I’ve been away from my computer for the past few days but I recently exchanged correspondence with Mastro Titta and heard about the mixed public reaction to our first public execution. He said there was much trepidation among the commenters about the reasons for the royal execution. I wanted to clarify a few things:
1. Our first condemned prisoner was executed for breaking the rules. We now have almost 100 authors with full priveleges to write posts on this site. That’s an incredible level of community authorship that, I think, very few websites would ever allow. One of the few rules we have in place is that authors must submit their articles for review before an editor actually schedules it to be published. Breaking that rule is a huge insult to all the other writers who wait their turn to publish articles on Crasstalk.
2. I know Mastro Titta mentioned that “his post sucked,” but let me be clear: We’re not going to publicly execute anyone because we don’t like their article. In fact, to date, we’ve published all but a handful of articles that have been submitted and usually do very little editing to the content. In this most recent case, the author simply copy/pasted a huge amount of text that could have been linked to. That wouldn’t normally be an execution-worthy offense, but apparently Mastro hates reading huge blocks of pasted text. It makes him grouchy before cutting off heads.
3. Executions are not done based on personal grudges or popularity contests. You can disagree with anyone here, on any issue, and you will not be executed for it. No one will ever be executed for disagreeing with Salome or BettyCrocker or Dancing Queen. In fact, all three of them are mostly wrong.
4. To date, we’ve banned exactly ZERO commenters from the site. And we didn’t ban OMGP from commenting, only from authoring new posts. We do reserve the right to execute someone’s author or commenter priveleges or both if it’s a particularly egregious case.
5. The executions are a tradition we borrowed from our ancestral homeland of Gawker and are done strictly in a spirit of jest. We’re not actually wishing for anything worse than mild teasing/ball-busting. It’s just a bit of internet fuckery, so try to stop worrying and have fun with it. Most of the condemned will probably be allowed back into our good graces with maybe a quick apology and/or a bottle of scotch.
6. Now that we’ve hired Mastro Titta to provide the negative reinforcement, we’re also going to give you some positive reinforcement. We’re announcing a new feature: COTW. I still have to sit down with DogsofWar and GrandInquisitor to work out the details, but we’re going to do a Comment of the Week post where we highlight the pithiest, snarkiest, smartest, most lulzy stuff you come up with. Stay tuned for details.
And as the Wu-Tang Clan once wisely said, protect ya neck.
