Reflections on Wonkette moving to a new platform, and our curmudgeonly fellow commenters

[cross posted from my Substack]

A big portion of my online life for the last two days has been grappling with new ways of interacting with fellow readers of the finest snark emporium on the interwebs, Wonkette.com. They moved from whatever place was hosting the website over to Substack, dumped the long-despised but heavily used commenting platform Disqus, and then all hell broke loose.

Which, when you’re dealing with a few hundred eccentric opinionated loyalists to the Wonkette Cause, is to be expected. Metaphors popped into my mind, primarily learning to ride a bike the first time ever, or learning to use my first average-intelligence flip phone, or later, my first smart-phone. In all those situations, I had to translate ways I had been doing things to some new fangled procedures, and it was Never Nice. I simultaneously would feel like a stupid dork and be furious that the device wasn’t doing what I thought it should.

And then it gets better.

As I told Rebecca Schoenkopf, we’re a curmudgeonly species. As the complaints and whiny posts and frustrations played out on Substack’s various user-contribution modes (Comments, Notes and Chats), some were ready to dump the whole affair, others could only focus on how it was different from Disqus, the system we constantly complained about, and crashed under the onslought of our cat GIFs and youtube embeds. A few of us talked about what we did like about the platform, as we poked around trying to figure out what does what, and got some pushback.

I felt bad for Rebecca, and not a little pissy with some of my fellow commenters. Come on, you guys, I’d think, you haven’t even been doing this for a whole damn day yet! We’ll figure it out! Not for the first time, I wished some of the talented programmers who frequent the discussions would band together to write a good, stable commenting system. But since I can’t raise the funds, I don’t have much faith that pipe dream.

But we’ll be ok. Like two-wheeled vehicles and computer-ified phones, we’ll learn the ropes. A few people won’t follow along, a lot of new people will join in. Like we always do, we’ll help each other figure out how to make it work; we won’t be able to satisfy every plea for help but while get most of it sorted out.

And, in this partiular case, I’m hoping it save Wonkette a lot of money, and provides a better platform for getting their articles out.

Learn something new every day!