Free Kinja!

"TheRealBicycleBuck" (therealbicyclebuck) 03/19/2016 at 07:14 • Filed to: None

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Sure, Kinja may not be a perfect platform, but it is a better collaborative blogging system than most of the others out there. It is the supporting technology that makes all of the Gawker sites possible.

I hope that Gawker releases Kinja into the wild before their ship sinks. Let members of the community pick up the pieces and reform their respective communities on their own. Sure, there are other places like Reddit where we could gather. But there’s a reason they haven’t been as successful. We may complain about Kinja, but there isn’t a better alternative out there. Without Kinja, Jalopnik would be just another car site with a few good writers and a clunky commenting system.

Kinja makes the difference.

Free Kinja!

Urambo Tauro > TheRealBicycleBuck 03/19/2016 at 07:44

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Are Gawker and Kinja interdependent or does Gawker just happen to use the Kinja platform/format? I never understood how that works.

vondon302 > Urambo Tauro 03/19/2016 at 07:57

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Good question!

Busslayer > Urambo Tauro 03/19/2016 at 08:05

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From what I read, Kinja was wholly developed by Gawker Media. Gawker was hoping to market it to other sites. I don't know if Kinja is to that point yet or if they are still in the R&D stage.

Honeybunchesofgoats > Urambo Tauro 03/19/2016 at 08:10

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Gawker Media created and owns the Kinja platform. The idea was to use it on the GM websites and then hopefully license it out to other sites to use as a commenting platform. As far as I know, it has never been used by anyone outside of GM.

Gawker Media will never “free” Kinja, since it has some monetary value*, and GM sort of needs money at the moment.

*Kinja is probably not worth $110m, though.

TheRealBicycleBuck > Honeybunchesofgoats 03/19/2016 at 08:53

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That was my thought too, but it would be great if the code appeared on github with an open-source license.

Santiago of Escuderia Boricua > TheRealBicycleBuck 03/19/2016 at 09:19

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Someone still has to pay for servers

TheRealBicycleBuck > Santiago of Escuderia Boricua 03/19/2016 at 09:30

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You are correct and there are lots of ways this could happen. If the code was open source, anyone could start their own version of Jalopnik (or their own Jezebel for that matter), host it wherever they like, and generate funding through advertising or a pay wall or whatever. That's how places like Reddit operate

The idea is to open-source the tools to make it easier for the various groups like Oppo splinter off in a familiar environment.

Tim (Fractal Footwork) > TheRealBicycleBuck 03/19/2016 at 10:47

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If the ship sinks, do we all head to Reddit to figure out what's going to happen to us?

Santiago of Escuderia Boricua > TheRealBicycleBuck 03/19/2016 at 11:03

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We’ll call it...

Jelopnic

TheRealBicycleBuck > Tim (Fractal Footwork) 03/19/2016 at 11:41

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It will be a long time before any ships sink. There will be an appeal at the very least.

Nauraushaun > TheRealBicycleBuck 03/20/2016 at 06:32

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I couldn’t disagree more. I find what few menus there are to be very confusing, and every single feature riddled with bugs. New bugs seem to show up weekly with existing bugs remaining permanently unfixed. Adding a comment on mobile is frustrating beyond belief - this is 2016 for shit’s sake. You can get a decent embeddable text editor for free!

I personally hope Kinja dies a quick death and we use something that already exists. I’m sure there’s something out there. At the very least, a new text editor would be nice.

TheRealBicycleBuck > Nauraushaun 03/20/2016 at 08:38

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All of those problems you are complaining about are more likely to be corrected if Kinja is open-sourced. I have no idea how large Gawker’s development team might be, but I’d bet it’s fairly small. It might be just a bunch of monkeys hacking away on keyboards....

Although there are bugs, I’m not aware of any other forum/blogging packages that have a similar layout. Kinja may not be perfect, but it deals with authorship well, works decently on a variety of platforms, and doesn’t look like every other off-the-shelf forum platform, making it pretty easy on the eyes.

Nauraushaun > TheRealBicycleBuck 03/20/2016 at 18:38

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Yeah, you’re right. If it’s fixable. If it were open source I’d sure try to fix it!

I’m not aware of one either, but the things Kinja fails at don’t seem that difficult.