The Standard’s most commented on posts of 2017

Written By: - Date published: 7:11 am, December 30th, 2017 - 27 comments
Categories: the praiseworthy and the pitiful, The Standard - Tags:

Another year has passed and it is time to again reflect on what has happened and for this site what attracted readers’ attention. To be frank the discussions are probably the most important part of the site, even more important than the original post much of the time. Occasional poster Matthew Hooton regards the Standard as a go to site if he is wanting to work out what the broad left is thinking and the discussions that occur regularly show how an initial proposition may develop.

The tenth most commented on post with 329 comments was Weka’s post Kaupapa Pākehā where she carefully dissected Andrew Little’s claim that the Māori Party was not kaupapa Māori. The post highlighted Labour’s position concerning the Maori Party that they were opponents and could not be negotiated with and suggested that a more nuanced respectful approach may have been better.

Ninth with 338 comments was Mike Smith’s post Yellow Peril? He noted recent hysteria concerning the actions of the Chinese Government and suggested the approach was somewhat hysterical. Most of the comments agreed, noting that China is clearly a reemerging superpower who had not thrown its weight around the way that others had. The mention of National MP Jiang Yang caused some discussion however.

Eighth with 357 comments was Anthony Robins’ post Immigration debate – Peters goes full racist. He responded to Winston Peters’ attack on two Asian Herald reporters and did not hold back on his criticism.

Anthony concluded:

It’s important to understand the state of immigration in NZ, and its important to understand the different data sets with their strengths and limitations. Peters could have made that point and it would have been a useful contribution. Instead he went for the cheap dog-whistle, probably assuming that he would pick up more votes than he lost. I hope he’s wrong.

The ongoing discussion heightened the tension between those wanting a pluralistic multicultural society and those thinking that current immigration levels are too high.

Seventh with 360 comments was another Anthony Robins post Labour considering Unconditional Basic Income. The concept is something that has been the subject of a number of posts at the Standard. Comments were mostly supportive although a few pointed out this had been Green Party policy for a while.

Sixth was my post the day after election night which attracted 361 comments. I managed to muck up my calculations on who was in on the list but I will claim credit for noting that Labour-Green are now a good 42% chunk of the electorate and after special votes are counted I expected them to head towards 44% of the vote. I also said that one more seat for the left is almost inevitable and two more seats are a possibility.

Fifth was my post on the return of Kim Dotcom and the Internet Party and the NZ journalist seeking asylum in Russia which I posted on January 2. The story, a New Zealander Suzie Dawson seeking political asylum in Russia seemed to me to be newsworthy. Dawson subsequently became the leader of the Internet Party which did rather disastrously in this year’s election. There was also the prediction by Kim Dotcom that two terabytes of hacked data would be released and the real reason John Key resigned would be made public. Neither happened.

And Suzie Dawson herself popped in for a chat. Along with a number of Kiwiblog regulars who responded to a typical hatchet job performed by Mr Farrar.

Fourth was my post so there was a housing crisis after all which noted that official figures presented for incoming Minister Phil Twyford indicated that there was a shortfall of 45,000 houses in Auckland and 71,000 nationwide.

I concluded by saying this:

It is great that we now have a Minister of Housing who understands the problem and is determined to do something so that kids no longer have to sleep in cars. But it is appalling that a New Zealand Government let a crisis develop and did nothing about it. National’s sense of indifference to the crisis and its refusal to acknowledge that it was happening clearly shows that they were not fit to hold office.

From the tenor of the responses most of you agreed, with the exception of a few energetic trolls who kept trying to say it was all Labour’s fault.

Third with 403 comments was the Notices and Features post put up announcing that David Clendon and Kennedy Graham had withdrawn themselves from the Greens Part list as a protest to their call for Metiria Turei to resign as leader. Given subsequent events the decision was a spectacular own goal although arguably also helped the Jacinda surge that eventually caused the change of Government. I do not believe the public has heard or appreciated all that was going on in the Green Party at the time.

Second was my post The Next Prime Minister Is posted immediately after Peters announced he was supporting Labour into Government. The post obviously was prepared in anticipation. There was another, lest positive, post also ready to go. I said “[l]et the attacks from the right about how unfair it is that a minority party did not ascend into Government and how MMP needs to be reformed begin. For the rest of us – this is a time of hope”. It seems that National took the comment about how unfair it all was as an instruction.

The post attracted 416 comments most congratulatory but some of concern about where the Greens fitted in and what this meant for them as a party.

And the most commented on post in 2017 is … [drumroll] …

The Notices and Features post on election night 2017 with 419 comments. The comments captured the agony and the ecstasy of the night well with attention being drawn to a number of tight and interesting races.

Stay tuned tomorrow when the most popular posts of 2017 will be revealed.

27 comments on “The Standard’s most commented on posts of 2017 ”

  • Comments are now closed

  1. Te Reo Putake 1
    30 December 2017 at 9:04 am

    Hmmm, a bit down on last year’s numbers, MS. It’s almost like something’s missing 😉

    All the best to Standarnistas for 2018, hope it’s a cracker.

    • stunned mullet 1.1
      30 December 2017 at 9:40 am

      Throw in an article on immunisation and those numbers will go up.. 😆

    • Morrissey 1.2
      30 December 2017 at 10:55 am

      OMG! You’re BACK, Te Reo!!!!

