This is why we can’t have nice things: the siren song of negative parenting talk
The most common question I receive about Offbeat Families is WHERE IS THE FORUM!? We get the question every once and a while on Offbeat Home, but with Offbeat Families it’s a weekly issue — a parenting website without a forum!? HOW IS THIS EVEN POSSIBLE?!
Why blog commenter over-sharing is ultimately a publisher’s problem
Publishing websites dedicated to big life stuff means that we get a lot of blog comments that are extremely personal. I’m not even talking here about the Offbeat Bride Tribe, which is private for exactly this reason — I’m just talking about comments on the blog. Comments that are all out in the open for everyone to read. A few examples of the kinds of over-sharing comments we deal with…
Co-rumination: why you can’t let commiseration drag down your community
It wasn’t until I read a New York Times article about a psychology concept called “co-rumination” that I finally had a word to attach to spiral of negativity that can drag down online communities…
Clean it up, shut it down: how we know it’s time to close comments on a post
On certain kinds of posts, my editors can get a serious work out keeping up with shitty comments. After doing this for so many years, I’m pretty good at knowing when a post is going to be controversial, and we make a point to schedule those posts for days when that site’s editor can be watching comments like a hawk.
Even so, when the amount of editor time expended removing crappy comments exceeds the number of constructive, respectful comments coming in, that’s when posts get down.