The choice to keep the site as only lightly moderated, as Tom Bartel once described it, is worthy of questioning. As Max has said, in a comment he made long before becoming the new editor, discussions at unmoderated sites quickly turn very unpleasant and mostly useless. (Example: Craig’sList Rants-’n-Raves.)

Matt’s still quite a young guy, so it didn’t surprise me that as editor he’d shy away from moderating discussions, because he’d likely find himslef overmatched. But Max ought to be able to do fine moderating; it’s clear he’s already been toning down his former tendency to be, at times, critical and argumentative, now that he’s in the middle, as editor and facilitator. And he writes well, and has a good sense of humor.

Max could also help things by going out of his way to welcome worthy newcomers, and encourage the regulars to do the same. And to encourage the regulars to go easy on newcomers.

But the clique-ish in-crowd clubbiness among the regulars, with their fondness for inside jokes, creates a huge barrier in the way of newcomers being willing to become participants.

I had to read a lot of archived threads to be able to begin to catch on about who among the regulars is who, and where they’re each coming from. It’s understandable that they keep their personal-info disclosures in their profiles to a minimum. But then, as a reader, you kind of need to create your own cheat-sheet reference guide (”can’t tell the players without a program”), about who’s who, based on stuff they’ve said in archived threads. And then you can wind up feeling like you’re cyber-stalking them. And then once you’ve learned to recognize the players, for your trouble you’re rewarded with the disappointment of watching them interact in just very predictable ways, in joking around and in giving each other a hard time, and that’s just not very interesting. Kind of like on a lame reality show on TV, where it’s expected that the participants always need to be stirring things up with one another.

And it would be good for the very frequent regular commenters to be encouraged to comment less frequently. . . in the interest of quality over quantity. The regulars tend to monitor the site throughout their workday hours, watching for each next chance to chime in, and for whenever any other regulars refer to them. That puts any newcomer who can’t be doing that (because of the requirements of their jobs) at a conversational disadvantage. The MNSpeak logo says “All Day, All Night”. But the reality is much more “All Day, while bored at work; not much at night.”

MNSpeak attracts very few women who aren’t still quite young and into lots of nightlife. That’s a big gap, a big missed chunk of the potential audience and contributors. I’m confident that part of the reason is the flirting and bawdiness by some of the young-women regulars, who seem to have excessive needs to have any guys, whether young or not, paying attention to them. That’s usually guaranteed to put off women who are a little older and aren’t flirty and bawdy. Here again, the moderator could excercise some useful influence.

Another disappointing pattern is when on occasion someone submits a genuninely informative or insightful comment, but the regulars just ignore it, as they revert to their in-jokes and sniping. Maybe I’m not typical, but the reason I’m intrigued by MNSpeak is its potential for providing lots of good user-contributed info, on subjects the contributors have some genuine expertise in. Not in-jokes and sniping.

I have also tried out the Strib’s Buzz.Mn site, which is more moderated, and obviously aimed at more of a family-newspaper audience. So far, I haven’t been impressed there. The thread topics have tended to be duds. And so many of those commenting, though more civil and much less clique-ish than MNSpeak’s typical participants, tend to want to just ask rather uninformed questions, or speculate wildly rather than contribute reliable info. (Like, why not first do a simple little bit of Googling on the topic, or see if Wikipedia has something good on it?)

Tom Bartel has complained at various times that the MNSpeak regulars aren’t shouldering enough responsibility for the site’s quality and success. In that MNSpeak is a commercial venture of the Bartel family (which is fine with me), seems to me that that should be mostly up to them, as the proprietors.

I will be happy to see MNSpeak survive and thrive. Or else fall by the wayside and get supplanted by someone else’s better version. I’ll direct my online reading attention to whichever one or ones are most consistently displaying good info on subjects I’m interested in.

Tom-

It’s not our job to make us interested in posting content on MNspeak. That’s MNspeak’s job.

-Aaron