Every time I put up a Dilemma article these days, the forums quake with outraged readers. Typically, their complaints are about how the Dilemma articles are split into multiple days, and how they hate waiting those extra 24 hours to have the other half of the debate appear. “Things didn’t used to be this way,” they cry,”so why are you punishing us now?”
The truth is that I’m not punishing anyone. If you want Punishment, read a Tomi Walamies article. When I split the articles into two days, I did so because I wanted to increase the amount of days we ran Limited articles, and also because the Dilemma series seemed to be underperforming for no obvious reason. The writing was solid, the topics were interesting… I had no idea why the Dilemma articles wouldn’t do as well as any articles on the site. Contrary to popular belief, it had nothing to do with being strapped for content, as I currently have articles coming not just out of my ears, but out of all of my orifices. Once you get used to it, it’s a good situation to be in, but I think it scares my cats. My wife is just pleased to have more scrap paper.
Anyway, after splitting the series into multiple days, I noticed that readership on those articles increased significantly. In spite of fevered complaints in the forums, more people were reading the articles. How odd. So I had to make a decision… do I listen to the readers in the forums making the complaints, or do I rule in favor of my writers, who obviously want as many readers as possible. I mean, if I were to go up to any writer on my staff and say,”Hey, if I post you on the same day as Geordie Tait, you’re going to get 20% fewer people reading your stuff,” they would say,”Uh, then don’t run me with Geordie, please.”
And they would be right.
It’s not fair to Ken and Mike to chop a chunk of their audience off by running both of their articles on the same day. Therefore, I’m going to leave the articles the way they are now, with one half of the Dilemma going up one day, and then the rebuttal going up the next day.
To those of you who are disappointed by this, I apologize. To those of you angered by this, go watch Dr. Phil for a while and come back to me. To those of you who don’t care one way or another as long as you get your fix, for once your apathy is welcome. To everybody else, enjoy the Dilemmas, and feel free to sample some of our other articles in the intervening twenty-four hours between installments.
Thank you,
TK