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I find this decision quite dissapointing. I know a lot of people here never particularily liked RA but they were and still are the biggest underground dance music site. I liked commenting there because it was one of the few places where you could have a public discourse on issues surrounding the scene. What's left that's not social media? There's some other music forums where I'm active but all of them, including TA are quite niche in their reach and appeal. RA was as universal as you can get in this scene.
Wall of text I wrote on their FB post of this announcement:
"I find this very dissapointing. with most of the smaller blogs and websites (LWE, mnml ssgs etc.) having closed down over the past 5-10 years, RA, as the biggest site for dance music was one of the few places left where an actual, structured public conversation centered around dance music could take place. if the last ten years have taught us anything, it's that social media is awful at fascilitating conversations. everything is way too fleeting and these sites simply aren't made to support people having actual conversations. I also find it bizarre to close the comments because of trolls and hurtful comments and the like and to then point to social media sites. there may have been some awful comments on RA from time to time but you have you guys never seen the average youtube or FB comment section? the RA comment section really was incredibly civilized in comparison to the toxic wasteland that is social media and 99% of the comments were inoffensive. yes, message board culture in a way was "uninclusive" since there were certain customs and modes of conversations to be learned and to respected if you wanted to be a part of these communities. but what's the point of a "broadly accepted" social media culture, when people are just yelling past each other all day long with no actual conversation happening? aren't conversations, by definition, always excluding someone? if you give everyone in a room the permission to speak, you don't have a conversation, you have a yelling contest. but this is not a racist, sexist etc. exclusion. I'm still friends with people from completely different social, racial, cultural, sexual etc. backgrounds that I've met on message boards years ago. it's an exclusion of those that don't want to adhere to a certain discourse culture and of those that don't want to put in any effort in the conversation. what's the point of being "inclusive" towards people dropping pointless one-liners etc.? as a result, nobody remembers anyone from a social media comment section once they close the tab. if there is a better way of fascilitating conversations in the works I'm of course all for that but I'm skeptical at "new ways" that are "more with the times". while message boards may have often became a social mileu of nerdy white guys I really don't think that they are discriminatory against people with different backgrounds structurally (and isn't social media much more open to that kind of structural discrimination since everyone can see your country, race, gender, social mileu etc.?), they just need to be supervised accordingly to keep the conversation culture inclusive (for those that want to put in the effort to join the conversation in a meaningful way) and diverse. this can be done with strict and hands-on moderation. social media on the other hand, may be on the surface "inclusive" to everyone but is really inclusive to no one in the end for structural reasons, since nothing is ever enforced and no one is having a conversation. it's not a coincidence that the overall amount of hate speech on the net has increased tenfold with the introduction of social media. in the past, nazis, trolls and racists etc. were just kicked off private websites, today they are free to roam on megacorp platforms and are even supported by algorithm culture (see the youtube-altright outrage industry or the huge amount of FB and twitter nazi bots)."
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June 2018 mix
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