Friends, comrades, TRAIDers—
I'd like to take this opportunity to engage you all in an experiment in collaboration and transparency. Amazin' Avenue has been around a long time—since February 2005—and many things have changed in the intervening years. I used to write all of the content, now I write very little, instead spending numberless hours behind the scenes on editing, management, and so forth. We used to write on a platform called Scoop, which featured nested commenting and user-contributed stories called "diaries." We've been through two full redesigns since then; the internet of 2014 often differs wildly from the internet of nine years ago. We have many more readers than we had back then, but we also have a much more well-managed parent company in Vox Media and occasionally competing interests to be sensitive to.
I know some people who are concerned that we have too much content on the site these days. Others think we don't have enough. Please understand that we all work very hard—essentially for free—to make Amazin' Avenue a great experience for Mets fans. None of us do this for a living; we all have jobs and families and other things vying for our time and attention. We spend far more time than anyone would think is reasonable in order that all of our readers and community members can have interesting content to read, thought-provoking topics to discuss, and any and every opportunity to be expressive, intelligent Mets fans.
We also go to great lengths to make sure that everything appearing on the site has been edited for cogency and consistency. The goal is to have lots and lots of high-quality content, knowing full well that there will inevitably be some overlap in coverage and that some things we write won't appeal to everyone. Many long-standing AAers may not realize this, but the vast majority of people who read Amazin' Avenue are not members of the community. Thousands and thousands of people read the site every day and never leave a comment, and a significant portion of those readers are discovering the site for the first time. We'd love for them all to become regular readers and contributors to the community, but we know that probably won't happen.
All of this is to say that while the community is extremely important, it's not the only consideration. If you're reading an article that seems to cover a lot of the same ground as an article from last week, it's because most of the people reading it didn't actually read last week's article. We won't knowingly post garbage and we don't engage in dishonest traffic-first tactics like clickbaiting, slideshows, Top 5 topless photos of Matt Harvey, etc.
Nevertheless, given the abovementioned restraints on our time and energy, I can't swear that a subpar story will never sneak through. If that happens, I encourage anyone to email me directly at eric@sbnation.com or tweet at me at @AmazinAvenue on Twitter. I take all of your concerns seriously, and while I won't always agree with them I will always hear them out as long as you're respectful and constructive. If you're a jerk, I won't want to be your friend.
Preamble aside, the community website Reddit is famous for, among other things, a dialogue format called AMA, or Ask Me Anything. Please consider this the first (of many, I hope), Amazin' Avenue AMA. Ask whatever you like in the comments and I will do my best to answer as clearly and honestly as I can. As the name suggests, you can ask about anything: the Mets, Amazin' Avenue, food, books, pets, music, whatever you like, just no politics and religion. This isn't a "live" AMA, so I won't necessarily be responding in real time and you can feel free to ask questions throughout the day (and coming days).
My one request is that you only comment on this thread if you have a question or follow-up. There are lots of other places on the site for general comments and discussions.
Ask away!