Getting back on track after the big Newsvine Joke

I do not believe that I am overly important.

that seems to be a running theme for many who fell for the "joke," and it's complete bull@!$%#. you are just as important as anyone else here and, in the way that you - and each of us - approach the site - you are more important as far as your points of view are concerned than anyone else is - you define your experience here, not newsvine, not other writers, and not any particular group of writers.

nobody has ownership of any kind of article here, either. if you want to write your own trivia article, i am sure that now would be a good time to do it, as many people are feeling like you are. an inadvertent result of this, for those who took part, is that they have become less popular, and the perspective that they provide unique contributions has been compromised.

i still dont know how i'm going to handle each of these authors at this point. some of them are on my friends list. some on my watchlist. some i just enjoyed reading when i happened upon them. i dont think i'll try to engage them in trying to figure out what to do next, tho. thats for me to figure out, because for me, i'm who matters here. and for you, you are who matters. we're not doing ourselves any service by saying or implying, much less believing, that we're not important to this situation. if it werent for us as the audience, this little experiment would have fallen on deaf ears. as soon as anyone read one of those articles, that person became just as important as anyone else who did the same, authors included.

hey walt d. -- listen, dont put words in my mouth. i'm encouraging people here to express what they feel, and what they feel is entirely valid. but that bears repeating, especially for those who feel most hurt, because not everyone feels that way, and they are coming under pressure for feeling a certain way, which is bad.

you cant tell people how to react. this isnt as easy as "learning to take a joke", but as many of us vent, we are doing so in a manner which very expressly encourages ourselves to move on. thats what we're trying to do. but, honestly, when one of the authors comes on and says "move the @!$%# on," you're only throwing fuel on what are now, today, cinders. it's also time for the authors involved to move on.

but your implication that the other thing we do here is mindless ideological bickering, well that throws me off.

looks like we have some work to do to catch up! - please, as always, feel free to post links here to other articles. the automatic popularity of the "perpetrators" gives them a quick advantage, but many of us are already explicitly not going to those columns, so we'll need to know where we can go to air our grievances and discuss how we feel.

i'll check out killfile's article, too.

I have said what I feel on their follow up articles as I don't think they are going to come to many of these anti articles to speak. (One of my peeves about some of the 12 is that they rarely comment on any of my stuff, anyway, even though I try to comment on theirs--well, Dennis does occasionally and Djehuty sometimes.)

i kinda doubt we'll see them visiting these articles, too. a unique part of the prank is that the writers involved subjected themselves to it. for that, i guess i feel less inclined to rule them out and more inclined to see them as people who did something stupid, and that awareness probably keeps them from fully engaging. i think any and all of the reactions are valid and should be appreciated.

it's disappointing that the authors involved are being allowed to double their readership by posting followup items. what they did, from a straightforward standpoint, was a violation of the CoH. i'd be interested to read or have been a fly on the wall during the discussions these authors had in preparation for the Big Day. i'd like to know the extent of their arrogance, to be quite frank, which led them to do this with what i can only assume was a relative disregard for the rules. and i am growing increasingly frustrated with the way that newsvine isnt doing anything about it. then again, it goes to that same old truth - that newsvine is what newsvine wants to be, and while the users have a good deal of control, we are all of us under the guidance of staff. that these users arent facing even the briefest of sanctions is a major misstep, i think. based on many of their comments in the "joke" thread, they havent lost much of the arrogance that probably fed their decision in the first place.

But anyway... Can someone who is actually upset about the whole writer switch deal explain to me why they are upset?

because the articles created a predictable emotional response for many. and many people involved in one or a few of the articles werent involved in the rest, so the prank wasnt obvious. and because many people, as could be predicted, invested an emotional response as a reaction to that particular author, who for the most we knew very well. because part of the way newsvine works is that each author builds his or her column into something like a brand, and has certain loyal readers. dennis makes the point of "checking each fact". elsewhere dennis makes the point that these articles were opinion pieces, not news items (i think it was dennis - but either way, it was one of the authors involved). many of us did draw our own conclusions about the opinion pieces we read. only to be fooled by authors who were intentionally doing just that.

the point, supposedly, was to personify the inherent fact of online resources that they can be unreliable. however, these were opinion pieces which, for the most part, were entirely reliable in themselves. the only difference was that, since it was part of a prank, they were written without the emotional investment normally exchanged during such events. in most cases, they werent about outrageous claims. they were opinions — some more easily debated and obviously flawed than others, but the main distinction, and the point of the prank, was that article A would never really have been written by author A. so they switched, and author A wrote article B and vice versa. while clever, it's a very superficial prank. because to the reader, especially new readers or, like i said, readers who werent involved in more than a couple of these articles, there was nothing in the article to expose it as a prank. it was a cheap way of making a point.

and as i've said elsewhere, the point seems to have been simply proven by the perpetrators, but without having any affect on the balance of newsvine stories. newsvine contained nonsense the other day — but not nonsense that was revealed by this clever prank, but rather nonsense that was contained by this clever prank.

and if dennis's last point is to be believed: dont trust journalists because you like them., then i think thats probably going to be the most resonant lesson that many readers learn. because these 12 may continue writing trustworthy stories and opinion pieces, but if they are trusted, it won't be because they are liked.

so, again, as i said in my article, "They came up with a premise and, instead of demonstrating that it exists, they manipulated Newsvine's content in order to demand that it exists."

no, dirtclod, you're just...lemme see...two and a half days late. but i do appreciate your stopping by as well as the caps shouting and the repeated exclamation points. good stuff. i'll take the valium, tho - send it COD.

i'm sure dirtclod has enough to go around.