That Violet Blue thing

Doctor Pickles

@149
“Yes, it could have been handled better initially, but it was handled and now, instead of doing any sort of cover-up and being defensive about it we’re getting a dialogue. ”

No, we aren’t.
BB has, thus far, not explained what they mean when they say “Violet behaved in a way that made us reconsider whether we wanted to lend her any credibility or associate with her.”

tresser

@334

so
what?

Poormojo

@602 That was very well said. I must say I appreciate it when someone takes the time to think out a response, and takes the time to do so without invective pr personal attacks.

Well done.

Myopic Phrenologist

#918 posted by CloseReader:
Yes, very clever, you said “newspeak” was “doubleplusungood”. Now the Boingers are coming to disappear you and put rats on your face because they’re a totalitarian government that has total control over all aspects of human communication.

Indeed, because we all know that when one is comparing the similarity of one aspect between two different things, one is actually saying those two things are exactly the same in every respect.

So when one compare the waterboarding done by the US government to the waterboarding done by the Pol-Pot regime, CLEARLY they are saying that the US is exactly like the Pol-Pot regime in every way.

Your thought process here is pretty much that of a Freeper

GregLondon

Actually, Greg, I agree with your “pretty small” characterization of the harm resulting from the archive deletions at issue here. I, for one, never said it was huge.

Hold that thought…

Teresa, supposedly in a moderating role but being uncharacteristically immoderate, attacked my argument quite vigorously in her #691, calling it “nonsense”

Er, but your argument was that you were here to defend the broken links.

ErosBacchus @186: As several other people have pointed out, “unpublishing” something (because you don’t want to pay to host it any more) breaks all the inbound links to that content.

Teresa@691: Nonsense. Most large, active blogs take material down, for a variety of reasons. Some do it more than others.

So, you admit that your reason for arguing is to fight broken links, and you admit that the damage from those broken links is “pretty small”.

Could you also consider that given that a shit storm was blowing, someone using a minor excuse like broken links to enter a shit storm debate might occur as being slightly … out of proportion … by the people being attacked?

I don’t think that Teresa would begrudge your fight against broken links per se, just that given at the time a seemingly endless line of trolls were flaming BB over the whole violet blue thing, that maybe the middle of a shit storm wasn’t the best time to bring it up.

Random832

The other thing is – and this is why people (myself included) insisted “you had a year” was because #5 said the posts were removed from public view (passive voice, as if it was a collective decision instead of Xeni acting alone) while an evaluation of what to do took place. (More passive voice, implying that the BBers all got together back then to “evaluate” things.

It’s now clear that neither of those are the case, but what’s not clear is what “an evaluation of what to do” actually did mean – I can’t think of an alternate interpretation of that; maybe someone else could suggest something?

David Pescovitz

@RANDOM832 (#1578),

you wrote:
“By “not addressed” I meant there’s been no hint of a process, going forward…”

As several of us have said, we’re working on it. BBers are still on vacation, we’re still digesting, etc. Thanks for your patience!

Blue

Greg, Hagbard …

Name calling, ad hominem attacks, straw men; and apparently you still believe you have something valuable to add to the discussion.

I fear that ship’s not so much sailed, as sunk.

(Don’t forget to scrape the barnacles off your bum, when you’re done.)

Robotech_Master

This whole uproar, by the way, reminds me of something in a Websnark post a couple of years ago. (Text-find on “Don’t try to rewrite history” to get to the relevant bit.)

David Markland

Very depressing situation. I really don’t care for whatever beef is between Violet and Boing Boing, but I do subscribe that the idea of never deleting content, and if so, it better be for a damn good transparent reason.

Based on all statements, it sounds like Boing Boing didn’t like what Violet said or did at some point, so they’re deleting every mention of her. If this is the case, the action is flat out deplorable.

I’ve also read of a second instance of Boing Boing deleting mentions of another blogger… almost immediately after he spoke negatively about Boing Boing.

Between these two instances, what I’m walking away with is that if you say something critically of Boing Boing, one of its members, or maybe even an advertiser, Boing Boing may remove previous mentions of you.

Or that Boing Boing may remove opinionated posts because it may embarass them in the future.

Its really a bad precendent, especially from a blog that has set so many good precedents. I really hope Boing Boing acknowledges this bad decision, and helps continue to set a higher standard of blogs instead of contributing to their stereotype as catty, unethical forums.

mdhatter

Antinous, are you paid for your work here? If not, can I buy you a beer?

ulor

Okay just to add to this huge mess. This seems to me similar to a situation that happened to me albeit much less public. I am a graduate student and my thesis advisor jacked me bad. I was on the final revision of my thesis and he basically told me that I just wasnt going to graduate and that my thesis sucked even though he had been reading drafts of it for like 5 months and should have told me, he always said it was coming along and was almost done …obviously we disagreed on what should happened next and I decided after some attempts to make it work to just change to a new program and let it go. So I moved from one sub-field to another but within the same department. I would always try to not really talk about what happened w/ others since they were in the same department and I felt it would have been really tacky to just attack them when being very very generous I could conclude it was a miscommunication. When I tried again to apply for my new degree they attacked me and I looked bad because I had never said anything even though I was just trying to keep them from looking awful and incompetent. I told a few professors what had happened that they had basically jacked me, but until that point I looked terrible because I was just trying to do the right thing. Sometimes when you try to protect the reputations of others you come off looking terrible. Thats my 2 dollars and 48 cents. I think the same thing is going on here…although I might be wrong…but being classy sometimes makes you look like a douchebag especially when the other side is taken advantage of your tack.

Talia

#334 “I can’t find links to anyone else who’s this mad at Violet Blue, so it looks like it’s most likely related to their advertisers.”

That’s pretty flimsy reasoning. “I don’t have any facts to work with, so I am going to resort to angry snark.” :p

ErosBacchus

Sorry Teresa, I’ve had enormous respect for you since the early nineties, but you’ve still screwed up here during the course of a long and difficult day with the accusations of lying. You said “Violet Blue has demonstrably lied more than once” and then, when challenged, failed to demonstrate even one lie. I think you should apologize to her.

In your #691, the first “lie” you attribute to Violet is “pretending that there’s something extraordinary about removing old material from a weblog.” That’s not a pretense, it’s a difference of opinion. There is something extraordinary about these deletions, as many hundreds of your most loyal fans have told you today. What we have here is a difference of opinion, but no lie. You can call it nonsense all you want, but routine edits and cleanups of old content cannot reasonably be compared to what happened here. There was nothing routine about it, and no lie in pointing out its extraordinariness.

The second lie you attribute to Violet is “not mentioning that the entries were unpublished over a year ago, and that she’d known about it for months before going public.” That’s a lie all right, if she in fact did know. But it’s not a “demonstrable lie” unless you can demonstrate that she did, and you haven’t even tried to demonstrate that. You may know it, but you haven’t demonstated it. You haven’t even pointed to anything suggestive of it. I myself didn’t happen to notice, and the deletions broke several links in my own archives. So, maybe a lie, but not a demonstrable one — or at least, not one you’ve demonstrated yet.

The third lie you attribute to Violet is “Overstating the number of entries about her.” That’s just lameness on your part. If you and the Boing Boingers can’t make an accurate count (“I can’t get an accurate count without reading each one” says you) than how in the hell do you think it’s fair to expect Violet to have an accurate count of material she doesn’t have access to? At least you’ve got a database. So, sorry, no — that might have been hyperbole, or it might have been error, but it surely does not rise to the level of “demonstrable” lie, when you (who has access to the database) cannot even make the count you accuse her of lying about.

I really think you need to stop with the insults and start focusing on the damage control. Because this has been seriously beneath you. You know who you have been reminding me of today? Jerry Pournelle on GEnie. No joke.

mightymouse1584

gotta admit… im a lil dissapointed.

GregLondon

random832: If I said “yes, it’s a bloody waste” would you drop it? You asked “what damage was done”, not “what damage was done to you personally”

I said @1055: OK, what damage did you suffer?

Which was in response to your rather vague allusion to damage in #1005: actual physical harm is rarely present in a betrayal of values. That doesn’t make it any less a betrayal, or any less _emotionally_ harmful.

OK. so again, what damage have you suffered as a result of BB’s actions? How have you been betrayed by BB? How have you been emotionally harmed by BB?

fiendishthingy

#1287 To the general public, those posts were deleted. When you load the url you get a 404 error. Apparently those with edit privileges are the only ones able to see what was once there. The use of “unpublished” was ill advised and in this context just sounds nefarious and muddies the water. It doesn’t matter if that is what the button is named in your back end software. The posts were deleted from view or removed from the site. If they were unpublished that would mean they written but never added to the website.

majkeli

Wow, Theresa, talk about needing to take two seconds to think before posting.

Explaining away hypocrisy doesn’t make is something else. There was a large mistake made and nothing but excuses to account for it. I’m very disappointed and becoming more disappointed the more I read the ranting retorts and insufficient explanations.

Antinous

Damon_TFB,

We would love to implement those ideas, but the MT interface doesn’t support some of them. Here are some specifics:

Have each comment’s number fixed. I have seen many references by other commenters broken.

The majority of renumbering comes from approving anonymous comments, which appear based on receipt time, not approval time. It’s really better to use a name or pull a quote when responding to a comment.

It’s fine to ignore comments that never made it onto the page, but if a comment is removed after being served to even one pageview, leave a simple “This comment was deleted.”

We have no way to do that except to overwrite the comment under the existing username. That would be a much bigger problem.

If a user wants to have their account deleted, that’s fine, but don’t delete their comments. Just change the username to “De-Registered User #42″

Username changes are not retroactive, so it wouldn’t make any difference anyway. I already test drove that option.

Some way to distinguish between different anonymous posters should be used. I have several ideas, but that could be hashed out in another thread.

Click the eyeball and leave a note or contact Teresa. It would be lovely to know if you were dealing with one or many anonymous commenters in a thread. If you have any ideas for fixes or workarounds on any of this, we’d be quite happy to hear them.

Thanks.

holtt

Comments like dried leaves
Filter down in hush whispers
Soon a fine brown mulch

mdhatter

“Let’s suppose Joe R. Blogger writes a wonderful post.”

Why? Xeni said: “This person never “posted” items to BB, they were not an author or a guest blogger.

SO, aside from those who misunderstand the actions at hand, what’s the big deal here? Someone here wanted to stop giving free publicity to someone else, for some reason.

Is that not their prerogative?

Foolster41

It’s your blog,

But at the same time I have to agree to the frustration of not knowing what the heck is going on. Perhaps this could have been handled a little better. *shrug*.

hpr122i

Why did the BBers not tell a white lie? Saying “we had a personal fallout” instead of “she’s unwonderful” would have avoided tons of speculation about VB’s and the BBers’ morals.

jody

If BB was a book in which they wrote about Violet Blue, it wouldn’t be called censorship if they omitted those phrases in the next edition.

the specialist

silence is golden – there is enough noise on the nets – take a lot of stuff down – spend your time adding content – stop the war – dada is everything – art is what you can get away with – not that many people care.

Christopher

one more re #290: Talia, you’re right, no one makes us read BB.

I’d be very very interested in seeing the numbers as far as net traffic to the site before and after this debacle, though.

(And since you seem to be one for wanting definitions–not that there’s anything wrong with that– debacle (noun): 2. An event or enterprise that ends suddenly and disastrously, often with humiliating consequences. 3. A confused rush or rout; a stampede)

Sister Y

Why are people hating on gossip? Gossip is a wonderful thing. It’s on Brown’s list of human universals and might be seen as a basic human need. It’s fun. It builds relationships.

Same with drama – it’s not on the list of human universals in name, but it’s certainly there in spirit:

conflict
conflict, consultation to deal with
conflict, means of dealing with
conflict, mediation of

It’s not wrong to love gossip and drama. Nor is it immature. It’s just human.

Antinous

#770,

Check to make sure that it’s not your head. That’s been happening a lot lately.

Shawn Struck

If you don’t trust the moderators to be honest about what’s in the record, I’m afraid that adds another meta-level to this discussion.

Jeez, that’s not what I was saying at at all.

I was just personally unclear on whther you saw what *I* saw in a comment history or not.

Antinous

Shawn,

I didn’t mean to imply that you said that. I was just making a general comment since some commenters seem to feel that I’m not being honest.

ErosBacchus

Greg #1069, I think you are being blinded by your loyalties. You see a shit storm and a “seemingly endless line of trolls” and so you take me to task for entering the debate while people are being attacked.

I, on the other hand, see the usual proportion of trolls in the BB ecology, plus a huge number of people who have genuine and honest concerns about what BB did, bringing this up now because now is when we learned about it. I believe that both you and Teresa currently (well, “yesterday” for her) have misfiring troll detectors.

I don’t view my concerns as an “excuse” to jump into a shit storm; I view this as a shit storm into which all of the usual trolls have jumped, as they will every time. One of the major errors in the handling of this matter is to assume that most or all of the critic commenters are trolls, and to treat us as such. There is a reason for this shit storm, or several of them, and you shouting at people in denial of that fact is not helping. (Full credit for dialing back the shouting in your last few comments, it is appreciated.)

