An Open Letter to our Readers: We want to hear from you

Dear Reader,

Every article on Hudson River Blue has a comment section at the end, a digital soapbox where you can post your carefully-measured reflections — or your habanero-level hot takes. As long as you follow the community guidelines, whatever you write will become a part of the public record.

Quite frankly, the comment feature at HRB is tragically underused. Our readership is larger and more engaged than it has been in several years – our audience has tripled in size since last season – but our comment sections remain relatively thin on comments. We need your help to change that.

In part, we’re inspired by the comments we see on other SB Nation sites. The readers of Sounder at Heart, Stumptown Footy, Dirty South Soccer, and Black and Red United are hyper-chatty — they comment on everything. They mostly put up posts about soccer and the teams they follow, but the conversations sometimes veer magnificently off-topic: Where to get coffee, what to bring camping, which concerts are coming up. It’s like listening in on the conversations at a good neighborhood bar.

We want Hudson River Blue to play that role: We want to be your local, the place where you catch up with your pals and make new friends.

The regulars who do show up here and post comments – shoutout to typoattack, KevinJRogers, Jamal Crawford’s Shoulder Bandaid, orangeorange, Col.B, AJ_Orecol, and moogoo – have lively exchanges that make HRB more fun. We read every one.

How do you post a comment on HRB? First, you create a free Hudson River Blue account here. Then you post a comment. It’s that easy.

Really, this is about community. We don't mean the “community” buzzword used as a branding tool by companies trying to sell you stuff, we mean the true sense of the term — a group of people with shared interests and goals, and who form social bonds over what they have in common. The tens of thousands of fans who follow New York City FC are a diverse group, and we think you have a lot to say.

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To be perfectly clear, we have no financial stake in adding more comments. It’s free to join, free to comment. Honestly, we simply want to hear more from you.

One final note: The User Profile sign-up process at SB Nation isn’t as frictionless as it should be: It can be a bit glitchy, and the two-factor authentication can seem overdone, but once you sign up and you’re logged in you shouldn’t have any trouble staying logged in.

Besides, we promise it’ll be worth it. We’re waiting to hear from you.

Sincerely,

Hudson River Blue

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