I still don’t understand the bloggerbashers.
More than once, some self-promoting blogger has put up an important story that I had not yet seen.
I have yet to ever pay a dime to click on someone’s blog for a good story...Costs absolutely nothing....
For the most part, they're stupid monomaniacs. "Bloggers", in general, do less damage to the Republic than Big Media. In fact, the very idea that only Big Media is a reliable source for news is absolutely poisonous. We KNOW that Big Media lie about practically everything. Bloggers? Not so much.
Completely agree...I come here for one source of my news... and 90% of what I read is from a blog instead of msm source! Blog bashers are under same msm mind control tactics as my liberal friends who continually tell me they are conservative and it is I that has changed... I can pull up posts from 14 years ago as proof it was not recently...
Deep seated insecurities combined with delusions of grandeur
fueled by depression and mass quantities of alcohol.
Plus... I think bloggers are mostly scumbags.
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.
I think it’s very likely a group dominated by mentally ill people, and possibly OCD sufferers. I feel bad for them and can’t imagine taking the time from my day to hunt down and comment on posts I don’t like. I mean, if that means something to you, then how meaningless must the rest of your life be?
More than once, some self-promoting blogger has put up an important story that I had not yet seen."
The bloggerbashers know better than you.
Sort of like a soup Nazi. A kind of blogging Polizei. How dare those bloggers try and self promote! And how dare you for wanting to get info outside the beltway alphabets, or their personally approved list of news sources. Thats just not allowed!!
Follow what they demand or else...
More than once, some self-promoting blogger has put up an important story that I had not yet seen.
The main objection by humblegunner and others like him seems to be the bloggers who only post teasers (clickbait) to drive traffic to their blog site. Since they control their own content, they are free to post the entire story if they choose, and if the story really is important they should do just that.
And readers who find the posting interesting or useful will then voluntarily go to the blog site in question to read more and bookmark the site for future reading.
Another issue are bloggers who post and run. These never engage in discussion of what they have written, probably because they can't censor comments as they can at their blog site.
Thirdly, once posted on FR, the poster has limited ability to alter the content. In a sense, FR serves as an archive of informational snapshots that can be useful for research purposes in the future, or embarrassing, as the case may be.
Fourthly, FR exists on voluntary contributions by users like myself who feel that FR is worth the investment. FR allows NO advertising. Some posters have chosen to use FR to promote their own for-profit endeavors such as books, even to the extent (as one notorious never-Trumper ex-FReeper did) of posting screen captures of their Amazon listings.
Posting clickbait excerpts from ad-infested (and sometimes malware-infected) blog sites accomplishes the same thing. That lowers the blogger to the level of the MSM sources who demand excerpting to protect their ad revenue.
Bloggers are certainly free to choose how they control their material, and readers on this site are equally free to react to blog postings as they see fit, as always within the overall rules established by the site owners.
