Top 10 Slipped Disc stories over 10 years
NewsWe’re coming up for a decade as an independent, free-standing site and it seemed a good idea to check which stories drew the biggest readership since April 2014.
Here’s what we found:
1 Lockdown musicians record Beethoven 9 from home
2 Lara Bretan frightens opera singers
3 Bocelli and daughter hit
4 Georgian musician changes sex
5 John Williams leaves his scores to Juilliard
6 Jonas Kaufmann falls for opera director
7 Angela Hewitt sees her favourite piano smashed
8 Yundi Li crashes out of Chopin concerto
9 Alice Coote writes body-shaming letter to male critics
10 Red Army ensemble dies in Black Sea crash
More eclectic than we expected. And few of the usual favourites.
The comment sections are the best part! Comments truly are the secret to Slippedisc’s success. Here is a fun piece of trivia you might not know: sometime in 2019, Norman tried to remove the option to show the amount of likes and dislikes for comments. User engagement cratered immediately, and after a week Norman was forced to reinstate the function, otherwise his website would go under!
This is completely untrue, I don’t know where you got that idea.
I had completely forgotten about Alice Coote’s letter. She is such a mensch (or female equivalent) and has had my respect for so many years. Brava!
While most of these articles have garnered many comments – some over 200 – and votes, the 2016 piece on the sad fate of the Red Army ensemble has a total of five comments and not one vote, up or down, for any comment. I fail to see how this qualifies as one of the „stories [which] drew the biggest readership since April 2014“.
As measured by Google Analytics, not upticks and downticks
So, the electoral college. Doesn’t exactly reflect where most of the interest has been here, as far as I recall it.
How did Domingo not make this list?
It was a very big story, on Slipped Disc & everywhere in the media. Putin himself had sent them to sing in Aleppo.
It seemed a bit off at the time – that these beloved international musical ambassadors, who were gaining a lot of attention outside of Russia – had this freak plane accident on Christmas Day 2016 & all died.
Since 2016 many of Putin’s nefarious acts – poisonings, plane crashes, mysterious deaths – have come to light. It’s often made me wonder if this plane crash was truly an accident. . .
Thumb ups and downs can be manipulated by bots, and in some cases just by deleting the cookies that mark a reader’s vote. Thumbs should not be trusted. This article discusses how fake down thumbing is used to suppress people’s desire to express their view.
https://news.wpcarey.asu.edu/20221003-fake-thumbs-can-silence-real-voices-online-commentary
Interesting too that my comment about the Bechstein’s Nazi connections was not posted. It clearly didn’t fit with the narrative. I’m guessing that this one will be redacted too
That Red Army Ensemble plane crash, no. 10, has always haunted me. The Red Army Police Choir, who came to international attention at the Sochi 2014 Olympics, were among those who perished. Here’s their famous cover of “Get Lucky” at the Olympics” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyHK3nKgTtA
I was so sad to learn that these lively, yet dignified gentlemen, who brought so much joy with their singing, died in the crash. The only hopeful note was that their cheerful choir director in the video, General Victor Yeliseyev, apparently was not on board & is still with us.
Such a tragedy.
On February 25, 1960, 19 members of the US Navy Band/Orchestra died in a mid air plane collision over Brasil.