(no subject)

[the_rck]

metanews may not get posted until tomorrow. Google docs isn't cooperating in either Safari or Firefox. I've already been fighting with it for an hour, and I have better things to do than to spend six hours doing something that should take half an hour, tops. In Safari, everything's just moving really, really slowly. In Firefox, the document doesn't want to load and keeps telling me to clear my cache and giving me an 'unresponsive script' warning.

My suspicion is that Safari's problem is that I'm using an old version (still the most recent that will work with my OS but old enough that Google keeps warning me that it's no longer supported). Then again, given that Google docs isn't working in Firefox, either, maybe Google's hiccuping. I don't know. I just want to get this dratted thing posted so that I can do something else for a couple of hours. I really hate the way that metanews keeps taking up more and more time. I haven't had a single day this week when I have worked on it for at least two hours.

Ah, Firefox has finally deigned to load. Maybe I can do this after all.

It's just discouraging. We put a lot of work into this, and most of what we hear back are complaints that we're not finding the right sort of meta for the right sorts of fandoms and that we're not giving the right sort of information about what we're linking. Oh, and that we don't curate the links to make sure they're good meta.

The first is a problem of not knowing the right places to look and of not having enough people to look carefully. A lot of this stuff is on Tumblr now, and we have no way to deal with Tumblr (and I don't expect we will in the foreseeable future. Nobody wants to commit twenty plus hours a week to link finding on Tumblr. We could have someone spending all of their time searching Tumblr and still not find everything).

The second is a question of time. I'm trying to do each link in under two minutes so that I have time to do all of the others and still eat and sleep. It could be resolved with a few more volunteers to help me with the blog list. Well, partially resolved. I still have no interest in reading most of the articles I link, and I doubt any other link finder would be either. It takes far too much time. I look just enough to be sure it's probably meta and to get a vague idea of what it's about. Then I pull a quote of some sort and go.

The third-- Well, most of the fandoms we link find in, we know nothing at all about beyond what we see in the meta we skim. Judging content with no knowledge is a bad idea. Also, we don't want to be arbiters of what's 'good.' We try to link only to substantive meta, but we're moving really fast. This ties in to complaints I've seen that we 'only link to SJW' stuff. We link to the stuff we can find. We're following more than sixty blogs. We'd add others if they were suggested. There's no point in adding Tumblrs because nobody's checking there. The reason we have, for example, a lot of Buffy meta is that there's a really great newsletter for the fandom on LJ that searches out a lot of good links. We don't, by contrast, have a lot of H5O or Supernatural meta because the sources we have for those don't link any and because none of the blogs we follow talk about those shows.

Okay. Time for lunch. Then I post.