What to make of HotSoup, the non-partisan, non-ideological, mostly non-everything political discussion/debate site just out from Beltway insiders Carter Eskew, Matthew Dowd, Joe Lockhart and Mark McKinnon plus media types Ron Fournier and Allie Savarino (and top-heavy with yet more executive co-founders)? It’s difficult to be polite; I won’t always be.
Toward the end of its debut week, there isn’t much talk at the site. Nor are too many non-”Hardball” news outlets talking about it. Among those who have, appraisals tend toward the grim.
One is GOP Internet strategist Mike Turk, who once worked on a similar project called Grassroots.com. Upon HotSoup’s announcement this summer, Turk warned of the pitfalls at Personal Democracy Forum. But as he wrote this week at his blog, Kung Fu Quip, the problems were bigger than he’d thought:
Perhaps the most vexing thing about the site is the apparent lack of any correlation between the name and the content. Their content is divided into “Issue Loops” but that bears little relationship to Hot Soup. They might as well have called the site Eggplant.com.
Honestly, I don’t get it. I have a lot of respect for the people involved in this, but it may be the most poorly conceived idea since Kevin Federline.
Earlier in the week, Paul NcManara of NetworkWorld.com had pled for sanity:
This group cannot be operating under the illusion that all they have to do is provide a platform and the Lincoln-Douglas debates will break out. They must know there’s a good chance that not every Hotsouper will come willing to bridge divides, celebrate differences and gain enlightenment.
Yes, they can be, but to their credit, they seem to: This week Fournier or somebody posted a message in the non-blog front-page meta window, “Hot Corner,” admitting that things need to be retooled:
We knew HOTSOUP.com would go online as a figment of its future potential, and that the finishing touches would come from you. That’s exactly what’s happening …. By scores, we’ve received your comments and criticism through feedback@hotsoup.com. Even better, many of you felt empowered enough to use the site itself to post your critiques in Issue Loops …. This take-matters-in-your-own-hands approach is confirmation of the core value behind HOTSOUP: It’s about you …. That’s why we’re hard at work at this work-in-progress … Among the problems we’ve fixed or are fixing: 1) Speed and performance of video …. 2) Content cutoffs in Loops …. 3) Discussion board display order …. 4) Loops ranking on homepage …. Thank you for your suggestions, and keep them coming. Only you can make the Soup the hottest site around.
It’s since been pulled (in favor of a blithering anecdote about their MSNBC appearance and something about the ONE campaign) — whisked away to who knows where. As I said, it’s not a blog. It’s just a square called “Hot Corner.” Once an announcement is pulled, it disappears into the aether. Please, people. Get a blog.
But there are many more problems than (I think it’s) Fournier addresses. For one, the registration process asks for too much information, and gets unpleasant when you don’t tell it where you live, what’s your job title, how you vote and where your ancestors came from:
Did I mention the site looks awful? The color scheme is unappetizing, its navigation tools are scattered, no RSS feeds are provided, and they have pictures on the front page where the content should be (c.f. Digg). The actual content (aside from “Hot Corner,” which apparently is not considered as such) is relegated to a narrow column just off-center:
Check the source code, and you’ll see the site is almost entirely rendered in Flash. Or, turn off your Javascript and watch the site disappear. There’s scarcely an indexable ASCII keyword on the page, so it isn’t likely to rank well in Google searches. This site should be rebuilt from the ground up. Most of the web-oriented co-founders arrive from a social networking site called SisterWoman.com that exhibits none of these amateurish flaws, which makes this venture’s absurd failure to launch all the more perplexing.
One of its selling points appears to be bringing famous-for-DC types to the blogosphere. But The Huffington Post — which was proclaimed to be the failure that HotSoup actually is — already did. (Still, I can’t let it go without noting that Arianna promised Gwyneth Paltrow, yet has so far only delivered Lynne M. Paltrow.)
HotSoup is closer to George Clooney’s “post” at HuffPo than a real meeting of the minds: It’s painfully obvious that most celebrity HotSoupers didn’t sign up themselves, their assistants or HotSoup did. Will we ever see them jump into the fray? How about you, Mary Matalin? Donna Brazile? (Seriously, John Ashcroft?) Hey, maybe even at some point Mark McKinnon and Allie Savarino will weigh in — you know, two founders of the site.
