comments
Once the doors open, it's going to be a slaughter of the lambs. I'm not looking forward to it.
1) people are polite and write intelligent and interesting posts and comments; and
2) when you write something, there is an excellent chance that it will actually be read.
When the site is thrown open to a lot more people, even if condition 1) remains, I'm not sure that condition 2) will.
Once you get a few thousand people here, there will be so many posts that it will be impossible to keep up with them all. Listings of comments and posts might remain on the sidebar for only a few minutes. At that point, I don't think I'm going to be very interested in spending one or two hours writing a post on the off chance that someone might actually read it.
Someone once said that 10 Rembrandts on the wall is art; 100 Rembrandts on the wall is clutter. I fear we will end up with clutter -- lots of good posts, most of which will receive very little attention. I hope I'm wrong.
If it is any comfort, I and several others who have commented on this thread (at the risk of sounding patronizing), have been around since there were less than 300 members on this site and we spent a fair amount of time (or at least I did) talking about what happens when OS truly becomes "OPEN".
But then the number of subscribers (or testers) kept climbing and so far, so good. I like to think that as folks come in, they will see the tone that everyone has adopted and follow suit. If they are looking to troll, they'll probably not get very far (at least I hope not...)
Just keep doing what you're doing and don't feed the trolls!
I'm hoping that O_S will be freely open to Salon subscribers, but not to non-subscribers. Does anyone else know whether that will be the case? That would probably prevent a lot of what we worry about when it goes open.
Based on the Kerry has written in the past, they intend for this site to be free and paid for by advertising. At least at the time that he wrote that, they weren't planning to have a subscription option like they do with Salon.
But we'll have to see how it plays out.
Ditto from me. I like it the way it is, but I suppose this doesn't generate income -- can it exist without that?