Rethinking And Refreshing Techdirt’s Weekend Posts: We Want Your Feedback

For many years now we’ve had two regular posts that come out on the weekends: our This Week In Techdirt History posts on Saturdays, and our Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week posts on Sundays. Sometimes we switch it up a little bit, replacing the history post with a special promotion or (as will be happening again soon!) with our Winner Spotlight posts for our annual public domain game jam.

This has been rolling along smoothly and we don’t plan any major changes, but we occasionally discuss whether there are tweaks we should make, and since I’m on vacation this week (and thus not around to write today’s comments post) we thought it would be a good time to check in with our readers and find out what you think.

In general, the weekend posts don’t get a lot of traffic, though that’s never been our reason for doing them anyway: they are for our community of commenters and long-time readers who we know appreciate them. Nevertheless, the relatively small audience for these posts is why we try not to expend too much time and effort creating them every week, as we’re all very busy around here and there are always a lot of projects on the go!

So with that in mind, we want to know: do folks like these posts? Is there stuff we can do to improve or refresh them going forward? Is there something else entirely you’d like to see as a weekly feature? Sound off in the comments, and we’ll be discussing the possibilities over the coming weeks.

There’s one change that we’ve already talked about and will likely be rolling out after the upcoming run of game jam winner spotlight posts: since Techdirt’s history has grown so long, and since frankly nobody wants to be repeatedly confronted with the fact that 2021 is already five years behind us, we’re going to ditch the “five years ago” section in the history round-ups and instead look at posts from ten, fifteen, and twenty years ago. Next year when we celebrate our 30th birthday, we might even change that up again to ten, twenty, and thirty year sections. Reaching further back just seems more fun and interesting than reminiscing on the recent past.

Also on the history posts, there’s a question I’d love some reader feedback on: is the “paragraph format” with a brief summary of some posts from the week worth keeping? Or would it be just as good (perhaps better) to go with just a bullet-list of selected headlines? Or something else?

As for the comments posts, these are our longest-running and most important tradition, as we’ve always valued our community of commenters and we want to highlight your contributions. However, as you know if you read them every week, lately it’s often been a struggle to populate the “funny” side of the list, and admittedly the quality of the Editor’s Choice selections can vary a lot, as it depends on how much time we (and especially I) have had to follow and engage in the comments on a given week.

So again we want your feedback: should anything change about the comment posts? Should we pivot away from Editor’s Choice and instead feature the top three winners-by-vote in each section (maybe retaining a single Editor’s Choice comment on each side, or just one for the week?) And how should we handle it when it’s a slow commenting week and there just aren’t enough highly-voted comments to make a post? (On especially slow weeks on the funny side, sometimes the “winners” are really just the chance recipients of a trickle of idle votes, and not really comments that make any sense to feature).

There’s also a similar question about the comments posts as there was about the history posts: is the brief written summary (in which I try to explain the context of a comment if and when it’s absolutely necessary to understand the comment itself) worthwhile? Or would a more dry bullet list that simply quotes and links to the winning comments and their authors suffice, leaving readers to go check out the full context as they wish?

Beyond these specific questions, we’re open to any and all thoughts on how the weekend posts should change (if they should change at all) and suggestions about anything else you might like to see. We’re not in a rush to make any changes, but it’s worth getting the conversation started. Let us know in the comments. (And if any suggestions are especially popular and get lots of votes, maybe they’ll turn up in next week’s winning comments post!)