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For the next part of my act, let’s roll the blooper reel. First, at the top of the main page you can find a link titled “Issue Loops,” and if you click on it even tonight, you will see:
Assuming there were threads to be found here, this is what you would want on the front page. This isn’t amateur hour; this is the afternoon before.
And this one is less a blooper, if anything more of a practical joke:
The second blooper, now apparently changed but still not actually fixed at the time of this writing, occurs on the celebrity pet issue page for Lance Armstrong, where an unidentified patronizing author/moderator (see “Editor’s Comments” in box at right) demands:
Never mind the fact that here the Beltway insiders are pretending they’re like, the new outsiders, man. Because whether you like it or not, Lance Armstrong has a pitch for his side, which you can pretty much ignore and skip to the very end:
Is Lance’s ghostwriter a fan of Joyce? Maybe we’ll find the answer if we just click on the “more…” button…? No:
Okay, now I get it. What big issues aren’t being addressed in current online debate? There are none. This comic software glitch is emblematic of why HotSoup.com is going to fall far short of its lofty goals: Try to be everything to everyone, and you will be nothing to nobody.
Others are already doing what they think they are. If they don’t like the partisan debate sites, there are plenty of online forums already offering whatever kinds of debate you want: Slashdot, Kuro5hin, OffTopic.com, Anandtech, even Something Awful and Genmay. Try the Corvette Forums. You might be surprised.
Though most online forums are not about politics, all the big ones have off-topic sections where debates left, right and beyond are carried on around the clock. HotSoup is going to bring you… prepared text from Lance Armstrong’s agent? The experience of being hounded with insipid questions — “Is the sentence stiff enough? Too stiff?” — by Ron Fournier?
Blooper-wise, best of all is the unenlightening, unlinkable and surely soon-to-disappear V-Factor sidebar:
Take it away, Mike Turk:
Something called the V-Factor rates posts on a scale between “never” and “definitely will”, but completely fails to indicate what they will never or always do? What the hell is that?
Update: I had thus far left out any mention of Right Wing News blogger John Hawkins’ involvement w/r/t the Conservative Forum he was asked to oversee — which so far is less popular than the now-defunct Conservative Grapevine message board Hawkins once ran all by himself — but now “Hot Corner” is mentioning it, and well, see for yourself:
…. Today we welcome the many readers of “www.rightwingnews” to the Soup ….
Never mind the fact that Hawkins has been on board since before the launch, so it makes no sense to welcome his readers “today.” Apparently HotSoup editors are not among the readers of Hawkins’ site. Because, depending on your browser, typing in “www.rightwingnews” won’t get you very far.
Update, months later: Things I should have said when the site was still operational:
- If it was supposed to actually be “hot soup,” it must have been carrot and pea soup. It never looked appetizing.
- Per the image asking what issue “our mainstream media and our leaders” were ignoring, why were the “voices” all people featured in the mainstream media?
- One of the key points that I did make was that this thing was bound to fail because it never had any buy-in from the famous-for-DC names attached to it. Carter Eskew and Mark McKinnon might have been interesting discussion leaders, but they never tried.
- The apparent teenager asking about legalizing marijuana is actually a married adult, possibly with kids. Months later, I saw him on “The Colbert Report.”
- The Corvette Forums have actually been pretty big on Fred Thompson.
I think that was about it.
As you may have read in this morning’s Wall Street Journal, this website has come under new ownership. 
The Blogosphere is the Last Refuge of a Scoundrel
Call me crazy, but the blog launched today under Tom DeLay’s name — he said tonight on Hardball that he’s not actually writing it (”I’m not a very good writer”) — is not half-bad. I’m not saying that it’s great, or that it will even be accepted by the rightosphere at large (DeLay has many detractors on the right), but that whomever set it up clearly knows what they’re doing.
