Troy

@ProfD I never watched the show either. Nothing against Joy. I just don’t watch broadcast TV. Everything I watch nowadays is streaming on demand. I was aware of the call, but did not join it. I’d support efforts to restore her program on a new platform.

FYI: @Cynique and @aka Contrarian are the same person. @Dr. Lorna thanks so much for sharing your thoughts and sharing it with you chairperson (chairperson of what?).

🙂 All those great-grands I'm sure you are tired -- whew! Seriously, It must be fascinating to see so many of your descendants. When you first wrote that post, 15 years ago, most of those great-grands were not born. It would be great to see a few more comments.

No, that type of reporting and coverage is important -- life-saving! Sure, perfect fodder for the tabloids -- which I guess GMA is TV tabloid huh? I don't watch it, so I have no clue If their MO is trolling the web for sensational stories I'm not surprised they are #1. Being popular does not mean it is the best thing for you, certainly not enough to attract my attention.

@richardmurray, do you see the spam comment on your blog? If so, please delete them. I have to manually delete these on an almost daily basis. 4 new spam messages were added today. I have not deleted them yet -- just waiting to see if you see them.

Thinking about the lack of participation on these forums I began looking at some of the most popular posts. This one is #50 in terms of popularity and has been viewed almost 16K times. You will notice that there are a couple of lurker comments posted 6 years after @aka Contrarian made the post. We can no longer take "guest" posts, because racist trolls and spammers have ruined that for us -- making it impossible for me to have an open forum. I have to require logins and accounts now. If never did post Cynique's article. I will remedy that. Connie, if you want to revise the article let me know. You can edit the original and I copy it from there. These are the kind of posts that attract readers without racing to the bottom with trash to feed the algorithm.

I'm sure she could have come up with something to compensate a low-level thug 🤔 Seriously, here is the scenario: A teenager accidently hits another teenager with her baton during a track meet. No one is seriously injured. Someone posts the video online exclaiming, "Black Girl Clobbers Another Black Girl with Baton During Track Meet." The video goes viral. Good Morning America, desperate for ratings, jumps all over it the video, without vetting the story giving it national attention. We have all been manipulated into outrage. The story as presented is indeed outrageous, but looking deeper it is of no consequence -- certainly not newsworthy. The entire situation is absurd.

@aka Contrarian that explanation sounds perfectly plausible and reasonable; indeed, it appears to be an accurate description is what is going on. The nameless, faceless lurkers keep the forums alive. I think the software and perhaps how I have organized things here is perhaps a bit confusing for a newcomer. I thought about streamlining things by consolidating the forums and ditching the underlined features. I really wish I could get rid of the registration process. The creates additional effort that really hurts participation, but the huge amount of spam and racist hate makes having an open forum impossible. I'll consider a provocative question for the week. I'll add it to a newsletter and see what happens. My problem will be keeping it up. Here is the first provocative question of the week ▶ (given the state of the net it may not be provocative enough)

I post this question in an effort to encourage more discussion from people who read posts but don't comment (lurk). The thought was that my questions should be "provocative." I not sure it this question exactly fits the bill 🙂 Kicking things off: MSNBC cancelled “The ReidOut.” What are we gonna do about it? Was anyone here on the emergency Zoom call, attended by nearly 10,000 people, in support of Joy Reid, the first Black woman to host a prime-time cable news show? If we really needed her program we would come together and ensure she has a platform and the resources to continue, and even expand upon, what she was doing... right? We could boycott MSNBC or we create our own “The ReidOut,” in the same way the Roland Martin created ★ The Black Star Network. We have the tech, the money, and obviously the talent. What we need is the commitment and fortitude. PQOTW#1

On the contrary, Del boy are particularly good at answering questions. In the old days before the proliferation of AI I had a bot that would go out and look for conversations about books and post a comment with the link to Amazon. I made a little bit of money every day with that until Twitter shut down the ability to do that sort of thing. I had another bot that would go out search for profiles that had anything to do with Books or African-Americans and follow that profile. Sometime later, it will go back and Unfollow that profile. This was an easy way to increase your followers. The reason is that a percentage of people you follow will follow you back again. This was all automated. I recall reading an estimate that 60% of the traffic on Twitter was bot traffic. Facebook is obviously different and I don’t recall the bot traffic figures for Facebook I’m sure the tools and bots used by people with resources are far more sophisticated and effective today. I’ve been told by social media marketers that personal pages perform better than business pages in terms of organic reach. I deleted my original Facebook profile page so I’m not about to rebuild a new one to find out if personal Pages perform better than business ones.

I disagree. When I was in high school, a kid from boys high picked up the starting blocks and hit another kid with it during a track meet. Today where everyone post everything on social media I’m sure that would’ve went viral. But in New York City, where people will be murdered every day that incident was not newsworthy. Kids lash out in all kinds of situations all the time unfortunately. If the national news covered every time these situations occurred. They wouldn’t have time to talk about anything else. to make matters worse, the girl denies deliberately hitting the other runner. She says it was an accident so this is not even a clear case of violence, and George Stephanopoulos is covering it as if it is. The girl was not seriously injured. She was allegedly diagnosed with a concussion, but looking at the video that strains credulity. Now, if it was a small market, where high school sports is regularly covered. I could see it making the news, but national coverage really?! yeah, I about that figure skating situation as well. But clearly this track incident does not rise to the level of hiring a hitman to take someone out.

