An Important Note to Our Valued Commenters from Bob

[Wonderment]

I have now posted in Disqus. It looks to me like the situation is as follows. Under vbulletin, there was the commenting world and the diavlog world. The two things were closely related but distinct, and they were related in a nonhierarchical way. Often the commenters thought that the discussions were more interesting than the diavlogs, and often they were. In the new dispensation, comments are clearly subordinate to the diavlogs and have no life independent of the diavlogs.

Agree. It's disempowering for commenters. There's no way to put lipstick on that pig.

Bob, you are simply wrong to place so much importance upon the comments appearing below the video window. I can see why one might think that this was terribly important from the point of view of improving traffic to the site, but I think it's a business error. A better approach, in my view, would be simply to point users to the user forum, which would have an independent existence.

I don't see how it's a business error. It's a decision to the detriment of the existing commenting community, but that doesn't make it bad business. "Creative destruction," as Mitt Romney would put it.

Bheads was failing as a business. It was unsustainable, and now Bob and the new non-profit are trying something new.

I don't really get how a non-profit disentangles itself from Bob's job at the Atlantic, but that's really off-topic.

If I were marketing Blogginheads 2.0, I'd say something clever about synergies, but I'm not, so I won't.