"I'll keep this board up for a while, but I'm locking it for new posts. " wfmu is a listener sponsored (and i would contend the best anywhere) fm and internet freeform radio station. that means that 100% of their operating budget comes from listeners. either by direct pledges durring their annual fundraising drive or in the form of support of their special events including their annual record fair. seven years ago they launched a message board in connection to the website. it served as an interface between some of the staff who contributed with postings and comments and the listeners postings and comments. some of the threads went into hundreds of comments providing interesting discussions of station, music and non station related subjects. many enlightning topics were worked through in this fashion. it was an incredible resource. it did however reveal in various ways a top heavy tendency to over steer and over control. seemingly innocuous posts and comments were wiped. large sections of archived threads were lost. an unmistakable aura of managerial contempt ensued. links to the message board on the stations main web-page were mysteriously removed at the same time their beware of the blog was launched soon participation on the board would dwindle to a couple of dozen. that handful persevered through an onslaught of spam. management refused to delegate to any non-administrative weekend spam monitor. pages of spam would stack up. still a few hung in there. these decisions all came from station manager ken who recently gave us some hope that he would begin to make an attempt to get the situation on track. today the board was sunk (posts and comments frozen) by ken who appears to believe that the blog and board cannot coexist. as with most blogs they pull in a few comments but not the serious interactive listener participation that is more natural on message boards. so fuck you back to ken for tanking an awesome board wether for the reason given or otherwise. fuck you back because you and your control issues are a slap in the face of the listenership of this listener sponsored station. fuck you very much. a few of us wont forget the dis!
Wow, that is a shame, especially for people promoting themselves so heavily as some kind of free-speech guerrillas. "Freedom is Free Form -- but only when WE say it is." I wouldn't want to moderate a board myself -- the spam problem alone seems insurmountable -- but if the decision was made because FMU management didn't like what posters had to say ... well that's just a drag.
thanks stdpm. wussup. this appears to be their solution, open threads on bwtb. what they dont get is that the mb threads contained a collective wit and wisdom and its just not ok to just go around wiping that shit out. a major real value of the internet is the archive effect.
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- bill 9-13-2006 12:08 am
Wow, that is a shame, especially for people promoting themselves so heavily as some kind of free-speech guerrillas. "Freedom is Free Form -- but only when WE say it is." I wouldn't want to moderate a board myself -- the spam problem alone seems insurmountable -- but if the decision was made because FMU management didn't like what posters had to say ... well that's just a drag.
- stronger than dirt pete moss (guest) 9-16-2006 2:50 am [add a comment]
thanks stdpm. wussup. this appears to be their solution, open threads on bwtb. what they dont get is that the mb threads contained a collective wit and wisdom and its just not ok to just go around wiping that shit out. a major real value of the internet is the archive effect.
- bill 9-23-2006 8:57 pm [add a comment]