@kungkungkung said:

Yeah people. God forbid phish.net posts up the good reviews. "Do we really need an in depth review of the 23-minute light."? Yes. It would be better than hearing about "how awesome" the show was. Yes we are all here to have fun. Yes we all want to have fantastic experiences. But really? The music man. The music. It hurts phish's image nowadays when you post a review that's way too long and way too descriptive of a single persons' "experience" brah. They are professionals now. I want to talk about what they are doing musically, and anything straying from that can be posted on phantasytour. Phish.net has been posting whoever writes the longest review for the last few years now, and I think we can all agree they should be better than that. Maybe I'll write a longer message next time so phish.net will think its good enough to post.

I knew what I said would be unpopular, but I have a pretty stalwart record of calling out people who demand that the reviewer be there or that "their" show was the best ever show. I was just pointing out the irony that there seems to be no way to win if you bother to take the time and review something. Instead of "do we really need a review of a 23 min light?" I should have said "should we expect a review of the 23 min light?" because these recaps have never given more than a few cursory sentences to the centerpiece jam. Oh wait, I did say that.

Maybe I'm just salty that the post I took the most amount of time on, 3 hours listening along with the show, was not received better (Dick's night one). But it is literally exactly the kind of review you are calling for and the only kind of review that I would make. It was the polar opposite of this review, and still did not succeed in giving the people what they want (if the voting tells you anything). And I realized that it was mighty hubristic of me to expect people to love everything that comes out of my mind and onto the board.

So how does this relate to your post? Well the mere fact that you said that you would pay phish.net to let them post your reviews as featured pretty much sums it up for me. In the literary/academic world this is known as self-publishing and anything that comes out of it is kind of a joke because it couldn't make the cut in the real world of publishing.

Also, phish.net has not been publishing whoever writes the longest review. I'm not sure where you got this idea, but you can clearly tell who the contributors are by going under the "Navigator" tab and seeing everyone who has posted to the blog. They are generally people who help put the website together and are longtime contributors going back to the "old review" section. Martin Acaster has reviewed just about every Ghost of 1.0. "Icculus" is Charlie Dirksen who has written more reviews of jams than everyone else put together.

So it all comes down to recognition. We all want recognition. I wanted recognition for that mammoth review that took me forever to create. Clearly you want recognition. But you can't just hop on the board and talk about how great your reviews would be, put your money where your mouth is and freaking write one then.

It reminds me of a quick talk I had with Dirksen about a year back. I was urging him to review new jam material because I thought there was a definite lack of that on the new site compared to the old. He said to go ahead and write your own, man. Nothing is stopping you but you seem to want the official accreditation of seeing your name in lights up there at the top. Gotta work for it first.