TrebliG07 wrote:The upvoting (or downvoting) in the comments section was helpful in finding the fun stuff to talk or laugh about with other people. While no voting would make everyone equal in view time more or less, when there are lots of people commenting it makes it unrealistic.
I loved talking on Cracked for a long time, but their comment section made it harder when it changed (6 months ago? A year ago?) and even more so now. I really wanted to come back like I used to but I don't see that happening now:(
Perhaps this will fill the commenting hole in my life now! Anyone able to say how this compares to our forums of old?
Yeah, that's exactly how I feel too. The upvote/downvote feature doesn't really seem to be useful unless everyone is able to use it because the whole point is giving community feedback. I don't think the change makes their comments section unusable per se (I actually remember back in the days of old when they hadn't even implemented voting), it just degrades readability for very little monetary reward, if the number of up votes on recent articles is any indication. And after all the negative attention from management to the commenters, the change feels much more like punishment than an earnest attempt to increase revenue.
And not to let out a torrent of complaints, but I also do feel that the articles are getting less diverse and more tenuous, like reallifegirl said. A couple months ago I tried to pitch an article about crazy stories from the history of math, and the feedback they gave me was simply that people probably wouldn't click on an article about math. I would be fine if they gave me feedback like "your language is too technical" or "you're too long winded" because I'm very much guilty of those sorts of things, but I think writing off an article simply by subject like that makes them miss out on a lot of good content. Also, I don't even think that their analysis is correct, since there are several Luke McKinney articles on the site about math that have 1,000,000+ views, while a lot of their more recent articles hover around 200,000. And I honestly didn't even like McKinney's writing style, but at least it added variety.
I guess we'll see where Cracked goes from here, but I don't have much hope now that their biggest draw in terms of views are their pictofact features that do their best to emulate a non-satirical version of clickhole.