Brown Pundits runs on attention. When we put hours into the site, it hums; when work and travel pull us across three jurisdictions at once, it slows. We have a backlog of pieces we want to write and lives that keep getting in the way. The June survey took the wind out of the schedule. We do not want to run this place as full-time editors, and we should not have to.
First, a thing worth saying plainly. Brown Pundits is not a magazine. It is a discussion community with essays attached, and it always has been. The life of the site is the conversation, not the rate of publication. Everything below follows from taking that seriously.
The principle is high-intensity posts. A lot of writing is rewriting, and we want authors to work their pieces hard before they go up. We have noticed the same thing for years. A post that carries real thought and attention never dies at ten or fifteen comments. Fifty is our quiet benchmark. Past a hundred, the thread stops being ours at all and takes on its own life, because people come here to argue with each other and use the post as fodder. Signal pulls signal. Thin posts pull nothing.
The rules:
- Fresh original writing is the post. Work it hard, put it up on its own, and let the comments run. This is the essay, and it keeps standing where it always has.
- Reposts do not each get a post. Links, columns, reviews, the odd video, other people’s work: these stack into a single running thread, one per author or theme. The author upranks the newest entry to the top, refreshes the timestamp, and lets the curation gather in one place. One dense thread beats ten thin link-drops that die overnight.
- Open threads, where the general cross-talk lives, stay scarce. We open a new one only when the current thread crosses fifty to a hundred comments, or once a week, whichever comes first. Two or three live threads, not twenty.
The obvious worry is that a long thread walls out newcomers. It does not, because the newest entry always sits on top, and the open threads rotate weekly or at a hundred, so the live conversation is never buried under a year of history.
An example. A contributor who shares a steady stream of links, a column here, a book review there, the odd YouTube, keeps one running thread for the lot instead of a dozen one-line posts. Each new link goes to the top. The older ones stay underneath. The regulars know exactly where to find it and argue about it, and the thread grows heavier and more valuable every week instead of vanishing down the feed in a day.
That is the whole idea. Original essays worked harder, reposts gathered in one place, cross-talk kept to a few live threads. We stay a discussion community with essays attached. We are just building better rooms for the discussion to happen in. Less churn for us, more weight for you.
We have some very complex deadlines in the next 2-3 days thus we may not write as much as we would like..
You are welcome to implement whatever rules you want. It’s your blog.
However, I don’t think this is really going to work out. Asides from you, no one really writes essays for BP. It will lead to a dead blog. But again, it’s your prerogative.
If it were my call, I would allow people to share pieces from their personal blogs or pieces that they’ve published in newspapers etc. Perhaps stipulating that links and videos from “The Wire” (for example) should be restricted to Open Threads. But one’s own original writing that has appeared elsewhere first would be fine.
If the issue is that people think that I monopolize BP, I’m happy to only post once a week.
What will end up happening otherwise is a bunch of “Open Threads” in which the “Saffroniate” and “Crescentiate” snipe at each other. That seems to be what drives most people anyway.
I wouldn’t use comments as a metric. As we’ve seen, the posts that get more than 50 comments are those that allow the two factions to snipe at each other. A book review or a translation etc are never going to be popular in the same way.
the idea is to create denser posts for intellectual and literary thread.
original writing can be stacked in a threaded post.
open thread has links from all over the internet.
Open Threads are limited to weekly or created when comments go beyond 100 comments
I take your point. And again it’s your blog.
You are free to run this experiment. I’m fairly sure it’s going to lead to radio silence.
Frankly, I’m not hard up for places to post my content to. I can post an essay to Substack every day if I feel so inclined. However, people may start unsubscribing if I spam their inboxes 🙂
It would be one thing if other authors on BP were actually producing original content. Other than one or two recent pieces this is not the case.