This Used To Be My Playground

I'm not going to come out and say I miss being on The American Scene or anything; the digs here are pretty nice. Instead, I'll say that there are an awful lot of ongoing discussions over there that I've been really enjoying - including, but not limited to, Reihan and James Poulos on rewriting/destroying the Constitution; Reihan on Dana Goldstein vs. David Brooks (a topic that this Observer article dovetails with nicely); and this conversation about education.

Also of interest: Reihan on David Vitter's sordid past, and Alan Jacobs on the suburbs.

Comments

Are you a goddamn lobbyist or something? I'm not even going for wit, that's an honest question.

Posted by EpicureanQuaker | July 12, 2007 1:39 PM

Now if only Reihan can get the damn archives online so if I don't read the site every day I can figure out what the hell has been going on.

Posted by Sanjay | July 12, 2007 8:02 PM

Hear, hear.

No archives. No search function. Can't find posts by individual authors. Can sort by topics -- but only the most recent posts, because there's no "older posts" button to take you off a first page.

Oh, and the frequency of new posts is such that if you skip a day or two, there will be a completely new front page. Which means those posts are gone forever, because, again, no "older posts" button.

The TAS interface sucks so badly that, even though it's full of stuff I should be interested in, I look at it only occasionally.

Doug M.

Posted by Doug M. | July 16, 2007 6:32 AM

Also: TAS /doesn't/ generate a lot of good discussion.

Most posts give rise to only a handful of comments. Scanning the front page, I see the following number of comments per post: 3,3,0,1,3,5,7,6,3,1,1,0,3,0,6.

That's an average of 2.6 comments per post. By way of comparison, my 200-hit-per-day home blog averages about 2.1.

Further: while there was that fluky Constitution post with 40 hits, it's very rare for a TAS post to get as many as a dozen comments. Probably because of the archive issues mentioned above.

It's true that length of thread is a weak measure of value of thread. But three or four comments is just not a "discussion".

If I sound a bit cranky about this, well, it's 2007. There's no excuse for a blog interface being this unfriendly.

Doug M.

Posted by Doug M. | July 16, 2007 6:50 AM

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