i actually don’t think you can… not without being manipulated on some level. You’re constantly prompted to do something even LinkedIn shares with you the activity of your friends what they liked or if they have an anniversary or birthday you’re being prompted to send them a congratulations. Now sending someone a birthday greeting in response to a prompt sounds pretty innocuous, but it’s not because it potentially begins a whole chain of exchanges that you might not be interested in engaging in, and if you ignore it, then you feel like a dirtbag who can’t be bothered to say happy birthday… On Facebook, I post to my business account remotely and occasionally I look at the meager engagement that I get and I will reply to that if someone writes something that requires a response. My homeowner’s association has a private Facebook group that I look at periodically because sometimes there’s some useful information on it or I can get a question answered. But I generally go in there with blinders on. I know I may come across as being very judgmental regarding the use of social media. I have no issue with anything that an adult chooses to do with their free time. when I talk about social media, I’m typically talking about us collectively as a group. I contend that as a group our data and attention and privacy are being exploited. Indeed, we are being exploited and creating vast wealth for a relatively small number of people (small compared to the number being exploited). I don’t come to this position from a place of ignorance. I used all of these social media platforms from the moment they were invented. I was very active on them for years, but I saw had operated and I decided to quit. It’s like the cigarette smoker who learns how bad the product is and stops using it.

It originally broadcast on Good Morning America (GMA), which is a nationally broadcast program. The video got 1.4 million views on YouTube -- not counting the ones here, because YouTube does not publish embedded views as to encourage creators to direct viewers to YouTube to watch video. Here too GMA is feeding the algorithm and debasing their content to get more viewers. Look, someone getting hit over the head with a stick is simply not newsworthy. @Delano it is possible that the clip started out on social, went viral and GMA picked up on the story. If that is the case, that is a pathetic waste of journalism and sad to think the national news may have come to this.

@ProfD I've been doing this since 1998. I ain't turning off the light unless I'm the last one. Please don't try to come up with a topic to please Goolge's algorithm--unless it is something you really want to discuss. Besides there is already a LOT of competition to rank on the term The Pimp Chronicles. 😉 Yeah, people have been programed to scroll through a feed. Again, you don't search you just scroll through what is delivered to you. It is mindless, but very a compelling way to be entertained. The feedback you provide on how long you dwell and watch videos helps determine which video you are served. People tell me it is uncanny how well TikTok knows what you want to watch. Is it a business or personal page? I've been told that is it best to use a personal page as business pages are not shown unless you buy and ad. The other problem with social is that you don't know which accounts are bots. Unless it is someone you know -- even then you can't be sure -- there is a meaningful probability the account is bogus. That 850 may be 600, 500 -- who knows?

A national news story... wow.

Hey @aka Contrarian tell her to post here, she will not be ostracized 😉

True. We can't let that be the reason that we are not spiritual beings. I believe that we have lost a lot of knowledge due to the perversion of spirituality through religion for reasons of control and power.

@aka Contrarian To me saving my mental health by not subjecting myself to the algorithm, not contributing to the wealth of multi-billionaires, and supporting Black-owned indie platforms is not worth the trade-off. It is not like I'm on a media blackout. I listen to the radio almost daily and read newspapers and magazines. Despite that I still did learn about day light savings time from another human being, so I did not miss-out on the no-so-trival event 😉

It appears social media has sucked all the air out of the room. That started more than a decade ago. I'll start another conversation about this here ▶

There are so many reasons why there is not much participation on these forums, but there are many reasons why people do participate. Trying to appeal to people on the positives and downplay the negatives is challenging, but I'm open to ideas. I should be clear what I mean by participation: I mean people who post comments and start conversation There are currently 9,652 people who have an account on this forum, but only 917 of them have made at least one comment. Only 250 have made 5 or more comments--that is less than 3% people who have created account. 65 People have made 100 or more comments, but many of those people have not posted in years It is not like the forum is not being visited and read. In the past year almost 774 visitors spent an average of almost 13 minutes per visit on the site! That is a long time. In the past 12 months, 18.861 people visited this conversation "Blacks commit 60% of ALL violent crime — but only 14% of the population" and spent almost a minute there on average. "Pete Davidson And Jewish History" is also a popular conversation started by @Pioneer1 almost 2 years ago; in that past year that page was visited on average, by 11 different people a day--every day. Another Pioneer conversation, "People Ignoring Their Smoke Detectors" is visited by more than twice as many people, a day, than the Pete Davidson page! Visibility is not really the problem. I think the problem is visibility within the community I'd like to attract--Black people who participate. At any given moment there are at least a couple dozen people on the site. The screen shot (shown below) shows people on the site as I write this. The vast majority are people without accounts (or no logged in): Also, I approve new accounts on a daily basis. People are still signing up, but not participating in conversations. In the old days before the corruption of Google's Search engine. The site was far more popular as it was able to attract more readers and participants organically through search. Still, there is no reason this platform is not far more popular, given the existing traffic. I guess I need a professional to do more active promotion... In the world of AI generated content the ability to engage online with actual humans (as opposed to social media bits) may result in a resurgence in the popularity of independent discussion forums like this one. One can hope 🙂

Hi @Rosey Lee Looking forward to your 2nd Novel: A Gardin Wedding: A Gardins of Edin Novel List Price: $17.00 WaterBrook Press (May 13, 2025) Paperback, 272 pages Fiction

of course there is I did not mean to suggest there weren’t. All I’m saying is that TikTok is not one of them.

My daughter mentioned it to me yesterday if it wasn’t for her, I would not have heard about it anywhere else. Talking about daylight savings time doesn’t generate revenue. You be much better off talking about how LeBron James got into Stephana Smith’s face at the Lakers game. We should get rid of daylight savings time anyway it serves no purpose other than to confused people wreck havoc with our sleep schedule.

If you ever been to South Africa, I imagine you would not be able to understand why a white South African would come to the US? One, the country is beautiful; two, they are doing very well; three cost of living is higher; four they’d be safer in SA and five it is America….

They are still around. I meet one all the time.