I continue to fail to understand the complaints about bloggers that are not based on the content of the posts.
It looks like these complaints are an FR _fad_.
FR is supposed to be smarter than that.
God forbid we give an ally a hit.
Concur with your observations. Let’s just say that there are some ‘mods’ who are a bit, shall we say, ‘over-zealous’.
I think it comes down to this:
Years ago, when Free Republic was young, Jim Robinson was sued by the LA Times and Washington Post for copyright violations.
Many of us thought that the lawsuit had no merit as this was clearly fair use. However, Jim didn’t have unlimited funds to fight it. Bottom line. Legally, the rich win over the poor, despite a case’s merits.
So we had an order to all FReepers, to only post excerpts of their articles, and this list of “verboten” news sites grew and grew. Some we could only paraphrase.
Over the many years, Free Republic has grown and grown. The stickiness of the site—how much time people spend here, is phenomenal! Over the same many years, the number of hits and stickiness of a site can be used to generate a lot of revenue. Now Free Republic does NOT advertise, so that revenue isn’t seen here... Which makes the site so much nicer to read and navigate.
When a news site is excerpted here, in order to read the entire article, a FReeper must go to the link of that source. Unlike Free Republic, many even so-called legitimate news sites are filled with trash—tracking ads, popups, annoying offers, and even login pages from a walled site. This annoys people to no end, especially people used to Free Republic’s cleanliness in this regard.
When someone has a conservative blog they want to post an article from, they’re free to do so, and when that site is not on the excerpted list, they can post the WHOLE article, which is a blessing to people here, for the above reasons.
But some blog posters want to use Free Republic to generate revenue, so excerpt their own blogs, using FReeper’s curiosity to read the whole thing, and then get ad revenue while FReeper’s browsers are trashed. And to make matters worse, many of these blog posters aren’t really FReepers. You’ll see they only ever have ONE post in a thread, their thread to their excerpted blog. They never give one single dime to Free Republic, which has now almost continuous fund raisers to pay for our ad-less web site.
THIS is what we call blog pimping.
I’m sure you are reasonable and see that this is very unfair.
Not every blog does this—many are as good and even better than so-called real news sites. When they make an effort to share all of their content with us, and the blog writers (and that is as opposed to regular FReeper’s posting someone else’s blog) participate in the discussion—this is good, and they should never be scorned like the blog pimps hitherto described.