Antinous

ErosBacchus,

Once again, the majority of critical comments in this post are from first-time commenters. You yourself are a first-time commenter who has seventeen (17) comments in this thread, all of which are completely intact and visible. BoingBoing regularly posts about repression, torture, loss of civil liberties, global warming, deforestation and other matters of the gravest consequence. Yet half the comments in this thread are from users who have never bothered to weigh in on any of those matters, saving their outrage for this instead. Torture: no response. Year old post removal: explosion of fury. The facts speak for themselves.

buddy66

HOLTT,

Well, it’s got the 5-7-5 three-line form, but do you think the leaves and mulch contrast is visual enough?

Yeah…I do too. It ain’t exactly “…petals/on a wet black bough.” But what other haiku ever is? Nice.

Scoo

As one of the “unpublished” on this forum at the hands of TNH, for a post where I declared that, for the most part, the boing boing party was over, I can’t say I’m surprised at all of this. Well, there’s one aspect of the story that does surprise me: how ham-fisted the handling of the whole debacle has been, given the storied media-savviness the BB gang. Really, it’s like brand suicide.

Forget Nuked the Fridge, Violet Blue is the new Jumped the Shark.

GregLondon

BB could at least tell HER what she did that was so wrong.

If you weren’t holding a can of gasoline, I might think you had a genuine concern about this. But given the pyros running amuck, it lands slightly flat.

Hiram in the Netherlands

Trying to figure out a way to ‘unread’ five years or so of Boing Boing.

‘Unpublishing’ someone is disappearing him or her, exactly to the extent that lies within your power as an online publisher.

It’s an unkind, even violent thing to do.

Archeaopteryx

@GREGLONDON – The real betrayal here was when Wendi Sullivan Blue decided to abandon information freedom and become part of the Patent and Trademark system to slap down an impoverished single mother. Its also really clear that her reason was not because of any real confusion between the two, but because she could not stand the thought of being thought a *gasp* whore.

Church

Yes, yes, “Unpublish” is a technical term for a database maneuver. We get that. It also makes no difference to us. If something is removed from a website, nobody gives a fig about the mechanics behind the process. It was removed.

I think that removing things like that stinks. It’s sneaky and underhanded. If you have a falling out and don’t want to be associated with someone AND don’t want to call attention to the fact, just stop posting about/linking to them. Sure, they may get a trickle of attention from old links. So what? I’ve been on the receiving end of bb links. It’s not anything to worry about after a few days.

As was mentioned a few posts up, Breath on MeFi had an interesting take, which was essentially that we’re holding Xeni to Cory’s standards. There’s some merit to that, but as this is essentially a group blog (again, as seen from the outside) it seems reasonable to do that. I can’t wait to see Cory’s take on this.

I’m sorry that TNH and Ant…(I can never get his name right) had a tough couple of days, but a lot of us are also moderators elsewhere and I, for one, am going to use this as a cautionary example for other mods. Xeni also started out pretty poorly, but I guess she got some sleep or something because she’s doing much better now. (And the mods are too, come to think of it.)

eustace

Yeah, it was the overrepresentation of the self-entitled that creeped me out. And certainly not enough cowbell.

ill lich

I am curious as to what boing boing may do in the future when a similar case might present itself. If say, Loren Coleman begins talking about aliens as a previously undiscovered species, and then joins the Raelians, will you guys follow the same modus operandi? Clearly trying to do it “quietly” didn’t work in the end (although it appears to have worked for about a year), so will you contact the person in mind and tell them what you are about to do and why? Or is that just going to make the soon-to-be-unpublished party angrier?

“Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

–Randall Patrick MacMurphy (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest)

Daemon

To quote from Xeni’s post way up at the top:
“the posts were removed from public view while an evaluation of what to do took place”

Depending on what the incident in question was, this makes perfect sense to me. If VB seemed to be doing something they considered morally reprehensible, then I can understand why they would want to take them out of the public eye while they debated whether or not they wanted to continue supporting her. I can’t see them doing it for some trivial issue.

“We didn’t want to pay to host them on our blog anymore. This is also why we remove hateful, ad hominem attack comments from public view, too…”

This quote imediately follows the first, and while it may not have been intentional, it does sort of imply that VB did something they really, really, really didn’t like.

The fact that they still aren’t talking about the reasons implies that either they are still evaluating whatever the original issue was (which, even after a year is still possible) or that the issue is a private matter, that the public is entirely unaware of…. and probably that they feel that more harm would come from revealing the information than by keeping it silent.

I really can’t see them doing this over the her name lawsuit.

rotorglow

I think it’s cool that people who say mean things about BB or its authors get disemvoweled, but people who call VB a cnt etc. don’t.

What was it Xeni was saying about ad hominem attacks?

Antinous

Rotorglow,

If you will flag the offending comments, I will be happy to look into it. Just click the eyeball and fill out the form.

GregLondon

will@435: Greg @419, the point isn’t how long it takes to notice that the past has been revised. The point is that it’s been revised.

Bullshit. The damage done to BV by deleting these posts over a year ago was small enough that you jokers didn’t notice it for a fricken year.

At which point, all this bullshit about censorship and Stalin and Orwell and 1984 gets bandied about by a bunch of tn ht wrng, mlq-tst hrrngng, mealy-mouthed bunch of whaaaambulance drivers.

I don’t uphold ideas of opposing censorship or opposing fascism or opposing stupid wars simply because some fucking piece of paper says they’re a bad idea, FOR FCKS SAKE, I oppose them because censorship leads to fascism leads to stupid wars leads to PEOPLE FCKNG DYING. I oppose them because THEY INFLICT A REAL FCKNG COST.

Any mthr fckr who is bitching about “censorship” on BoingBoing, when that “censorship” took place over one fckng year ago, has completely missed the fckng point that THERE WAS NO REAL DAMAGE INFLICTED BY THAT ACT AND IT WASN”T CENSORSHIP.

The only damage is your collective underpants in a knot over some legalistic worship of some vague thing called “censorship” that apparently has no real meaning, no real cost, inflicts no real damage, and is simply some dumb fckng vocabulary term that means whatever the fck you want it to mean.

The next SSHL WHO BRINGS UP 1984 PROVES MY FCKNG POINT. This isn’t some totalitarian Big Brother rewriting history and sending your sorry asses to room 101. Any SSHL WHO BRINGS UP JOSEPH-FCK-M-STALIN PROVES MY FCKNG POINT. Millions of people fckng DIED in the purges, in the pogroms, in the prison cells of the secret police.

And you mf’s have the NERVE to compare that kind of shit, THE DEATH OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE, to someone deleting SOME BLOG POSTS???

And when called on this absolute and unmitigated BULLSHIT, you have the GALL to argue legalisms? To argue that it’s NOT the damage inflicted, or even POTENTIAL DAMAGE INFLICTED, but that its some unholy WORSHIP of some WORD OR CONCEPT to the point that it loses all REAL MEANING?

To go and argue that this is FCKNG EQUIVALENT TO JOSEPH FCKNG STALIN??????

You argue as if REAL PEOPLE being FCKNG KILLED is SO IRRELEVANT to the point that you can compare DELETING A BLOG POST to A POGROM THAT KILLED MILLIONS OF PEOPLE, and do it with a straight face. And when called on the bullshit, YOU INVOKE SOME LEGALISTIC LANGUAGE MANEUVAR TO JUSTIFY IT???

ARE YOU FCKNG KIDDING ME????

ulor

As an academic, I know with my spelling most of you are shocked, when we cite (see I can spell it another way too) something online we put both the link and the day it was retrieved that way if it goes away or is changed you can show that at least on the day you retrieved it the info was such, which may not be true X months from now. This is standard practice for APA. So it is surprising that something like this does not exist in the legal profession as well, if it doesn’t then it should in my opinion.

klobouk

I am certain this thread, like Oliver Cromwell, will die by 1658.

technogeek

#172: Xeni, I’m not sure whether you’re saying the cleanup was a mistake or opening that decision for discussion was a mistake. I’m actually more in agreement with the latter than the former…

Hiram in the Netherlands

I wrote a politely worded, relevant-to-the-thread comment, that answered a question asked by another commenter, and it was not shown. I entered the same comment a second time, and it still is not shown.

Why is that?

Ceronomus

Holy crap! People still care about this? How about you folks get worked up about something that matters? Maybe help out folks struggling to make their lives better. Something like Kiva (Featured before on Boing Boing) http://www.kiva.org/index.php

How about everyone takes their self-righteous indignation about this molehill and instead turn it into something positive? How about helping those in need instead of self-aggrandizing complaints about something that is…nothing.

Mantari

Wow. I appreciate Xeni addressing so many different people AND managing to stay positive through it all.

hagbard

#1372 majkeli

Haven’t you heard? Pitchforks and torches are so yesterday. Having a reasoned discussion about the best policies for a large famous blog is the new black.

GregLondon

blue, nobody reasonable could argue with that, if it were the case, but it’s not.

We’ve already proven that one in 1627, remember? No probably not.

you still believe you have something valuable to add to the discussion

I started out because folks were comparing BB’s actions to Stalin and Orwell’s totalitarian state in 1984 and other crazy comparisons. Just recently Satan compared BB deleting a blog post to China making people disappear. And I’m just pointing out the absurdist stuff like that.

I don’t know if I’d call it something valuable as I’d call it shooting fish in a barrel.

browren

You know, all the arguments about whose blog it is and editorial privilege really don’t have a thing to do with the credibility problem.

Yeah, sometimes people don’t behave the way you like, and yeah, sometimes you disagree with them so much that you have to distance yourself from them, but to do so in a secretive way, and to do so retroactively – especially when one of the key attributes of your blog is supposedly its openness – well that is going to raise a lot of eyebrows. Why are you acting so surprised by this?

Over on my Livejournal account I’ve had quite a few friendships dissolve, but not once would I have considered going back through all the old posts and removing anything that mentioned these people. The history of the blog is just that, a history, and changing that history, regardless of what term you choose for it, is going to call your credibility into question.

smokingyogi

This is important enough to me to make this my first post ever.

How is it possible to stand for openness, freedom, transparency and equality when you try to erase the past?

I’ve considered you all to be some of the best journalists of a new era. Will you be leaders and live with your mistakes, or will you run a clubhouse?

Your values are expressed in every post you’ve written. Consider those values and explain to us how this is acceptable.

The right response is to reinstate the posts and issue an apology to your readers. We believe in you and we want greatness.

arkizzle

James, that was discussed many, many comments up-thread..

eg. #40, #139, #219, #400, #417..

Also (and I’m happy to say I don’t know at all), if it was related to the trademark action, why would BB have deleted the posts “a year ago”, when the trademark thing only happened in October 2007?

mneptok

Theresa,

I have found your comments in this thread (and some others, TBH) to be dismissive, demeaning, and hardly in the spirit suggested by saying, “We’re listening.” You may be, but it seems you’re having some difficulty *hearing*.

Being called unintelligent, a blockhead, pretentious, etc etc is not something that inspires an audience to careful consideration of their words and opinions, and polite, reasoned discourse.

Please take some time AFK. I’m sure this has been a rough ride. Please don’t make it tougher by letting your reactions fuel the flames.

One man’s opinion.

minTphresh

just press the OWIST button…see what happens then…

Will Shetterly

Xopher, I came across a sentence today that I love: “Tribe trumps truth.” We’re seeing a lot of that now.

I don’t want to piss you off. I want truth. I’m sorry you think that’s an attempt to piss you off, but I’ll keep after truth.

I don’t know if BB’s morality is defined by money, but my point was simpler: BB is a company that makes a great deal of money from ads. It has policies. Many of us have thought BB proved that companies can behave ethically. To us, erasing someone from corporate memory is troubling. Whether VB’s offenses have anything to do with BB’s income, I don’t know or care–my suspicion, which I’ve mentioned, has been that it has more to do with her abuse of trademark law, something that bothers me at least as much as it bothers Cory.

FredicvsMaximvs

I’ve been watching this thread grow with a sort of morbid fascination. I mean, Holy cow! 1171 comments! We really are obligated to keep it going, just so someone can have the dubious honor of being 1337. ;)

It’s an interesting dilemma, this question of whether to “unpublish” or not. And I don’t envy y’all (VB included) for having to sort out this question in such an extremely public manner.

Right now, the way I see it is this: I have a few ex-girlfriends. Some of them I don’t talk to any more. Some of them I’d rather forget. But I never did throw out any of their pictures or letters. Why? Because they’re a part of what makes me who I am. I don’t necessarily go back and look at them much, but they are there.

Who knows – maybe I’ll change my mind tomorrow.

As I understand it, part of the reason for taking down the posts is because the links generate revenue for VB. Setting aside for the moment the ethical questions that brings about, perhaps one way to reinstill confidence in your blog and still show your disapproval for her actions would be to put back the posts, but disable any clickable links in them. (Sorry if I’m misunderstanding the issue, but I don’t think I can wade through the umpty billion comments and linked articles looking for that proverbial needle.)

Anyway, if nothing else, this controversy has definitely generated some interesting discussion on the ethics of blogging.

Damon_TFB

#1755 (FuneralPudding):
“I went to the Violet Blue thread and all I got was this stupid T-shirt”

I want to put that on a hat.

Stu Mark

I just had a thought – This reminds me of Robert Rauschenberg’s erasing of a drawing by Willem de Kooning. Art is Art, whether you like it or not. And BoingBoing is Art.

arkizzle

Justin Watt:

“Removing posts from your archives is a big blogging no-no, and not fully and openly disclosing why you did it is another.”