      • Te Reo Putake 1.2.1
        30 December 2017 at 11:17 am

        Back by unpopular demand, Moz! Just a fleeting visit though, think of it as like the Xmas day armistice on the Somme; a brief but beautiful moment in time.

        • mickysavage 1.2.1.1
          30 December 2017 at 3:34 pm

          Numbers are down a little but we lost a few authors in the great civil war of 2016

          On the past couple of months we have had more than twice the number of pageviews that the Daily Blog get …

          I’d be more than happy to have you back as long as you left the moderation to me …

          • Bill 1.2.1.1.1
            30 December 2017 at 3:38 pm

            You’re speaking only for yourself there micky (but you know that), and that whole “leave the moderation alone” was tried…twice I think. 😉

            • mickysavage 1.2.1.1.1.1
              30 December 2017 at 3:40 pm

              Aye I defer to the collective wisdom of the individuals involved in the Standard. TRP wrote some really good posts but dang I could not stand the fights …

          • greywarshark 1.2.1.1.2
            30 December 2017 at 3:46 pm

            A Duh from me MS. Could you just remind us what were the big contentions of 2016? You have it at your fingertips no doubt and I have lost track.

            • mickysavage 1.2.1.1.2.1
              30 December 2017 at 3:48 pm

              Major screaps amongst three of the authors with authors purporting to ban authors and really awful moderation. A lot of it happened in the back end. Something I was trying to forget …

              • Anne …
                30 December 2017 at 5:24 pm

                I don’t know what was going on in the back end ms, but it seemed to me that Te Reo’s style of writing was often misunderstood by some of the regulars – authors and commenters alike. I miss Te Reo because he wrote some damm good posts and he also had a great sense of humour.

                • red-blooded …
                  30 December 2017 at 5:42 pm

                  I second that, Anne. Te Reo, if you’re publishing somewhere else, maybe let us know so that we can follow your thinking if we choose to. How about TS give Te Reo status as one of the bloggers down on the left hand side, who can be linked to? Surely that wouldn’t cause too many arguments?

                  Anyway, nice of you to touch base, TRP.

              • greywarshark …
                30 December 2017 at 10:02 pm

                MS
                Okay – can’t remember what I was asking. Thanks anyway.

  2. dv 2
    30 December 2017 at 10:11 am

    How do do work out the popularity, if not by the comment nos?

    • weka 2.1
      30 December 2017 at 10:39 am

      comment numbers and reader numbers for each post are different (Authors can see various stats on how many people visited a page).

      • dv 2.1.1
        30 December 2017 at 10:45 am

        OK, DUH me thats so obvious when it pointed out
        Thanks Weka.

        • lprent 2.1.1.1
          30 December 2017 at 4:01 pm

          It is the ‘lurker’ effect – currently approx 23x lurkers to commenters. What commenters comment on isn’t usually what most people read.

          Even when there are comments, they aren’t created equally. There are some posts where the comments get to being an order of magnitude larger than the average.

          My most common look for posts is pageviews coupled with average page reading time. But there is another measure which is unique visitors that has only a passing relationship with page views. It isn’t uncommon to have post with thousands of pageviews from less than 100 people providing 80% of them.

          Some posts are beloved by commenters. Some provide great facebook fodder. Some are just read deeply by a lot of people and only have minimal comments. Some keep collecting page views for years.

          One of the nice things about this site is that we don’t specialize that much towards any one type of post. That is because we tell authors to write about what they’re interested in expressing in any style that they feel expresses it well enough for their skills and purposes.

  3. red-blooded 3
    30 December 2017 at 5:46 pm

    I seem to remember a large compilation of Nat’s lies and damming failures published by Anthony Robins as his last post, too. I have a feeling that one might get ongoing hits, especially as the next election looms.

  4. cleangreen 4
    31 December 2017 at 10:02 am

    Yes Micky, the right wing trolls are a sorry sad bunch that had brought nothing more than selfish aggressive greed and hate to us all during the last nine years.

    For instance I drove back to Gisborne from Napier yesterday and have witnessed that the roads are being totally demolished and destroyed by the increased number and sizes of heavy trucks now, and there is no simply room for trucks and other vehicles nowadays on our narrow windy hilly roads.

    Even the road rage got worse over the last nine years as the ETF (Road Transport Forum,) who are totally representing just the road freight industry) had pushed Government to give them “preference” over other road users caused a trebling in trucks on our roads making driving so very dangerous causing many deaths but it was very good timing to see labour/NZF find the “hidden” Ernest Young rail report “The value of rail in NZ” which found that rail saves NZ $1.5 Billion every year at present confirmed what we all knew that rail is vital to our future.

    So Labour/NZF with Green Party support must re-instate rail again as our “prime mover of freight” again after national tried ruthlessly to destroy rail as they hid that report 2 yrs. ago wilfully after the report showed that rail needed to be saved.

    Welcome in 2018 with a new Labour coalition Government to work alongside with us all.

    • One Anonymous Bloke 4.1
      31 December 2017 at 10:18 am

      Yep.

      …roads worth billions of dollars are cracking under the pressure of plummeting morale at the NZ Transport Agency…

      An ongoing demonstration of National Party incompetence and failure.

      Obviously the solution is to defund and privatise NZTA 🙄