The manifestation of my love for Newsvine always comes out as a negative ...  whether it is over-reaction or acutely radical opinions I travel the fringes .. pushing buttons and creating buttons to push.

I've never been fond of on-line forums and chatting ...  too much stupidity and too many under-age (and under-educated) participants.

NV is just cerebral enough to discourage the usual crud who live on the Internet merely to get their jollies by annoying and attacking others.

A large part of the quality of life on NV is due to self-moderation ... and I must also give credit to NV's moderators who tho flawed do as well as any could expect under difficult circumstances.

The powers that be have simply not invested as much in NV as they likely spent acquiring it ..... the goals on a spread sheet relate to ROI not necessarily growth.

NV has been stagnant since MSNBC acquired it as an incubator.

The principals (Davidson etal) have extracted all the value in the ingenuity that inspired NV and have departed - and it is only now that the realization of the existence of another player is emerging.

The NV community.

I think Mike Davidson got it. The community deserved a large share of the profits that were extracted early on ... NV has stagnated since it's brilliant inception. Money can breed complacency  - the more money - the more complacent we humans become.

What I enjoyed about NV from my first visit was the constructive conflicts and the vibrant intellectual community - people who actually made some sense even if I didn't agree with them!

These NV'ers are a surprisingly small group of several hundred loyal individuals who have "appreciated" the core social value of NV.

And after all is said and done NV is a social venue first and foremost.

Some may debate the existence of a group of NV'ers outside the normal corporate pyramid, who had and still have an impact on NV's success .. or failure.

Those items I cherished most were my friends list and the many memberships I maintained even when I couldn't be active in all of them.

My writing transcended many topics and the reaction from a cross section of group members helped me shape each new article.

Politics has intrigued me since 2008 when I was inspired by Barack Obama. My underlying interest in politics relates to nature including ourselves (we humans) .. however I place no value on what we humans think and attempt to separate knowledge from emotional rationality that is irrational at its core.

For me NV has been therapy - the repartee often reminding me that I know as much and as little as any other human on earth.

NV's operations have always been a black box. Communications being sparse and implicitly directed downward at we NV'ers below.

The redundant rules repeated and skinned as the COH and the "real" rules and this code and that code are merely the usual purposely confusing legal mumbo jumbo ... that large corporations post on websites.

We are all used to it  - although we shouldn't stand for it.

There needs to be some justification to shareholders for the legal component in bloated Corporate budgets that reduces cash dividends.

Anyways  - I digress.

MY goal in all of this rhetoric was to restate a few features that I think are critical to the continued success of NV.

• A linked list of the comments a user makes that can be used to trace back to a discussion.
• No cap on memberships
• Our friends list

One other item that troubles me is the inefficient use of screen real estate as compared to classic.

It's seems the site has been remodeled to emulate the extra large print edition that some newspapers put out for seniors.

Perhaps it is the growing trend. The media seems to want to reduce OUR peripheral vision to get us to pay more attention to what they want to tell us to do.

And they DO!

I feel an anxiety attack coming on just thinking about it!