Citations, please. I am yet to read the Official Bloggers Rulebook, or indeed meet one of it’s enforcers.
__

Chemical Orphan:

Censorship, in the negative sense which a lot of people seem to be jumping to, means making the material unavailable to society at large (or a specific set of people). This would require BB to be the original publisher of the material, or at least it’s main source.

VioletBlue’s work is available elsewhere, this is not it’s prime source, so it’s not censorship per se. Do you demand NYT runs pr0n in it’s pages, that they are censoring it otherwise? Is there no such thing as editing (or indeed good ol’ human “change of heart”), or is it all black & white censorship?

Elvis Pelt

@764

Violent? Good job, you’re moving up the ranks of goof-ball posters.

Burnchao

@Joel Johnson #957

I apologize for being too defensive or even antagonistic at times in this thread.

Maybe I missed it, or maybe you’ve unpublished them, but most of your comments haven’t been that antagonistic. In fact, I think you’ve been the most cool-headed of principal Boingers that have gotten involved. But again, that’s assuming comments haven’t been unpublished to make you appear cool-headed.

It’s hard to parse criticism when you aren’t sure if it’s from concerned friends or mawkish ghouls

There may be some BB-haters and some VB-huggers here, but I’m pretty damn sure the majority of the people here that are bothered by all this are, or were, BB-huggers. It’s not what you did to VB, but what you’ve done to BB, and have been doing for at least a year.

We’ll do better.

I can see that you’re trying but…

In the meantime, can you guys give us a few days to digest all this? [...] If our choices as a group are as important as many of you say they are, I don’t think it’s too much to ask to let us sync up and discuss this more.

Dude, you’ve spent over a year trying to sync up, as has been continuously pointed out by Xeni, TNH, Antinous, et al. (Well, last time I looked, they were pointing it out, but I don’t know if anything’s been unpublished since then)

Come on. BB knows how properly handle when they publish something they regret. You do it all the time. You one-line it and update in red font. That’s the way you’ve been doing it for years. Unpublishing isn’t the way you handle these things. (Well, I guess it is the way you handle things, at least for the last year. I don’t know when the unpublishing started, but I hope it only been a year)

just saying

Your ‘Cory watch’ comes across as selfish at worst and petulant at best. This is not about you.

Ah, I’m going to leave y’all, moderator included, to your name calling and infighting. Best of luck with this mess.

Seacrest Out.

Satan

Yes this is a private site and there are owners who have full control about what goes into it, what gets taken out of it, and who gets to write for it. But there is a flipside to this. This private site is sending and transmitting its content to the public. As a member of this viewing public, I have the right to use the means made available by BB to question a decision and ask whether an explanation can be forthcoming about that decision. I am not making a constitutional play for free speech here. I am asking person to bloggers for a clarification that would remove the suspicious of malfeasance on BB’s part for what looks to me like a bad move.

What was it about all the past work that lost merit?
How can you tease the public about “something happened” and then simply presume to not explain it? Do you believe that a complete absence of suspicion is the way we should live with each other? I believe a system works because there is a built in amount of distrust and that is why transparency is so helpful in keeping everyone on the same page.

The longer you hide, the worse this is going to get.

holtt

If it makes my comments any more or less tolerable, I used to be the head moderator of a large game forum with 90k registered users. I know what it’s like and I know how it is to moderate a community of posters in a firestorm. I actually got in trouble with the higher ups for being more sympathetic to the angry people in the forums than the “company line”

For what it’s worth, here are some things I learned…

It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. It is fair to shut people down for HOW they say things. Compare asking the waiter to bring you a new salad because yours has a slug in it to climbing on your table and shouting profanity for all to hear.
Respect people posting. Without them there is no community. If you can’t respect them, get out of the business or shut down your community. If you don’t care what they think, then make your presence a one way (from you to “them”) conduit, not two way.
Respect angry people. They can’t always rationally express their anger but it’s usually based on some kind of frustration. Help them get to a point of explaining that frustration so you both can understand it.
If your product sucks and someone says it does, then they are right and it’s not fair to shut them down for saying so. Sometimes you don’t know something sucks until you remove yourself from the picture.
Before changing policy, announce it BEFORE you do it and get feedback. Then do it. People don’t like surprises.
It’s easier to steer conversations to new areas with humor and honey rather than a club. Don’t argue with people, even if you’re right.

Joel Johnson

Quite a lot of us will be in the same physical location later this week, so we’re going to continue to bang on this whole thing and try to reach some sort of happy medium. I don’t have a lot more to offer than that at the moment, but thought I’d pop in and wave a hand to let you know we’re still discussing things and moving forward. We’re a slow boat!

mdhatter

To what standards, if any, does BoingBoing hold itself accountable?

FIRST, READ THE POST. Then, follow this link from within the post.

http://www.boingboing.net/policies.html

the_boy

to derive some good out of this, I’d be all for boingboing offering a tutorial on how to use the wayback machine. I stare at that interface, know it is something I should love and understand and revere, and I just can’t possible grasp how to make it work without some agonizing process. Not that they’d have to use the tutorial to teach us how to find Violet Blue, but it would be nice if they could turn this into an opportunity to make the web more accessible to some of us un-savvy peons

priyanga

@Teresa (#553)

“Is it okay if I mention that I find some of these comments astoundingly stupid?”

“And as for all this “Orwellian editing” crap — christ, do you take two seconds to think before you post it?”

“… then I’m sorry, but you’re a blockhead.”

Not good form insulting many of the loyal fans who have tried to articulate their concerns and confusion. Do you really have to be so mean and condescending?

The post ended with “And if you think there’s more to say, by all means, let’s talk. We’re listening.” not we are going to belittle you for expressing your opinion on this strange situation.

I love BoingBoing, I don’t like this dismissive tone. If you didn’t want comments regarding this issue, shouldn’t have asked for them. If you mean “We’re listening” then listen and don’t insult.

Also, you keep alluding to the bad ways VB has behaved and how BB is above that hence keeping mum. But that stance, backhanded VB trashing, and condescension towards readers is turning a fire into an inferno. Boo!

oheso

@1182. Get married. You’ll throw them out …

Bruce Arthurs

Okay, I’m gonna make just one more (hopefully short) comment about the word “unpublish” and then go away.

“Unpublish” only contains the idea of “saving” or “archiving” if you’ve already learned the blogging-software definition of the word. Minus that knowledge or experience, there is no context to the word to communicate the concept of “saving” or “archiving” the unpublished posts. This is why it keeps having to be explained, over and over, as new people come along who haven’t seen it used in the blogging-software way.

Like, oh, me. I’d never seen the word “unpublish” used until this whole discussion started, and I’ve been blogging for years.

But that’s been on Blogger. And it turns out that the Blogger command that does the same thing as “Unpublish” here is…

…”Save To Draft”.

Bam, right there on the button is the word “Save”. Hit that button, and the post is moved from public view into a “draft” catgegory visible only to the blog’s editor. No confusion possible.

Y’know, I’ve seen Blogger treated with disdain, like it was the two-headed ugly stepchild of blogging software, but in this case… I think they got it right.

That is all.

No, wait, there is just one more thing I wanted to say:

I’ve put two previous posts here, that seem to have caused some ruckus, and NOT ONE LURKER HAS SUPPORTED ME IN EMAIL! NOT ONE! I AM DEEPLY, DEEPLY HURT BY THIS. YOU LURKERS ARE ALL A BUNCH OF… OF… SLACKERS!

Nelson.C

That’s just nasty, Mother.

ST

Why do people with “Moderator” after their name often come across so negatively? It is the moderator’s role to be “the cop” but, especially on a site like Boing Boing, can’t this cop be one of the cool ones? The sort that can maintain order but still hold your respect? They are a rare breed but they do exist.

I say this because of the tone of things like “…you haven’t been a very careful reader. Go back and try again.” and “It was a group decision. Why do you think it took so long?” and “I expect she’ll survive it.” I realize some of you will disagree with me on this but I read that and my mental hackles start to go up (even though I have nothing to do with the commenters they are directed at). It comes across as… ack, what’s the best way to put this… chippy, maybe? There’s just a touch of “in your face” to it and I don’t like it. Boing Boing is “us” to me and I don’t want the folks I hang with to be jerks.

Now for the constructive element of my comment. Perhaps saying “It was a group decision, thus the delay” or to express your annoyance “It was a group decision. Have some patience.” would have sounded better? Rather than “…you haven’t been a very careful reader. Go back and try again.” try “You missed our point. Read the previous comments again.” I have no clue as to why you all are unhappy with the individual whose articles are at the heart of this issue but rather than the snide “she’ll survive it” maybe just leave that out? Since I don’t know what the issue is YOU are the one that comes across negatively when you make statements like that.

I’m just sayin’.

loraksus

Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator

Stay Classy…

eustace

to Hiram in the Netherlands; calling this violent only exposes to your readers the extent to which you have been protected from the reality of violence, and the harm this has done to your perspective. Perhaps you should start a server farm for all the poor discarded links on the internet; perhaps nothing else will protect your delicate sensibilities. Until you volunteer to pay for it, you remain a transparent puff of gas.

The Morgan

FIRST!

Tsuyoi

So if I’m to take what the mods have posted and read between the lines this is a case of:

Hell hath no fury like a woman ignored.

Burnchao

@#1172 Xeni

No, it absolutely does not, though I can see how that might have been stated more clearly, and understand the confusion as I read your comment here.

I’ll accept that. Now before conversation can continue, I guess I have to wait for you to alter #5 to look like it always read more clearly. Then I’ll get to point out that that’s the whole problem, altering previous statements to look like they’ve always been right.

(I apologize if that’s too aggressive, I hope the reasons for saying that way it is understood.)

mdhatter

#338 – Community would mean the standards were set by more then a handful of people.

This is the forum. You and I are the community.

We are just a handful of people. If this weren’t up to my standards, I would not comment here, nor would you.

What you said is like saying no community exists at a coffee shop because the owner decides to close at 8 each night, regardless of his customers wishes to stay until 11.

Reasonable limitations do not prevent a community.

genericvox

“In attempting to defuse drama, we inadvertently ignited more.”

Wow. Understatement of the year. I never heard of Violet Blue until this, but after reading all this I was compelled to Google her… If anything, it’s giving her more publicity. Maybe this is some reverse, or anti-advertising? I’m confused.

Although I do agree with the decision (and right) to delete whatever you want to, I can’t say I wholeheartedly agree with how this is being/has been dealt with. I do feel like I’m left in the dark, and I’m rather disappointed. It’s like saying “Something bad happened, and we’re not going to tell you what it is, but it’s being resolved. The bad lady is gone.”

I almost want to say that I feel this is a half-hearted attempt to quell the curiosity of those who already knew about the incident(s?), while igniting the interest of those who didn’t know (and probably wouldn’t have really cared) in the first place.

I do love reading BB and BBG, and this “thing” isn’t going to make me stop reading… Again, I do agree with the right to remove/add/edit whatever you all want to. This is your house, and we have to obey the rules, but I think we’d all like to know what rule was broken – I’d like to stay in good favor of the my gracious internet overlords – and will other “violators” be dealt with similarly? Was a warning given? If someone does/has done something you don’t like, are they erased from the tomes of Boing Boing forever?

I thought Boing Boing was a celebration of wonderful things. This resulting chaos is not a wonderful thing! “Secrets don’t make friends!”
:)

David Pescovitz

@Joel (#815), Totally. It’s been really hard reading a lot of this, but I’m learning a lot about what BB represents to many people and also how much our community really cares about this site and are invested in it. I appreciate that. The support, criticism, and yes, even the outrage, didn’t fall on deaf ears. And I too feel differently about some things than before.

Xeni Jardin

#1181Ulor: yes, I believe the moral of your story is a true one.

#1175 oheso, Cory’s actively engaged in this, but he’s on vacation with his family, and mostly offline.

#1180 oheso, I’m still confused about the claims of “deleted” or un-approved comments, I’m not clear on the specifics of what you’re referring to. But I know the mods are doing their best to keep this unprecedented thread civil and adhere to the loose but good-spirited guidelines we follow, and I don’t doubt their good intentions and hard work here. I’ll let them reply as soon as they can (it’s late at night where some of them are, please be patient).

#1179 locolobo729 and other first-time commenters, thank you for weighing in.

@#1176 Burnchao:

I read elsewhere of other unpublishing incidents…

So it’s an entrenched belief/policy.

Well, no, and you might do well to consider the source/s.

There is no secret sinister plot to whitewash large batches of our archives, nuke unfavorable reader comments, or sneakily tweak our policies or FAQs.

As you can see from the extremely large number of comments in this thread, a number of which are critical of one thing or another, we’re not afraid of open dialogue.

I’ll try to stay engaged in this thread a while.

avdi

The argument a privately held editing it’s own content constitutes censorship is, of course, poppycock.

HOWEVER, the frequently-made converse argument – that since it’s not censorship there’s nothing whatever wrong with it – is equally rubbish.

You can be an ass, legally and within your rights, and still be an ass.

It’s one thing to go back and put disclaimers on old posts. But outright deleting them? Not cool. Totally within your rights, and still not cool.

