I have some concerns about Post that are only getting deeper.
So people are asking for more detail and the answer is hard to put into solid points because it is more Vibes than facts but some things:
...
Issues include, in no particular order:
- The points system and how it pushes interactions.
- The founder's last company and statements about his opposition to privacy work at Google.
- The policy around prerolled video
- The apparent lack of alt text options...
- It's incredibly constant pushing of itself as a platform for "independent journalism" but no visible staff experience or employment at any journalism or media cos but plenty of experience at aggregation platforms...
- The prioritization of pricing & payment over safety controls.
- Forcing of content to live on-platform to use those tools instead of giving or supporting publishers w/an interest in controlling their own platform.
- The above and other similarities to Medium...
- Comments are not native to the platform but are powered by OpenWeb... which--for all the founders talk about payment-based journalism and how important it is--is a advertising company that happens to also do comments and has some troublesome events in its past.
- It does not appear that authors can moderate their own comments
- Their content moderation rules are rather loose
- They do not appear to have a clear appeals process for incorrectly moderated content
- Individual Post pages all appear to have OpenNews's privacy policy linked
Now... the OpenNews stuff is particularly troubling considering the founder's rhetoric about subscription/payment based journalism. But all of this *could* be startup jitters. I'm not here to tell you the platform is bad or canceled or anything like that...
But I'm extremely wary of how it is set up and the business that is running it. I will try it out because I'll try everything, but also, I am not yet interested in promoting it or me on there without a better handle on what is going on there. So yeah... I have concerns.
Also, just like the whole... vibe of the main feed is a little weird and it feels very unfinished even in the features that are presumably the focus of its launch? ...
If you want people to do full-length articles like Medium (which I think they do) they need to be able to edit
Also, for the sake of trying the platform on its own terms I put up a Post that I pay-walled for 1 "pt" and uhhh... I can't read my own post. Seems like that would be a thing basic QA would have caught?
If you are not familiar with the issues with OpenWeb, you can start here:
I'm pretty concerned that signing up for Post means that you are also implicitly agreeing to OpenWeb's privacy policy and terms, all things considered.
Also... uhhh... don't do this. This is obnoxious.
*OpenWeb
(I said OpenNews a few times in this thread and meant OpenWeb every time, sorry about that)
Just realized... there's no way to see if someone replied to your Post, "@"ed you, or "RePosted" one of your posts that I can see? Starting to wonder if the pitch for this platform was "what if Medium had a bad commenting system".
For those curious about the founder's statements about why he left Google that were troubling me, those are archived here - web.archive.org/web/2021062214…
The CEO edited his welcome post so it no longer says that you are endowed with unalienable rights that are protected based on a set of categories including "net worth". New version has removed that specific phrase. Archived version here: web.archive.org/web/2022111919…
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"dumps OCRed screenshots to a SQLLite db file in your user folder" is what I would come up for a weekend hackathon, not a ready-to-ship Operating System feature. Holy shit.
I do think it's wild that over the last 365 days almost every non-profit newsroom (including many NPRs and big names everywhere) have lost major funders and each time it's treated as an individual story and no one asks if there is an underlying issue.
Every non profit journalist I know is talking about how no one has money any more and it's wild to me that no one has even tried to explain this phenomenon which sure feels like a systematic issue and not a bunch of random coincidences.
Like, did America's oligarchs suddenly decide they're too rich to bother with the PR boost around funding journalism? Did the money move elsewhere? Are any of the foundations involved even willing to talk about it? I haven't seen a single attempt to answer these questions.
An interesting little fact about Vice's content: a full site archive, including saving outbound links, was performed by the volunteer Archive Team last year and it took ~six months to capture all the Vice content across all the languages they publish in. They've published a lot!
This is getting a bunch of activity so I'm going to add, Archive Team is a really cool collective of volunteers who do work on their own to save the history of the internet and if you have a little extra cash, maybe support their efforts! opencollective.com/archiveteam
I hesitate to consider the collapse of The Messenger as a broad story about the state of the media. Remember, they launched an ad supported site intended to grab traffic from social and search without a working sitemap and incredibly broken ad tech
The Messenger's fatal flaw was it was run by incompetent people who didn't know what they needed to do, how much money was needed to do it, or where to put the money when they had it. Yet I'm sure every funder & leader will go on to continue to be considered Media Thought Leaders
Even *RIGHT NOW* The Messenger's website occasionally crashes to white screen and no ads will load on a clean version of Chrome on OSX other than one video preroll ad and Outbrain. There are MULTIPLE articles under the minimum word count to get indexed.
So @TheMessenger has launched its new website. Let's take a look! Image paths imply they are on WordPress and `cms.themessenger.com/wp-admin` takes us right to a Google Login, so WordPress seems to be behind the site. Ok! ...
Interesting little fact popping up in the response headers: `X-Powered-By: WP Engine Atlas`. I think this is an interesting choice b/c I don't usually think of WP Engine as a top-tier host. (They're fine, this isn't an insult, it's just a different scale than say... WP VIP)...
WP Engine Atlas's signup promotes 4 "world-class" websites and uhhh... they aren't an impressive bunch. For the high minded big traffic aspirations of Messenger, this strikes me as an odd choice. Maybe money savings here?