But then, one could argue that Tom DeLay is no longer a politician, just another conservative activist, so perhaps he’ll be willing to take on opponents in a manner sitting officials never are. To wit, the latest post at the time of this writing bashes Jimmy Carter for his “apartheid” book, and another post applauds Michelle Malkin for slamming Kofi Annan — just like a regular old conservative blogger.
His blogroll rings true, including just about every standard big-name blog of the rightosphere save Instapundit, and even includes Mickey Kaus (incorrectly listed as “Kaus Files”), the favorite liberal of many a conservative blogger.
Blogger “carnivals” — edited round-ups of self-submitted entries — are a mainstay of the blogosphere, and DeLay is promising a “Carnival of Conservatives” every other Friday. We’ll see exactly what that means, but it certainly sounds like a commitment to being an active participant in the political blogosphere.
What’s more, the content management system appears to be either WordPress or Movable Type, and even if not, it sure looks like a site powered by one of those traditional blogging platforms. It even claims to be protected under Larry Lessig’s Creative Commons license — which is somewhat amusing; DeLay does not strike me as a typical adherent of copyleft provisions.
Best of all, liberals are allowed to comment, at least so far. Holden of First Draft, the the owner of many ponies, has the third comment in this thread. Comments by new users are moderated, and Holden was critical but polite. One assumes that profanity is a red flag [Update: Yep] — an issue liberal and conservative bloggers do not see eye-to-eye on — but if DeLay’s team continues to let dissonant views through, the site will be the better for it.
What’s more, Holden is listed as unregistered, and as yet one need not even provide an e-mail address before commenting — something many traditional blogs do not allow.
Not that the site is entirely praiseworthy. It’s not such a big issue that he’s not actually writing his posts — few politicians do — but this disclosure does not appear on the site, though some posts do go up under his name. Even a shared byline would be nice, to give some idea of who is responsible for word choice.
For example, one contributor goes by the moniker NJ Conservative. No indication whether that person is the same as this NJ Conservative. Another is billed as NH Conservative, so the odds are these are merely anonymous contributors named for their state of residence. Will nobody post under their own names?
Meanwhile, if you want to sign up for his new political action committee, GAIN (Grassroots, Action, and Information Network), you’ll have to download a MS Word DOC, provide references, pay $52 “at the time of acceptance” and e-mail it back or upload it to the site. That’s not as bad mailing it back, but it is cumbersome. And if you’re posting this to the Internet in the first place, why require references?
Additionally, Jackie Kucinich of The Hill (and yes, daughter of you-know-who) reports that GAIN is supposed to be like a conservative MoveOn.org. I’m not sure if the analogy is hers alone — the organization’s about page doesn’t make that comparison, not that you’d expect it to — but I do know that MoveOn.org doesn’t require a membership fee upfront.
These parallel institutions, activist group and community blog, currently operate under two separate ethoses, and chances are one will eventually prevail. Time will tell which one supersedes the other. DeLay being a hardened Washington power player, I’ll predict that the blog’s best days are right this moment — one vitriolic blogswarm and the comment section could become as closed as DeLay’s former political operation.
But he is also the consummate politician, willing to go on Hardball on the day he resigned, and if he can keep smiling through the blog fights that surely lay ahead, he just may have something here.
Update: Ahem. Well, it seems that the original first post has been deleted from the website, or at the very least altered. A scandal? John Amato at Crooks and Liars seems to lean in that direction. The original DeLay post was saved and has been reposted here, with the first 111 comments available here.
It doesn’t appear that DeLay wrote anything compromising in the first post, but when you read those comments, you can see why it might have come down. Warning — “language” follows:
And:
Plus:
Also:
An unregistered user claiming to be DeLay writes:
A lone voice protests:
Okay. Again, call me crazy, but it sounds like the problem here was that they didn’t have their comment moderation system ready to go at launch. That’s a blunder, to be sure, but this is not a case of DeLay’s team removing an embarrassing or erroneous post of their own (although I am confused as to why the original text of that post was removed). Lefty bloggers say civility is overrated, and while there are circumstances where they have a point, this is not one of them.
Amato implies that Democratic voices are censored from the site, but as I’ve demonstrated above, that isn’t true. But it may become a self-fulfilling prophecy.