I enjoy both this blog and Violet Blue’s, and until I saw this post I had not an inkling that there was any bad blood between the two. After today I will still read this blog and Violet Blue’s blog; the only difference is that I will trust this blog a little less.

hagbard

#615 mullingitover

What an odd thing to say. A whole day spent heckling BB, and then you accuse them of picking fights.

This whole thing is a minefield. Literally any response from anyone at BB is an opening for an attack. What they get attacked with depends on what they expose.

It’s all pitchforks and torches, isn’t it? These people are guilty of having bootmarks on their faces! Let’s get ‘em!

CloseReader

@#941

Apparently my meaning wasn’t clear. I think it’s inappropriate to use the language of totalitarianism to comment on a blog’s editorial policy. I am offended by the use of concepts originally created to comment on human misery and suffering on what is essentially a ridiculous kerfluffle. It’s very easy to throw fuel on a fire by throwing inflammatory words and concepts around. Nothing gets people riled up by throwing around words like “Stalin” and “Nazi” and “torture”.

Thank god you made my point completely crystal clear by needlessly equating my comment to a comparison of the current US government and the Khmer Rouge.

cprincipe

“Unpublished” – what delicious doublespeak.

A little bit of the “do as I say, not as I do” hits Boing Boing.

Burnchao

Well, there’s many unpublished posts of Xeni’s that have nothing to do with VB (Like a William Gibson interview, or a hello kitty copyright post).

I’ve also seen a post of David’s regarding VB, that’s now unpublished. So she can’t say it was just her work she was altering.

Random832

And TNH’s original post here is full of “us” and “we”, again making it seem like this was something that all (or most) of the Boingers were involved in. So, yes, people were a bit surprised when everyone else said they’d never gotten together and talked about it, and then when Xeni told the LA Times that it was her alone.

Damon_TFB

Regarding disemvowelling via a flag, don’t the moderators sometimes disemvowel *part* of a comment? Is this done manually?

Antinous

Yes, more or less.

tillwe

@Christopher (#344): I don’t think the net traffic to BoingBoing is affected either way; what will change is the image of BoingBoing and the feeling while reading it.

cavalier

So when are we going to talk about the fact that the unpublish line as linked in this post (“unpublished”) under the Copyright Policy DIDN’T EXIST a week ago?

Thanks to hades, here is the Google cache of the Copyright Policy as of 06/25/08:
http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:uRHyslDtxi4J:www.boingboing.net/policies.html+www.boingboing.net/policies.html&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a

Now comparing and contrasting that to the post linked, the following line has been added:

“We reserve the right to unpublish or refuse to unpublish anything for any or no reason.”

Xeni Jardin

@Burnchao, if your intent here is to have a reasonable, civilized conversation, I’m very happy to engage. If your intent is to insult or be snarky for the sake of pixels, I don’t think that is a good use of your time, or mine.

tillwe

@hagbard (#1586) — don’t worry, it’s a fine thing to have an agenda, even people like Lincoln and Franklin had one, I guess. Or Cory, for what it is worth. Maybe even a moleskin one.

.

;-)

Xeni Jardin

@ill lich, yeah I think we probably won’t do this again, even if the reasons were as strong and unusual as they were in this case. This was too much of a pain in the ass. We are living and learning.

wackyvorlon

I have a great deal of respect for Boing Boing and Violet Blue, and I am indeed saddened to see a rift forming. I wish the both of you luck in resolving the situation, and hope you are able to.

I do not believe this counts as censorship. The posts remain on the wayback machine, just not in the Boing Boing archives.

Random832

#925 If you don’t trust the moderators to be honest about what’s in the record, I’m afraid that adds another meta-level to this discussion.

Right, because they’ve been honest about everything else, including: the nature of comments whose removal they have admitted to; the authorship of the original blog posts they removed; the content of their own policy page as it stood at the time they “unpublished” those blog posts; and so forth.

I don’t think the difference between that and the “them covering up everything they think they can get away with” bit that’s been present in this discussion for quite some time is really worth another meta-level.

GregLondon

There is a reason for this shit storm, or several of them, and you shouting at people in denial of that fact is not helping.

Except I asked for your reason, and you said it was broken links. And it was the first stated reason in your post at #186, which is your first post in this thread.

You don’t get to handwave the passive voice “there are reasons for this shitstorm” to distract from YOUR reasons, which seems to come back to “broken links”.

Reading through your post at 186, this seems to be your cause in its entirety. But the thing that appears to have made it sting was having it called “nonsense”.

That’s the personal injustice you mentioned, the one that was pointed directly at you.

Which would sting if its important to you, but dismissed by the folks at BB.

But you seem unwilling to look at it from BB’s view, to look at the possibility that BB was dealing with something more than just some normal everyday shitstorm “into which all of the usual trolls have jumped”.

If you think this is “normal”, how does the 1000 plus comment thread and the massive comment list over on metafilter compare to a “normal” BB thread?

I don’t think BB has a problem with fighting broken links, but this is something slightly more problematic than just broken links.

So-Called Austin Mayor

Fellow Boinglings,

I may be in the minority, but I think that this thread has not yet outlived its usefulness and is still serving a productive function.

Xeni – Thanks for taking the time to engage this comment string. Even if I thought you deserved all the invective hurled in your direction, I would still respect you for wading into it. Your active participation is deeply appreciated.

Nina Eleanor Alter – Thanks for putting our hosts’ choice/actions into context. I still think it damages the valuable transparency/openness aspect of the Boing Boing brand, but your post makes it much more understandable.

But some of the moderators have let the righteousness of their task — taking up arms to defend Xeni’s honor would certainly go to my head — devolve them into enflamers. Challenging the legitimacy of BB lurkers and irregular commenters reads like, “If you don’t truly love Boing Boing, your opinion doesn’t matter — and if you truly loved Boing Boing, I’d know who you were.” Although it is understandable, it is unseemly.

Which, now that I’ve typed it, sums up my feelings on this entire “Violet Blue/’Unpublishing’ controversy”: Unseemly but understandable.

Always all the best, etc.

– SCAM

hpr122i

Ambrose: Right now my perception of the BBers’ view is “We really, really thought that doing X was fine. But it seems a lot of people think otherwise, and we’re by no means infaillible — maybe we were wrong — let’s think about it.”

And given that, apparently, Cory is on vacations, they may (understandably, at least for me) have to “think about it” for a while before they decide what to do. And that’s fine with me — I wouldn’t want them to rush into a decision and regret it later.

And I don’t think anybody can deny (no brothers at least) that rethinking the way BB does moderation is in order.

remmelt

Well, my holiday to Sicily was great, thanks for asking.

It’s good to be back though. What did I miss?

ROSSINDETROIT

I was unaware of this until TNH’s post this afternoon. I was curious enough to spend 10 minutes Googling the issue. All I found out in the Blogosphere was a lot of people speculating about what transpired between some other people to make them stop relating to one another in a certain way. That was 10 minutes wasted.
I do have a contribution to this comments thread, though:

IDCSESU

GregLondon

Dear BoingBoing,

Regarding your recent exercise in taking down your own comments, I find that my undergarments are in a serious twist and they are currently holding me hostage. They’ve informed me they will not unbunch until you provide sufficient explanation as to why you did what you did, that they eventually approve of said reasons, such that they can feel like they have editorial control over your actions.

My undergarments indicate that you have one hour to comply, at which point, they will strangulate an important appendage. If, after two hours, you still have not complied, they threaten to move up and cut off my nose to spite my face.

Please help.

Sincerely,
In A Bind

shmegegge

hey guys, it’s been noticed over at metafilter that xeni’s initial comment has been edited to remove a phrase that read to some people like an unflattering way to describe VB. that’s it’s been (apparently secretly) edited is bothering a few people. anyone want to clarify what the deal is there? considering the nature of the current kerfluffle, this is the kind of thing that would probably throw gas on the fire.

Jim Conley

Having just spent an hour poking around to get ‘the background’ on this story it’s pretty easy to develop a narrative as to why Violet got clipped when she did: Congdon; No Name Jane; The fifth Boinger theory – Take your pick, they’re all entertaining and equally irrelevant.

But does anyone really think it took Violet a year to notice she’d been ‘unpublished?’ The real story here isn’t why BB did what they did but why the story is breaking now. The whole thing has the stench of orchestration and a quick look at Google Trends suggests BB’s ‘response’ made Violet a hot topic today. Mutual parasitism at its best. Perhaps Mr. Sarno can clarify the sudden interest?

My tinfoil hat says that Violet needed some publicity and this was a great way to spike some quick hits. This sort of behavior might have something to do with why she was redacted in the first place. Who knows? Who cares?

As to the discussion of censorship, BB has always been wholeheartedly nepotistic and what the editors give they can also take away. Coop and the Reverse Cowgirl are a couple of notable beneficiaries of BB editorial policy. Violet is apparently one of the casualties.

The Fab Five (yes, Joel, we love you too) are opinionated, capricious, self-obsessed and fully entitled to do whatever they damn well please with anybody’s posts. The day they stop having opinions is the day I shuffle over to the Huffington Post before taking a header off a viaduct.

Those who take issue with this can just keep on trucking over to a genuinely neutral POV website.

Please tell us when you find it.

hpr122i

Eustace: By your logic, every time Cory criticizes an entity for “disappearing” its archives, he’s full of shit if he doesn’t volunteer to pay for the hosting?

epo

Oh now I am disappointed, we are nearly at 1984 posts and its all gone quiet.

Come on guys, the next big push – 1984!, 1984!

BTW Boingers, this page takes quite a while to load now. Perhaps you could paginate every 500 comments or so in the unlikely event that it ever happens again.

Ambrose

>my perception of the BBers’ view is “We really, really thought that doing X was fine.

Well that’s a very charitable view.

I don’t think it looks that way to the majority of people. All that “we have the right to do it” business, the history-revision, post-editing and policy-sleight-of-hand is just damage control after the fact as far as I’m concerned.

Archeaopteryx

KLOBOUK, don’t be so sure… I am being told some things that, if true, are absolutely going to be posted here… But maybe not for weeks.

Church

Oh, don’t bring HER up!

mdh

wow, oldnumberseven, just wow.

If this thread taught me anything, it’s that I hope you can find sites you’re happier with elsewhere, but you would do well not to hold your breath.

You could try TMZ.com i suppose.

krylon

The crux of this problem is people seem to be confusing editorial work with fact-based journalism.

BoingBoing removed editorial content. The same facts available in those posts are still available at various places online.

Comparing BoingBoing to the government’s concealment of data available nowhere else is not only stupid but silly: nowhere have facts been destroyed or claimed to have never existed.

Editorial positions change. Internet publishing allows those changes to be made in real time rather than having to post “Letter from our President”-esque aplogies that many of you think should have been made here.

Many say that as a personal blog, no such apology is necessary. To wit: if you disagree with editorial content, you may go elswhere to find “wonderful things.” But when an editorial decision is made without notice of any kind? Well, then it becomes obvious why people are frustrated, as their ability to make an informed choice about the media they consume has been taken from them.

I do not think a changelog for the website is the answer to this problem. I do not even know if it can be classified as a “problem” per se. What I do know is that this discussion, when properly framed and stripped of attacks and defenses based on the “personal” nature of the issue, is more important than most seem to realize.

nerdkiller

How long til Gawker or someone gets the savory deets? I’m not gonna pretend to be too mature to not wanna hear what happened.

ribonucleic

So in the end, this was all about nothing more than someone finding out their ex-girlfriend was a user?

http://valleywag.com/5021288/how-xeni-and-violets-boing-boing-affair-went-sour

Oh, for the love of…

mdhatter

@1181

but being classy sometimes makes you look like a douchebag especially when the other side is taken advantage of your tack.

That. Is. A. Pearl.

mdhatter

#163 Really, it’s like brand suicide.

As someone with no dog in the fight, I’ll listen to your words very closely and then refer to my comment #83 above: “Don’t give an anklebiter the ladder they need to reach your knees.”

kevcol

Here’s a little something to please and anger both the blindly adoring fanboys/grrls AND the rabble-rousing haters.

1. Boing Boing certainly has the right to “unpublish” any of its post(s.)

2. Readers certainly have the right make or update their opinions on Bong Boing’s credibility based on those unpublishings.

For me, it’s tough to square my image of the blog as a champion of transparency/free speech with this move. I won’t stop reading, but some posts on those topics may ring a bit hollow for awhile.

Boing Boing owns their blog, but not their reputation — that’s got to be earned. One misstep doesn’t erase everything that I like about the blog. But it’s not a high point, either.

zagboodle

Gee, it looks like Boing Boing has finally jumped the snark!

yannish

As far as ideas needed to move forward from this imbroglio, consider it for simplicity sake a printed newspaper, rather than a blog. Once its posted, warts and all, it stays for posterity. Identify and annotate edits and corrections for transparency. Basically follow the best practices in online reporting, and follow them.

Having control over both the content and the CMS gives you a significant amount of control, and temptation. Maybe once an item is published, only another BBer can make edits, so there is at least one other hand in the pie?

Good luck, Im sure you will figure this out. Giddy up!

Bruce Arthurs

Xeni, this thread seems to have gotten so large that my computer is choking on it; when I try to cut & paste from your comments at #1357 and #1191, it’s taking about 20-30 seconds per friggin’ keystroke/click. (!)

