RIP Tremonter

I killed Tremon­ter tonight. It was a good exper­i­ment, and taught me a lot about the neigh­bor­hood. Through it, I met a bunch of won­der­ful neigh­bor­hood peo­ple and anoth­er bunch of won­der­ful Cleve­land peo­ple. Through it, I became part of the Cleve­land Foun­da­tion’s Neigh­bor­hood Con­nec­tions Grant Com­mit­tee, and was sent to some neigh­bor­hood lead­er­ship train­ing in Nashville. Through that, in con­junc­tion with some oth­er folks from Cleve­land, I helped put togeth­er a Cleve­land Youth Sum­mit at City Hall. Because of Tremon­ter, I was threat­ened with a law­suit, threat­ened with phys­i­cal vio­lence, told I was racist, and told I was a cor­po­rate shill. Good times.

For the first year or so, the site just con­sist­ed of me post­ing things I found online that had to do with my neigh­bor­hood, busi­ness­es, local weblogs, local artists, art gal­leries, events. Even­tu­al­ly the read­er­ship was high enough that strangers start­ed com­ing up to me and telling me how great the site was.

Then I opened the site up for any­one to post, which is prob­a­bly why I now have gray hairs. At first it was still shiny, hap­py peo­ple hold­ing hands, but then folks start­ed show­ing up and forc­ing their agen­das all over the place, in your face. Names were called, feel­ings hurt, and new rules had to be put in place. About the time I raised mon­ey for two more years of host­ing by putting ads from local busi­ness­es on the site [some­thing like $30 for a year of adver­tis­ing], I start­ed get­ting emails from peo­ple who were try­ing to fig­ure out why they were being attacked by com­plete [to them] anony­mous strangers on my site. At first I tried to explain, but more and more often I had to read emails that were from peo­ple who were telling me that they could no longer vis­it Tremon­ter because the tone was now so antag­o­nis­tic.

The com­pli­ments about the site became less fre­quent, and then stopped alto­geth­er. Users threw my rules back in my face and were shocked when they were pun­ished for it. Folks start­ed reg­is­ter­ing mul­ti­ple accounts under anony­mous names and post­ing pos­i­tive things again. For a bit, this gave me hope, new, pos­i­tive blood, until I found out that it was actu­al­ly the case and had to put my foot down.

For the last year, the site has been noth­ing but an endur­ing headache. The only emails I get now are from peo­ple who have com­plaints about the peo­ple using the site, or com­plaints about the site from peo­ple who are using it. I no longer derive any per­son­al ben­e­fit from Tremon­ter. It has been that way for awhile, I’ve kept Tremon­ter open for longer than I should have, out of a sense of respon­si­bil­i­ty for what had become an impor­tant news and gos­sip source for the neigh­bor­hood.

I con­sid­ered burn­ing the cur­rent incar­na­tion of Tremon­ter and reset­ting it as a picked-author neigh­bor­hood ‘zine, and even bounced the idea off of a few trust­ed folks. Then I tried to fig­ure out just how long it would take me to get all of that set up. Then I received a few more emails from peo­ple who were very polite, and not con­de­scend­ing in the least, but were once again hurt by being attacked by strangers on the Inter­net. I let this hap­pen, time and time again, in my house. I can no longer apply any sort of moral rel­a­tiv­i­ty to the sit­u­a­tion. I nev­er liked the movie Old Yeller, but if your dog goes rabid, you put it down your­self.

I have a whole host of oth­er projects that I’d like to work on, the most impor­tant being Abra­ham. With the weight of Tremon­ter off my back, maybe I can actu­al­ly get the chance to work on one or two more.