LNH/META: To Reboot or Not to Reboot....

[Lalo Martins]

On Thursday, 27 October 2011 14:00:10 UTC+2, Andrew Perron  wrote:
> Really, what we need is to advertise - especially by word of mouth.
> Everyone out there who has friends who like writing, tell them about this
> place!  We're fun and friendly and smart and silly!

I told a few friends about it. They read a few issues and disappeared. When I was doing 58.5 I told a few friends again. They read 58.5, some of them read a couple of issues of other stuff, then they left as well. Nobody was interested in trying to understand the epic pile of characters and continuity tangle that is the Looniverse.

Mind, I'm a huge continuity whore myself, and that's probably one of the reasons I stuck around. So I'm not talking from personal taste, but rather from my personal previous efforts at advertising.

> > Now it's 
> > possible that if it had its own messageboard maybe it would do a little 
> > better than being on Usenet... although you'd still have to lead 
> > everyone who doesn't know about it to it.
> 
> Yeah, really, there's no difference between being on a bboard somewhere and
> having Google Groups there, except this way, people can graduate to the
> awesomeness that is a good Usenet client.

I was going to disagree, but then I saw the new Google Groups “Plus-Style” UI, which honesty is pretty awesome. I can really see more people using this. (Except for the florging scrollbars. What is it with every other web developer today wanting his own custom scrollbars?)

> > Back in 2004, I kind of tried my own LNH reboot with LNHY... and at 
> > least in getting new writers it was kind of a failure.  Maybe it would 
> > have done better with some classic LNH characters thrown in the mix.
> 
> I don't think so.  You did a good job, it was just that, well, 2004 was on
> the downswing for RACC; if you look at the Google Groups archives, December
> 2003 and January 2004 were the months with the lowest posting rate the
> group's ever seen.  And LNHY was one of the things that helped pull it out
> of that; August, the month it premiered, had the *highest* rate that year.

I liked LNHY as a reader, but I never felt compelled to write for it. It didn't feel much like a reboot or even continuation, more a spinoff.


There are other good points in other posts to this thread, I'll reply to them gradually whenever I have a few free minutes along my day :-)

-- Lalo “now to figure out how to port my signature here” Martins