For some reason, regular typing in the comment box seems to be working normally. So forgive me for not making specific quotes from your posts. I can’t seem to cut & paste right now, and scrolling up and down is similarly ensnailed. I’m going from memory here.

You described “unpublish” as a “technical term” used on Movable Type.

So… why are you using a technical term in a non-technical discussion?

Why are you using a technical term that comes from command-level Movable Type programming, in a discusssion that’s not being conducted, with some exceptions, by command-level Movable Type users who would recognize the technical meaning of that technical term?

Why do you continue to use “unpublish” when it has been continually and repeatedly interpreted in a way at odds with the strict technical meaning that you seem to think would be obvious to every single Boing Boing reader, whether they’ve used Movable Type or not?

When people see the word “unpublish”, the immediate thought, the common thought, the obvious thought is: “Those posts have been removed.”

I have skimmed the comments here, Xeni, and what I’ve seen is that “unpublish” has repeatedly been seen and interpreted as “removal” rather than “hidden”. It’s because the word is continually interpreted and used in a way contrary to the way you want it to be used and understood that I suggested “redacted” as a more accurate substitute.

As long as you continue to use “unpublish” , you’re going to have to continue “correcting” people who don’t see the word in the narrow, technical, Moveable-Type-specific way you want them to see it. Is that really how you want to spend your keystrokes?

“Unpublish” is a confusing word to use.

“Unpublish” is a bad word to use.

“Unpublish” is a terrible word to use.

As long as you continue to use it, “unpublish” will continue to be part of the problem, not the solution. For God’s sake, just stop using it. The more you use it, the more you keep insisting on it’s MT-specific meaning as the one-and-only possible meaning, the more… foolish… you look, Xeni.

Please, just stop using the word. Just stop. Find something better.

I suggested “redacted” because… well, as near as I can see, it’s an accurate word.

If I take a piece of paper with words written on it, and mark out portions of it with a wide-tip Sharpie, I haven’t destroyed the words on that paper; I’ve just made it more difficult to read them. There are methods, I’m sure — black light, or iodine vapors, or whatever — that could make the obscured writing readable.

Isn’t that exactly what you say the “unpublish” button does to posts, with the Wayback Machine substituting for the black light?

Perhaps what upsets you is the association “redacted” has with the Bush Administration’s excessive (to say the least) obsession with keeping their doings and writings inaccessible.

Well… “redacted” predates George Bush. And, properly used, it’s a useful method to protect genuinely sensitive information.

So… sorry, but I still think “redacted” is a better word than “unpublished”.

If you can think of a better word than “redacted”, as accurate, without the political baggage, by all means use it. I’d be happy to see it. But “unpublish” is NOT the word to use.

(I really try to use words that are clear and meaningful. Up at the top of this absurdly long comment of mine*, trying to think of a word to describe my computer’s slowdown, I rejected “snailification” and “snailized” before settling on “ensnailed”. That you** have to keep explaining the “real” meaning of “unpublish”, again and again and again, shows pretty clearly that it’s not the word to use in this discussion.)

–Bruce Arthurs (just for anyone who might have forgotten the author of this comment by the time they read all the way to the end)

*Y’know, if I hadn’t retired from the Postal Service last month, there’s no way I’d have the time to read this thread and write a comment this long. Man, I gotta get more applications for a new job out this afternoon, before I turn into that classic XKCD cartoon. (“Someone is WRONG on the Internet!“)

**the word “you” has not consistently been used in this comment to refer specifically to Xeni; some have been intended as a group-you that includes Xeni and other people who have used “unpublish” in its technical sense.

Burnchao

Holy crap, it’s not just the William Gibson interview– every podcast is gone! WTF is wrong with you?!

hagbard

#1588 tillwe

Gaaah! Are those bullet points? I can’t abide bullet points!

hagbard

Random832

Perhaps we should consider the pros and cons of moderators allowing anonymous criticism, both in the general case and this case in particular.

People who create a handle are still effectively anonymous, so it’s not like fear of retribution keeps people with handles from speaking up.

And people are certainly allowed to be critical of Boing Boing, so it’s not like criticism in general is being suppressed. In fact, they give us public fora for criticism (like this one), the better to keep other threads on track.

Anonymous is like the ultimate sock puppet. In a forum for critical discussion like this one, one could post multiple times, wording the same criticism different ways, in order to create the impression that the masses are outraged.

Anonymous is less conducive to dialog. Picture two Anonymouses getting into an argument, and trying to figure out what the heck is going on. Or picture trying to engage in a dialog with Anonymous, not realizing that some of the points are coming from a different person.

Anonymous is less conducive to effective moderation, because the history of a commenter’s posts can have an impact on a moderator’s decisions. As a participant in this thread (it’s long), I’ve also found the comment history feature useful for crafting my oh-so-trenchant observations.

If I were moderating, I’d allow anonymous comments very sparingly. They’d have to advance the conversation and offer useful insights that aren’t otherwise getting thrown into the ring.

Gainclone

Save the drama for… Andromeda.

holtt

This kind of reminds me of the days of child hood. “Fine you’re not my friend anymore, I’m taking your toys out of my sandbox and throwing them over the fence into your yard!”

Yea sure it’s not a kids game and it’s grownups (?) making a real living (?) and such, but it’s still pretty petty looking on the surface.

Doctor Pickles

@481

Since when are links to stories about this issue on other sites “inappropriate”?

Or are you saying that anything that criticizes the moderation on BoingBoing is “inappropriate” and shouldn’t be seen?

Antinous

Or are you saying that anything that criticizes the moderation on BoingBoing is “inappropriate” and shouldn’t be seen?

Doctor Pickles,

Do you only have an out port? Have you not read this thread in which you keep posting?

Timefishblue

You are e-waterboarding all your fans, Boing Boing. You should be put on trial for your heinous blog crimes.

FREE VIOLET BLUE!

Antinous

FREE VIOLET BLUE!

Do I have to purchase two other colors at the same or higher price to get that offer?

deadtrout

BB is the reason I am constipated today.

brooklyntwang

lk flff kttns, th r s ct whn thy ply wth blls f yrn. Hr fr fzz lttl ktts!

hpr122i

Xeni: with respect to people who ask that their comments be removed from the site: 1) I know it’s corporate, but who owns them? (Yeah, I’m a new commenter) How do they license them, and to whom? Do they have a leg to stand on if they want to revoke that license?

2) The approach at MeFi seems most reasonable: if there is a legitimate reason (danger to someone’s reputation or livelihood, for instance), remove the appropriate comments/details (you could anonymize if , say, someone just don’t want their name associated with a certain comment). In the cases where people want their contribution memory-holed, try to reason with them to keep the content, but if they’re threatenin legal action, bow (not worth your time, even if you did nothing wrong).

SLAPPstick

Indeed. What an affront to freedom of speech if that prevails. Conference organizers had better think twice about how it would affect their credibility for ever inviting Violet Blue to speak on open source, women in technology, sex worker rights, and similar issues again.

sleze

Welcome to BoingBoing Gossip Central. You never should have explained that there is a secret reason why you “unpublished” her. You should either come clean with it, or “unpublish” this article and never mention it again.

BTW – I’ve been reading this blog for a while and have NO IDEA who this Violet Blue character is. If you had never brought it up, I still would never have know. I suspect by tomorrow, I will have forgotten.

Grza

RE #326 MDHATTER;

That’s really unfair to hold it against long time BoingBoing readers that today is their first post. Not a community member? Is BoingBoing just about commenting on posts, or is it the larger relationship with the internet, spreading the ideas and websites BoingBoing allows us to find, and turning other people onto this side of the internet? If my comments haven’t gone on this board but have gone to my Congressman, my senator, the boards of various companies, should I be disregarded?

I just want to say that I feel your comments on this thread have been disrespectful and uncalled for, treating people who feel differently than you on the subject of unpublished posts like traitors. Now, I speak to no other threads because I am not, as you say, a “community member”. I rarely read beyond the articles and have never, until today, felt the need to comment. But what does it say that not just one or two but several regular BoingBoing readers felt to need to register to express an opinion today? Not that they’re not valid community members, but that this is an important but delicate topic that needs to be handled with respect. Please give them (and me) that much.

SteveKiwi

Wow, there’s a lot of self-important people who read Boing Boing, aren’t there? To quite a few of you I’d just like to say: Get your own blog. And get a life, stop borrowing the Boingers’.

Xeni Jardin

@#1186 cprincipe, we’ve already explained in this thread a few times I think, but maybe you missed it, it’s a long thread.

unpublish is the precise term (on Movable Type, anyway) for removing a post from public view and traffic, without destroying its record in our internal archives. unpublish means one thing on MT, delete means another.

Myopic Phrenologist

#1155 Xeni Jardin: I don’t think any of the mods here meant to disparage the value of first-time commenters

#653: Single-serving commenters who’ve shown up to stand in a circle chanting, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” won’t know this, but regular readers will…

“single serving”? A nice snarky put down, that.

#838: “Coming from someone who’s never posted before his dozen posts in this thread, we’ll take that for all that it’s worth.”

Honestly, are you telling us that this isn’t a condescending , dismissive put down implying that this comment from a first time poster has little or no value?

#877 You’ve never commented on BB before. You’ve made eight comments on this subject. You’ve accused the Boingers of violence. You’ve begged to be allowed to ‘unread’ five years of BoingBoing. You can’t expect anyone to take your plaintive cries of repression seriously.

#1076 Once again, the majority of critical comments in this post are from first-time commenters. You yourself are a first-time commenter… half the comments in this thread are from users who have never bothered to weigh in on any of those matters, saving their outrage for this instead. Torture: no response. Year old post removal: explosion of fury. The facts speak for themselves.

Snarky, condescending, dismissive, repeatedly implying that comments from first time posters are worth less than regulars, that they shouldn’t be taken seriously, that they are somehow not interested in the serious subjects and are just here to participate in a brawl.

And every single one of these is from a moderator. A person who has actual, official authority on this site, telling poster after poster that their contribution is worth less because of their low post count. Way to attract new commenters, Antinous.

mightymouse1584

f1rst post!!!

minTphresh

c’mon people! we need more rightous indignation! more indignant ranting! we’re not even to 1800 yet, so let’s get to it! if we is gonna make 2000, we gotta get tough on terror! so let loose! you know you wanna.

BettaSplendens

@PHIKUS @1817 – You should know that is the name of a famous SF short story by C. M. Kornbluth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons

mdhatter

This private site is sending and transmitting its content to the public

No, this is a website you REQUEST using http.

dwiff

Tempest meet teapot.

As someone who is ‘all over’ the internet on a daily basis for both work and pleasure, the first notice I had of the ‘shitstorm’ was the above mod post.

I think sometimes when you’re in the middle of a pile on it seems bigger than it is, and I guarantee the mod has generated MORE of a piling on by posting about it on Boing Boing.

Having said that, Boing Boing has every right to choose not to reprint – to put it in old media terms – any article they have created at anytime for any reason.

And you have every right to voice your displeasure by letting them know why you such a move causes you displeasure with it turning into a maulfest.

You can also stop reading and start finding neat stuff on the internet yourself.

Course I am really just curious as to why the did it, but that as a good New England boy I know to ignore the gossip demon when it whispers in my ear and mind my own business.

SBW

WW/.D?

Personally, it bothered me way more when Joel had his stupid moment and forgot what a ‘circuit’ is.

Journalists debate the should-we-or-shouldn’t-we-publish question. Nerds flagellate themselves over errors of fact that make them look stupid.

In terms of feedback modifying editorial control, I think the reaction on ./ to a cute Youtube video post was way more important than this incident.

I read BB, and will continue to do so, because it applies the “Lesson of Usenet”–that moderators and editors are useful–in a way that makes the signal-to-noise ratio high enough to be worth my time.

oheso

@1185

Xeni, thanks for your response. I’m looking @840 and @874 and @877. I see you’ve already responded to Hiram in good faith. Antinous’s response was not what I’d have liked to see in that circumstance. Not that I’m anybody, but Hiram’s question seems reasonable to me and is couched in reasonable terms.

sirdook

So I had a previous post here that disappeared last night; I think it had to be some sort of database error related to the high volume of posts, because it disappeared rather quickly and wasn’t particularly inflamatory.

But here, is the main point:

What puzzles me most about this situation the odd not-quite-public-not-quite-private was this is being handled. The original post essentially just publicizes the fact that they aren’t going to say anything, while the linked interviews in the update provide a bit more information.

One alarming disconnect between the original posts and the linked interview is this:
The original post makes it seem like there was a collective decision for BB to disassociate with VB.

But the linked interviews seem to indicate that this was a unilateral decision made by Xeni.

In that light, it appears that the explanation is this:

Xeni decided, for personal reasons, to remove all of her VB posts. She figured they were her posts so there was nothing inappropriate about her doing as she pleased with them. Many readers vehemently disagree, and BB is now reconsidering that aspect of their editorial policy.

This is a perfectly coherent explanation, it leaves room for the substantive dispute about what BBs editorial policy should be, and it leaves Xeni’s reasons private without obfuscating what happened. So if this is true, why doesn’t the original post say that?

Will Shetterly

Mdhatter, passion in the heat of argument is to be expected. You apologize when you go too far, so I’m glad to forgive you.

But Antinuous is a moderator. On Tibet, he/she is not moderate. Zosizma did not enter flaming. Based on the 100 messages or so that I read when I returned last night, Zosizma’s frustration is very, very easy to understand. And if there were ad hominem attacks that were deleted, I’m especially surprised: your ad hominem attacks weren’t even disemvowelled. That’s pretty much the definition of partisanship.

Since we’re giving BB advice about moderators, I agree that the moderators are fine people. The problem isn’t moderation. The problem is selective moderation.

And, okay, since it keeps coming up, there’s another problem: disemvowellment makes things worse on BB, not better. Mockery exacerbates indignation. Disemvowellment may be an acceptable tool on a private or political site where partisanship is expected. It’s a bad one on a commercial site, and an especially bad one on a site that addresses free speech. I hope the board of Happy Mutants LLC will consider that when they talk.

This doesn’t mean the experiment shouldn’t have been tried. It means the experiment in moderation should move on to v. 3.0.

CxLxMx

While I ultimately agree with BB’s arguments from ownership, this whole thing stinks:

* The refusal to even write VB’s name, referring to her as “this person”…
* Failure to acknowledge the changes without being “forced” to by the shitstorm…
* the use of “unpublishing” to keep from saying anything was deleted or censored…

I know BB doesn’t need to meet journalistic standards, but this whole affair really points to the fact that BB is really just a promotion machine… cross us, and you can’t participate in the publicity.

remmelt

How cool would it be if TNH and VB are ONE AND THE SAME PERSON HOW COOL WOULD THAT BE

PRETTY COOL

elwedriddsche

Who is Violet Blue and why should I care?

This is not a government site and whoever pays the hosting bills and/or owns the site can remove whatever material they see fit — without owing anybody an explanation.

Bob Doles Communist Doppelganger

What really gets me about this is the overwhelming torrent of overwrought teeth-gnashing and wailing over what is, in essence, a relatively minor issue of how best to withdraw support from someone who you no longer wish to support.

The fact that this was not handled well is not in dispute; the stated goal was to not to offer the appearance of support to someone with whom they’d discovered that they disagreed, without causing a shitstorm. The above shitstorm shows that this goal was not accomplished.

That said, is this really worth all the emotion and hyperbole that’s being poured into the issue? BB has always seemed like the sort of place where smart people who could discuss something reasonably would congregate, but I’ve frequently been disappointed in that regard. Every time something comes up that’s not popular, the threads are flooded with posters implying loudly that BB’s editors are puppy-kicking, baby-eating, kitten-sodomizing paragons of pure malevolence, bent on the destruction of everything that they claim to uphold. It’s silly, and it’s sort of exhausting after a while.

Could we maybe actually discuss this, like adults or something? I know this is the internet, and that’s a foreign concept here, but could we do it just this one time?

nemo

@shmegegge, can you link that?

cherry shiva

and the hits just keep on comin’ !

LarryC

Can we stop with the made-up word “unpublished?” It is dishonest Newspeak. Just write “deleted.” Xeni deleted the posts referring to Violet Blue. Deleted.

And honest conversation begins with the terms.

Xeni Jardin

#1431 Burnchao, I really appreciate the fact that you care enough to keep contributing to this conversation, but please, calm down. You are entirely mistaken.

The Boing Boing Boing audio podcast archives are just fine. I’m not sure why you think the podcast episodes are no longer available in part or in full, but a quick Google search or a peek at our MT interface indicates they are all very much alive and well.

It is late; you have been very very active in this thread; it might be a good idea to take some time out and re-check your observations more carefully before posting seemingly panicked, factually incorrect contributions to this already very long thread.

mdhatter

@ Random0832

But regardless, no BBer has said that she knows, and that’s good enough for me.

Good enough for you to keep demanding access to the dirty laundry of a company you don’t work for, and whose product you don’t pay for, and who still extend you the privilege to ask them questions anyhow.

It’s. Not. Our. Business.

Most of your (well argued) point is hinged on either your right to know, or your feeling that you ought to be told anyhow. None of us have that right. I think Xeni shouldn’t (in the name of artistic license) even have to explain it to her co-boingers. It’s her work to control.

If she (or any of them) loses even one iota of that control, Boing Boing will be lessened for it.

Takuan

that’s a editor call, not a moderator decision

Random832

Are there any plans for a further statement on this?

atomicelroy

I like to keep the drama on the stage… ( insert old jokes here).

Alphonse Dagenais

Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator on VB:

Maybe that’s why she did it: she was tired of waiting to see whether anyone else would notice.

Yikes. What happened to the quiet respectful moderator who didn’t want to embarrass the parties involved?

hagbard

#1074 Will Shetterly , #1075 burnchao

If I’m ever on trial, I pray to Eris you people aren’t on the jury.

As I’ve said before, there is a debate throughout this thread as to whether what they did is ethical or not.

It has not been established what is ethically correct.

Without that, you can’t move on to your conclusion that BB behaved unethically.

And without the presumption of unethical conduct on the part of BB, the characterizations of their motives in subsequent actions are at best wild-ass guesses.

minTphresh

can i haz 1200? i like turtles!

Akezys

“I may be in the minority, but I think that this thread has not yet outlived its usefulness and is still serving a productive function.”

You so just want to make it to post 1337 ;)

historyman68

Wow, first time I’ve refreshed the thread and not seen any new comments! For what it’s worth, my search function works instantly, but I’m using Firefox 2 in OSX 10.3.9. Firefox 3 doesn’t seem to work for me at all…

Also, nice thread.

Random832

Y’know, I’ve seen Blogger treated with disdain, like it was the two-headed ugly stepchild of blogging software, but in this case… I think they got it right.

I don’t. Any button whose primary effect is to remove from public view a post which was previously in public view, should contain some synonym of “remove” in it. If it was posted before, it was ALREADY saved, so the action isn’t one of saving, it is one of hiding or removing. “save as draft” only makes sense for things that have never been posted at all.

Secret_Life_of_Plants

One time, before the War/Occupation/Shock and Awe broke out, I saw a commercial for the “Dr. Phil Show” in which the “psychologist” was saying that we should support the war. I went on the Dr. Phil message board and wrote a long rant about how bad Dr. Phil’s reasoning was. I actually signed my real name.

That was many years ago but now anyone who Googles me probably gets the impression that I am some kind of Dr. Phil fan as my name comes up in relation to the message board. I am sure this will hurt my career opportunities as well as my street cred.

Oh well. Sometimes we just have to live with the lame things we do online in the public eye.

At least I have proof that I have always been against this stupid War in Iraq.

banjology

I, for one, welcome our new hypocritical overlords.

genericvox

FREE HAT!

And for the love of the FSM, someone burn some sage…

priyanga

Glad to see real boingers (yeay xeni!) on this thread rather than snarky proxys (boo teresa!)

did she really steal the lindbergh baby… what’s the scoop?

really, my head hurts, where is the unicorn chaser – and it better be good

Talia

#1378: wrong.

If you read through some of the comments you’ll learn its actually the technical terminology for what was done. It just seems to confuse some people as it is an unfamiliar term.

Maybe it is a confusing word, but it was not used dishonestly, it was used honestly and literally.

Nice try though.

David Pescovitz

Damon_TFB (@1684), Those are good suggestions. Thanks for posting.

Oren Beck

Comment management is one of those bugbears that defies “Easy” in any aspect. Then it gets worse.
It has become Whack-A-Mole of sorts battles in some cases. The level of moderation required often shows a “Sanity Quotient” index of posters. If anyone has some methods that consistently work easier?

As otherwise I fear our mods may starve while keeping up with the work. Which reminds me of Lovecraft’s alleged demise. Starving to death while answering fan mail. As trolls are fan mail of a deranged sort the simile may be on track.

william

I am dumbfounded at the outrage and shouts of censorship. Seriously? It’s a blog, people. If Violet Blue wants to say something, she has her own blog. And a newspaper column.

On the other hand, I’d expect the BBers of all people to know that removing stuff is an act that gets noticed. I share your distaste for needless drama, but I hope you folks have learned that making content disappear doesn’t get you there. And also that being open and forthright is harder than it looks from a distance.

Faustus

@David Markland

Who was this other blogger? because I’ve been looking around and can’t find a thing…and that would totally throw this into a whole new light/brave new world.

@Satan

Ferris Bueller is ALWAYS relevant. Also Ferris Bueller>Carrot Top. Remember kids what really matters is what you like, not what you are like.

Archeaopteryx

I want to ask anybody who is objecting here;

If YOU had a blog like this, and if somebody whose stories you reprinted was using that fact to pump up her public image, and then you found out that this person was morally reprehensible for some reason, would you still allow that person to use your blog as a publicity vehicle, or would you break all of her showy “look I’m a boinger” links?

Islington

Yeah…the Nazi comments are unacceptable. It trivializes something horrific. Let’s stick to analogies that don’t insult people, if possible. I’d also like to add that, moderators aside, most of the BB staff has been very civil throughout this entire ordeal. Kudos for that, we appreciate it.

Xeni Jardin

#1189Yannish: That’s the thing, though. It’s not a newspaper, and never will be. BB is evolving into something bigger than it began, but there’s no blueprint for exactly how to manage those questions, so we’re figuring them out.

@#1190 hpr122i, with this question about commenters who want to be unpublished/deleted/scrubbed from our servers, our approach has been — as it is with every new thing like that — not “what would lawyers do,” but “how can we not be douchey here.”
I think we’re leaning toward a policy like MeFi’s.

GregLondon

random832@1276: You. Had. A. Year.

You need to sit down, eat a banana, and maybe take a nap. All that flying has made you cranky.

random832@1286: The archives as of right now are unreliable. Anyone who wants to save something they read here from now on is, if they remember this, going to think, if only for a second “Should I make a bookmark

I’m truly glad to see heartfelt concern for all those nameless people in the future who might, only for a second, wonder if a link from the internet might go away at a later time.

Why, people have been lining up for a year now over the missing BB posts and you can see the line goes all the way… around… this keyboard.

So.

here’s something you keep arguing and I just need to point this out. You’re arguing for worst case hypothetical damage. Which is fine, if you’re designing combat aircraft or space vehicles. I’ve done both. This isn’t that. You need to stop.

I will point out that in recent history, the folks most well known in the world for arguing for the worst case hypothetical damage is George Bush and the “oh my god a million 9-11′s could happen here tomorrow!” at which point they use that hypothetical damage to launch a war against a country who actually had nothing to do with 9/11.

There is not a little of that going on here, which is why I keep asking for real, actual damage. You know, like asking how the deletion of these posts harmed you personally. I’ll guess the actual damage you’ve suffered is actually zero, which is why you have to keep focusing on future potential, hypothetical damage, just to keep people from noticing how undamaged you actually are. If the sole extent of the deletion of those posts is that you have to “think, if only for a second”, then I”m afraid that doesn’t justify the army of flying monkeys you’re flying with.

There needs to be, at the very least, basic transparency in EVERYTHING.

You need to get your own blog, get an insurance company, get some paying advertisers, and then maybe you can start handing out advice on how other poeple actually doing it should conduct their business.

Right now, you might as well be telling someone how they should defuse a nuclear bomb based on how you think they should operate.

I think you should take some time to seriously evaluate what sort of moderation style you want

Said the flying monkey to the tinman.

Just so you know, you got caught up in a mob. You had pitchforks and torches and had done a good job on starting to burn the place down. Now that folks have started to realize that they were part of the mob, rather than part of the solution, some have quietly gone away realizing their mistake. Others can’t accept they they could be wrong and so end up trying to find something to be right about.

“OK, so we burnt your house, razed your crops, and you didn’t really do anything terribly wrong to deserve that. But that’s no reason for your moderator to delete all those posts. Some of them had valid complaints. I want justice!”

Please. Get over yourself.

You made a mistake. People do that. BoingBoing isn’t calling for your head for it, because they understand poeple make mistakes. Its the people who were calling for BoingBoing to be perfect that are now unwilling to see their own mistakes, and trying to find some grievance in the wreckage. Something that will let them be right and make BB wrong.

This is getting absurd.

takeshi

@ David:

My two cents: BoingBoing is like an answering machine. If you guys care to change your outgoing message, there’s no law saying that you can’t. But all of these incoming messages are just like the ones you’re receiving from telemarketers. You have every right to broadcast them, remix them, or in any other way use and abuse them to your liking. By leaving the message, the individual is granting you their explicit permission to record them. Don’t lose any sleep over it.

Having said that, I wish that I could “suddenly” be unpublished from BoingBoing. I was mentioned here a couple of times, and it brought me a tremendous number of page hits, but also a heap of negative publicity and spam. Of course, I don’t blame BB for any of that, but considering the amount of mixed attention this debacle has brought Violet Blue, being an outcast just might have its advantages. I almost understand her position, though… BoingBoing is Page Rank Gold, and deleting references to her website has likely diminished her own Googlability to some degree. At least, until yesterday.

@ Xeni:

On a few occasions, I have espoused a belief that TNH and her fellow mods provide a service here, and I do believe that. There are times, however, when their derisiveness and cattiness are uncalled for, seemingly devoid of any real purpose aside from bullying your readers into behaving like ants. This thread in particular might have benefited from a bit of thoughtful self-moderation.

As to your predicament, it is no secret that this has cost BoingBoing some credibility. It is possible that all of those who have lost faith are in the wrong entirely. Not for me to say. I only expect that, given the ridiculously immense amount of attention that has gone into framing both sides of this debate, the moderators would exercise a modicum of care in addressing your readership. Still, I support you in your editorial decision-making, regardless of the rationale, because I’ve been following BoingBoing since the earliest days, and I am (barely) humble enough to acknowledge how unforgivably flawed I am.

I honestly can’t believe how *INSANE* this thread has become. So, finally, I leave you with the ultimate chaser: a video of puppies, kittens, and ducklings – together at last – frolicking adorably, kissing one another with reckless abandon, and being unapologetically cute at every dizzying turn and in every sickening way imaginable.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=jcMqBqkrBMw

joshmillard

I believe that the key concept is that disemvowelling alters a comment, whereas the other suggestions call for keeping alternate databases for the same comment stream. One’s a small add-on; the other’s a big system change.

Well, but that’s not the actual primary argument for disemvoweling, is it? “Convenience” isn’t something I’ve so far heard anyone, Teresa especially, suggest as why deemving is the preferred method.

Adding a column to the comment table called “hide”, with a boolean value defaulting to false, and altering e.g. index.cgi to do a check against that column for each comment and conditionally displaying either the comment or the “[comment deleted]” marker: not a big system change. Not a tiny one, precisely, but not rocket science certainly.

The notion of handling some sort of metatagging in the deemving, to shear off vowels on the fly, as in my idle question — that sounds like a bit more work indeed, and that’s partly why I was guessing it’s not something you’ve implemented. Understandable, but also a destructive edit that can’t easily be reversed if you come to believe after the fact that you’ve made an error.

arkizzle

I can’t find links to anyone else who’s this mad at Violet Blue, so it looks like it’s most likely related to their advertisers. #334 Doctor Pickles

Spurious! How do you even know that the reasoning involves anyone being “mad” at VB? It could be some dreadfully embarrassing or extremely personal thing. How does the rest of the internet’s opinion of a person relate to another group’s like/dislike/indifference to her?

And as has been mentioned numerous times on this site, the content is not influenced one iota by the sponsors.

GregLondon

Will Shetterly 1044: when you have nothing to support your positions, you insult people. … (I) thought Boingboing’s standards were higher than the rest of the corporate world’s. … morality is not defined by money.

Will @ 1074: I don’t know if BB’s morality is defined by money

OK, so, do you or do you not have anything to support your position that the issue here is that BB’s morality is defined by money? Cause right now, I’m now wondering if I should be insulting you, or if you were insulting me somewhere.

Whether VB’s offenses have anything to do with BB’s income, I don’t know or care

So…. it’s NOT the money. OK…. Lemme start over with the original question: In what way have you been harmed by BB in deleting it’s own content about VB?

Burnchao

#1185 Xeni

Well, no, and you might do well to consider the source/s.

Um, it sounds like you think it’s VB. I don’t even know the name of her site. It was probably at either making light or metafilter (I’m not a member/participant at either of those sites, I’ve just been following those places the most, regarding this action)

As you can see from the extremely large number of comments in this thread, a number of which are critical of one thing or another, we’re not afraid of open dialogue.

This open dialogue only happened after you* got caught. There hasn’t been any open dialogue about these actions for more than a year after the fact. I am sure that we wouldn’t be having this dialogue if your hand wasn’t forced.

* you being BB in general, not you, Xeni, in specific. I don’t know whose policy it was, or who performed it.

I’ll try to stay engaged in this thread a while.

That’s good to hear. You, David, and Joel have done a much better job at keeping it civil than your paid mods have.

ROSSINDETROIT

“Unpublished” is the correct and most accurate term for what was done to the posts in question. Unpublishing has specific characteristics which any other term fails to describe. If you don’t understand ‘unpublish’ please educate yourself by reading one of the many explanations of it above. But please do not lobby for the exclusion of this accurate term just because you don’t understand, or it ‘feels’ like deletion, censorship, 1984 or Hitler to you.

just saying

For those of you keeping track at home, the Cory countdown clock is now at 8 days and ticking. CRY WHT GVS?

Caroline

I read this thread, and all I hear is wank.

Christ, I am sick of the drama. I repeat. Grow a sense of perspective. Maybe it wasn’t the best way to handle this situation. But all the dramatic announcements that BoingBoing has LOST YOUR RESPECT and you’re DEMOTING IT FROM #1 IN YOUR FEEDREADER are just ridiculous. Come on. I’ve quit reading lots of people because they lost my respect, and it’s your right to make that call about what you read and don’t read, but the dramatic flounce is just because you crave attention. Cut it out.

Teresa, I love you, but I’m thinking they should never have re-opened comments here. It’s worse than freaking Consumerist.

doug l

Wow! Over 850 comments on this indicates that censorship and blog ownership is sensitive topic but what goes almost un-mentioned is that Violet’s blgo is about sex and specifically porn and when this content is removed in the current environment of fear and suspicion, it’s natural that it would generate more “hoo ha” than if it was just about how to make sock puppets or the latest sci-fi convention report.
Ironically, if you’d made a notice that you were going to “unpublish” those archives for practical reason, and referrenced Violets own blog it would have reduced the frisson.

ErosBacchus

The shitstorm is not normal. The shitstorm is a reaction to behavior by BB that is perceived to be 100% out of character for them and at least somewhat contradictory to their expressed ideals.

Broken links are only one part of this; they happen to be the part about which I personally care the most. That doesn’t make them the most important part, but it doesn’t make them irrelevant, either.

It’s not a normal shitstorm because the behavior was not normal for BB, despite contrary protestations by Teresa and others.

I kind of admire the audacity of your rhetorical approach, however. First you shout YOU ARE ALL TROLLS and then when somebody says “I’m not a troll” you admonish us for speaking up while there’s a trollfight on. Except, it’s not actually a troll fight, it’s a real fight that’s got trolls in it. As all real fights in internet space do.

Random832

#1300 You need to get your own blog, get an insurance company, get some paying advertisers, and then maybe you can start handing out advice on how other poeple actually doing it should conduct their business.

She asked. #1155 What do you think? Seriously, I’m asking.

How about you stop complaining when PEOPLE PROVIDE SUGGESTIONS WHEN THEY ARE REQUESTED. Can you do that? Even if nothing else, that was a bit over the top.

Talia

Its also almost derangedly pedantic to be obsessing so much over a single word. Seriously. Step away from the computer. Get some sunlight. Have a nap. There is no cause to be flipping out like this. Its hilarious, yet terribly, terribly sad. You poor things. :(

codon

Wow, I think we passed the Minsky emergent complexity limit, we’ll become self-aware any minute now.

Faustus

I’m now killing myself with curiosity over what Violet did that made you take the posts down. Drama is such fun.

odejoy

#160 – Sums it up rather nicely !!

BB has, thus far, not explained what they mean when they say “Violet behaved in a way that made us reconsider whether we wanted to lend her any credibility or associate with her.”

Oh BB fer chrissakes!! I never noticed this VB issue until you posted it!! Now, if you have brought it to the fore at least have the friggin b*lls to deal with it!! Show some SPINE.

Burns!

Jesus Christ! Really??? Nearly 500 comments here, with hundreds more on Metafilter and other places around the ‘net?

Why is this an issue? Boing Boing made a decision to remove content from public view on their own website. What business of yours is the “why?”

Don’t like it? Ask for your money back. Feel you can no longer trust the Boingers to provide interesting stuff? Just stop coming here.

noen

Aren’t egos amazing things? This has been handled very poorly. I would like, however, to quash this stupid meme: “It’s my blog and I get to do whatever I want on it.” Nope, life doesn’t work like that, never has. The reasons why should be pretty obvious.

The blogosphere is incestuous and narcissistic to a fault. God I hope this is the beginning of the end of that crap.

takeshi

Jesus Christ… can someone say “longest comments thread EVAR”?!

Disemvowelment is a form of censorship, albeit less invasive than outright deletion. This series of deletions is a form of self-censorship. I support this editorial decision, and I don’t even need a reason. Always thought Violet Blue was a bit of a boor anyway, but even if she wasn’t I wouldn’t care, and it’s not my right to make any demands.

Still, I find it curious how anytime BoingBoing gets criticized for something, a common response from the BB groupies is to lambaste the offenders into silence. “BoingBoing don’t owe you ANYTHING, so KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT!” No, BoingBoing doesn’t owe anybody anything. It is an invaluable service, and I dare say that the Internet would be infinitely less entertaining without it.

But telling others where to stick their free speech, or attempting to shame them into blind acquiescence, seems about as contrary to BoingBoing’s existential bottom line as it does supportive of an interruption in meaningful thoughtflow. I would expect that the BoingBoing crew regret the existence of any perceived secrecy to varying degrees, but I can hardly speak for any of them. I have no problem with their decision here, but it is likewise very easy to see why this has become such a big deal. A blog known for its staunch anti-censorship position should expect a bit of fallout over something like this, and its readers should be able to understand it, as well.

Telling others who disagree to “get [their] own blogs” seems a bit out of step with the realities of blogging and having opinions in general. Yes, it’s true… their time might be better spent blogging somewhere else, but, to be fair, your own time might be better spent finding more worthy candidates for your half-cocked indignation. Regardless of what anyone says, stories such as this serve to diminish BoingBoing’s credibility with certain people. In this case, quite a few people, apparently. As with print media, that sort of thing does have a measurable impact. BoingBoing knows that, and they have sought to address the problem head-on, rather than remain silent. Granted, they could have said something aeons ago, and one can only hope that this is a mistake they won’t soon be repeating, but they have every right to do whatever they deem appropriate for this particular website.

Their blog, their bandwidth, their list of allegiances and their vast sphere of influence. Wonderful things, terrible things – who cares? Their boat to sail, or to sink, in whichever manner they see fit. This isn’t The Love Boat. No reason to affix a lesson to every story.

mdhatter

Will

“Many of us have thought BB proved that companies can behave ethically. ”

Companies are Soylent Green – they’re made of people. Rely on people too much and they will always let you down.

Have you considered managing your own expectations better?

Nelson.C

Oheso @1170: You mean “Some of these comments are stupid” and “If you think… you’re a blockhead”. The first is a simple statement of fact that carefully avoids naming names. If you’re insulted by that, then you should add another resistor to your outrage meter. As to the Charlie Brownism, it’s hardly an occasion for anyone’s seconds to meet Teresa’s seconds.

Maybe it’s my unsheltered upbringing and uncouth manners, but I’m not seeing much cause for outrage there. Surely you have more reason than that for seeking Teresa’s dismissal?

Zandr

@1155 Xeni:

In other words, “please unpublish me, those are my words, I no longer want to be associated with them, remove them.”

I think there’s a slight adjustment to this sentiment that needs to be considered here. Consider “Those are my words, I no longer want them to be associated with BoingBoing, please remove them.”

@1173 Mdhatter:

Many of us have been dealing with trolls for 20 years now. Some of us never got good at it.

However, TNH is darned good at it.

I couldn’t disagree more. Were it not for the ‘moderator’ in her username, I’d have considered her to *be* a troll.

And not a very good one.

PeaceLove

Nice, Xeni. Beautiful. Help show your moderators the way.

When you start feeling our pain you’ll understand how to respond to even the harshest of your critics.

It’s so interesting to me that Cory is away when this all breaks. The the one voice so many of us us are the most interested to hear from, strangely silent.

Let’s all give thanks to the Internet Gods for sending down this fantastic little test, to keep us all on our toes.

Remember people, be peaceful and loving.

bobkat

I unpublished your mom last night!

David Pescovitz

@Gainclone (#1) and @ATOMICELROY (#2), Regarding the drama, the truth is, I agree. That’s one of the main reasons we debated on whether to even respond.

cherry shiva

@pyros: speak for yourself, do not speak for me. from my perspective there has been no breach of integrity. you can disagree but that does not invalidate my perspective. the “three reasons” you cite from “us” are perfectly valid. i understand that you disagree, but i don’t read boingboing for violet blue, i read it for boingboing, and you have not been denied access to violet blue, as the waybackmachine and her own blog are uncompromised. what is the big deal ? it’s what they want it to be, not what you want it to be. start yr own blog, mate. i’ll read it eagerly if it’s as entertaining as boingboing. save the drama for obama!

none of the protesters have yet addresses the issue (and probability) that there may have been liability issues.

michaelk

@greglondon #346:

“If you weren’t holding a can of gasoline, I might think you had a genuine concern about this. But given the pyros running amuck, it lands slightly flat.”

Can of gasoline? What?

I simply stated what I believed would be the more class thing to do, and that thing didn’t even involve the public, even.

In fact, if BB had even had the decency to talk to VB privately and say “hey, we got a problem with this thing you did, and we don’t think we can support you anymore” and worked from there, we probably wouldn’t even be having this thread.

Besides, just because BB could and had a right to “unpublish” without notice/discussion/acknowledgment doesn’t mean it should have.

fylateri

‘unpublish’? unboingboing…

my, how you’ve changed!

Burnchao

@ Teresa: Violet Blue has demonstrably lied more than once about this imbroglio.

Really? Then demonstrate it. Please. It’s the Bushites that say stuff like “we can demonstrate it, but the evidence is secret and I can’t tell you”. If you have something solid to claim, then claim it.

If we are getting things wrong because we don’t have all the facts, then give us the facts. If you want to keep them secret, then we’ll have to operate without them. You can’t hang on to your cake while you’re eating it.

I had no idea how long it was going to take the Boingers to arrive at a decision. It never occurred to me that they would dither so long over not wanting to go negative on Violet Blue.

What are you talking about? According to Xeni and Joel, the Boingers reached a decision over a year ago.

I never understood why BB posted so much about her. I don’t know why BB no longer posts about her. But BB has (according to Xeni and others) spent the last year falsely pretending they never did post about her.

If BB rewrites it’s history to pretend they never published something they did publish, I’m not going to be able to trust BB to not rewrite its other publications.

Sure, it’ll probably be a while before it drives me to the point of not visiting anymore, and sure, no one at BB is going to give a damn if it does drive me away. So I guess BB should go ahead and rewrite all previous its publications to whatever beliefs that it happens to have at the moment.

eustace

reply to #768You could put it that way if giving offence was your intention; but “criticizing an entity” covers a lot of ground and I would prefer to discuss a case.
I’m pointing out a basic hypocrisy – and I’m pointing it out in a particular case. A case where the deletion of a link was characterized as violent. Perhaps instead of putting nasty words into my mouth you might share what you think – about the hypocrisy of flaming others for not hosting content you are unwilling to pay storage costs for.

Timefishblue

I don’t care that much about this whole thing, but for some reason I’m really happy with Joel and David’s comments here. :)

ThreeFJeff

Thank you Mods, particularly Antinous and Teresa. Yours and the boinger’s comments have been the most worthwhile to read for the last 900 or so. Some of us do appreciate the wit you bring to the job.

You guys put in a lot of overtime on this thread. It got pretty repetitive after comment 20, so I was mostly skimming.

I just wanted to get one post of support for you guys in, even though I know you’ve got thick enough skin to handle this beast.

As to the “post deletion issue”, I’m pretty sure this is VB just trying to drum up some publicity and succeeding at trolling the BB community. So, I love BB, and I’m going to keep reading. Boingers, you aren’t censors, and I don’t see how you’ve broken any of your own principles. It’s your party. I’m just glad I’m allowed in.

brownbat

I don’t mind the unpublishing, and I don’t mind the attempt to be discreet. But when someone claims you have hurt them in some way, and you acknowledge the action but refuse to tell that person why, it makes the world really Kafkaesque.

In addition, none of us know exactly what sort of actions constitute “behaving in a way that makes BB reconsider associating with you.” We just know BB will take actions against such behavior.

Uncertainty can generate chilling effects, as everyone guesses at the sort of conduct they should avoid on or off the blog.

You asked us to respect your decision to keep the reasons discreet. Respect for an action is not something we can choose, though, it depends upon whether or not that action is justified, all things considered. Here I am scratching my head as to what could justify this FISA-level obfuscation. But since I read you all because you routinely give me such great guidance on issues of speech and technology, I’m sure you’ve weighed all these issues, and I can’t help but give you the benefit of the doubt.

Just remember, you guys are kinda my heroes, and it’d proper suck to find out two years down the line that VB was just kept in the dark out of spite or something.

GregLondon

will@1619: “Drama queen” … (is) now on the long list of phrases that simply exist to dismiss the opinions of others

will@1616: 3. Did Stalin revise history

you object to “drama queen” as being an unfair label but continue to argue that the deletions of blog posts can justifiably be compared to Stalin.

Dude, that’s better than comparing the deletion of blog posts with Stalin, and then 500 posts later admit that you’ve deleted your own blog posts.

will@401: This is going through the photos and taking out Trotsky.

will@997: I’ve deleted posts that seemed outdated in my blogs

Just when I think it can’t get any more ludicrous.

Xeni Jardin

We, too, prefer that drama be reserved only for one’s momma.

But when the apparent campaign to turn this into some kind of a petty blog fight went on for days and escalated, we felt like the responsible thing to do for you, our readers, was to address it.

Blog fights are stupid, airing personal grievances in public is stupid, picking troll wars is stupid. We just want to blog (and make internet TV).

The “unpublishing” versus “deleting” issue is this: the posts were removed from public view while an evaluation of what to do took place. We didn’t want to pay to host them on our blog anymore. This is also why we remove hateful, ad hominem attack comments from public view, too: this is our home, we are proud of the home we built and the guests who visit here with us, and we like spending time here ourselves.

This is a directory of wonderful things. If we no longer think something is wonderful, we have every right to remove it from this directory.

This is not Wikipedia or the New York Times. Boing Boing began as a personal blog, and still is in some ways, even though Boing Boing is a bigger thing now. When new information becomes clear, or someone’s behavior changes, sometimes a creator of work reconsiders what aspects of their personal creative work they’re proud of, and removes them from public view.

The posts still exist in our archives, and they’re also available on the Wayback Machine.

We realize that we’re now bigger and more complex, and we’d probably handle something like this differently now that we’ve grown (and now that we are more aware of how things can play out when someone’s determined to pick a public fight over it). This hasn’t happened before.

But this was not intended to cause harm to anyone, least of all the subject of the posts. We mean no one any harm.

Nobody was “disappeared.” When we start doing extrajudicial blog executions, or showing up to livejournals in the dead of night in unmarked cars and putting bags over people’s heads, or slicing the power cords off of other people’s own blogs, come talk to me about “disappearances” and “unpersoning.”

XJ

Haakon IV

Reminds me of when ESPN disappeared Gregg Easterbrook’s Tuesday morning Quarterback column in 2003 for making anti-semitic remarks (involving corporate parent company CEO Michael Eisner) in a blog on another site. Nearly instantly, they not only dropped the column, but completely erased it from the archives. For a short time, some dangling links were left on the site, but they were soon excised. As far as I know, there was no public acknowledgment on espn.com of what had happened – there was no way to discern from their site that TMQ had ever existed. Easterbrook went and wrote his column on NFL.com for a couple of years, and then came back to ESPN, and now his archives are back again, even including those before he had disappeared. What was weird about the whole thing was that you find find the news on lots of other sites, and blogs were discussing the controversy (though they weren’t as widespread five whole years ago), but ESPN wouldn’t touch it.

It’s the lack of transparency, and the attempt at changing history, that’s disturbing. ESPN had the “right” to do this on their site as well; that doesn’t make it right.

punkrockhockeymom

GregLondon @355:

You are fabulous. :)

wrybread

I’d just like to take this opportunity to congratulate you for reading this far.

boohoo

@763 Why did the BBers not tell a white lie? Saying “we had a personal fallout” instead of “she’s unwonderful” would have avoided tons of speculation about VB’s and the BBers’ morals.

Just speculating but it would seem pretty obvious. Saying it was a personal fallout would’ve prompted VB to speculate on what the personal fallout from one year ago could’ve been and maybe drag even more people through the mud. She doesn’t seem to settle disputes privately.

Like someone else said above if she really wanted to know she could’ve asked directly. In her blog she said asking would’ve seemed accusatory. Only a desperate media whore would think that asking on a blog and getting other blogger friends to ask in public would be less accusatory. As seen here, never under-estimate the power of suggestion.

Islington

I’m convinced that Mr. London is here simply to argue with someone. Please don’t slay me.

Yet still, ice cream…

hagbard

#1427 Ambrose

That sounds an awful lot like #1235, which I can see just fine.

My charitable view is that you are mistaken.

aislefive

I can see not publishing future stories about her, but “unpublishing” seems like a euphemism for self-censorship (or at least denial). This step seems antithetical to the nature of the Web that BoingBoing champions, where everything’s a matter of public record, and directing people instead to a Web archive seems a bit disingenuous. If anything, this is bringing more attention to Violet than leaving the posts up would, as most censorship tends to do.

I can’t imagine New York Times quietly unpublishing any record of Jayson Blair. I think BoingBoing hasn’t lived up to its own ideals with this one.

Satan

BB jumped the shark.

inkadinka12

I can understand changing your mind about the subject of a blog posting, but I wouldn’t go so far as to delete the posting. Instead, you might have added something like this to the entry:

“UPDATE (mm/dd/yyyy): It turns out that we were wrong with our original posting. Instead of being wonderful, we now think that XXX is a skanky worthless POS and we wanted to change our posting to reflect this opinion. So, you can ignore what we wrote before. That is all.”

Would have been simple. Would have been pretty clear that you no longer think positively about the subject (deleting the posting makes things less clear).

verde

A little late to the show. Anyways.

Blogs are archival in nature.
Messing silently with the archive is wrong, any archive.
Adjusting the archive to the reality of the time is a different thing.
Adjustments should only be done BY ADDING INFORMATION.
Anything else is re-writing the archive.

Granted that this is minute when compared with other forms of revisionism, but it is a slippery slope, and the overall feel I had was that Boing Boing wanted to avoid that slope all the time.

ErosBacchus

Antinous, I consider you a figure of humor at this point in the thread. Not going to engage you just because you disagree with my choice of things to be passionate about.

Xeni Jardin

@#1194 priyanga, please don’t trash Teresa or the other mods. As far as I’m concerned, they’re 100% real Boingers too. They have a job I would not want, and would suck at after a few days anyway, I’d lose my patience. Please try to understand.

@Burnchao, I don’t know what “disappeared comments” you’re referring to, I just know that I’ve seen some complaints of this kind by commenters who knowingly violated our stated moderation policies by posting off-topic stuff in unrelated threads, knowing the comments would be nuked, but being jerks about it. So, consider the source. I don’t even know exactly what you’re referring to, I’m just saying it doesn’t add up.

you* got caught

The posts were down for more than a year, nobody cared, one person started a shitstorm over it, this isn’t a “gotcha” moment but it’s something that makes sense to think about collectively now that it’s become such a huge frakkin’ deal.

GregLondon

myopic@1298: Way to attract new commenters, Antinous

So… lemme get this straight… you attack BB with a list of grievances because… you think Antinous harmed BB’s new commenters recruitment program?

You attack BB in defense of BB as a friend?

YOu think maybe you could either tone down the attack… or stop being so “friendly”?

Myopic Phrenologist

#1475 posted by Random832: TNH’s original post here is full of “us” and “we”, again making it seem like this was something that all (or most) of the Boingers were involved in. So, yes, people were a bit surprised when everyone else said they’d never gotten together and talked about it, and then when Xeni told the LA Times that it was her alone.

No shit. Especially when her original post said “SPEAKING FOR ALL THE BOINGERS…”

Does it still say that? I dunno – it seems that the folks around here (at least Teresa and Xeni) are accustomed to simply going back and rewriting their own posts without the slightest indication that they have done so, regardless of what may ave been said in response in the interim

Grobstein

It seems clear the big mistake was the hushing — both not mentioning the “unpublication”(?) when it occurred, and vigorously policing comments about it as though that could somehow keep it quiet.

In the face of that damage, y’all’s continuing decision not to tell us what’s up is disheartening, but maybe we’ll get over it.

ErosBacchus

As several other people have pointed out, “unpublishing” something (because you don’t want to pay to host it any more) breaks all the inbound links to that content. Doing so, and defending the behavior, reveals a philosophy of the internet that is sharply at odds with Boing Boing’s public values.

Is the internet just a series of documents, owned by the people who host them? Or is it something more? Is there “value added” to be found in the construct as a whole, consisting of the documents and the links that link them together?

To delete (or “unpublish”) stuff on a popular site is to break inbound links. It does damage to the broader internet, damage to the part that you don’t own. Everybody who loves the web because of its links and connections is going to question that sort of behavior.

I love the web. I imagine and believe that the Boingers love the web. And I’m really really surprised and disappointed to be hearing this “we don’t want to pay to host it” justification for breaking bits of it.

Hosting a document on a server (a document one owns and has the power to remove) supports the creation of a larger and more fragile construct of links in connection with that document. One does not own that larger construct, but one has the power to destroy it at any time. It’s reasonable, I think, for people who love the internet to refrain from such acts of destruction whenever they can. If they cannot refrain, it’s reasonable for other people to wonder why not, and to ask, and to criticize if answers are not forthcoming. Which is what I see happening here.

I really really really did not expect to find Boing Boing breaking inbound links and then pretending that such acts of destruction are of no consequence.

Talia

I went looking for an amusing unicorn picture to link to as a change of pace.

Let me just say It had never occurred to me that GISing for “funny unicorn” would lead to a picture of a swastika-toting unicorn on someone’s buttcheek.

….

GregLondon

So when one compare the waterboarding done by the US government to the waterboarding done by the Pol-Pot regime, CLEARLY they are saying that the US is exactly like the Pol-Pot regime in every way.

You’re just like Saddam Hussein.

I saw Saddam once wear a hat just like you wear. Don’t get angry if others misread me comparing you to Saddam to having something to do with Saddam’s WMD’s (or lack thereof), his genocide (or lack thereof), or his tyranny (or lack thereof).

You’re just like Saddam.

Because you wear the same kind of hat.

Yeah, there’s nothing at all loaded or emotionally charged or unfair in any way about that comparison.

gunnk

@1155 Xeni: What do you think? Seriously, I’m asking. I don’t know. We don’t have a policy for it yet.

OK, here’s my take:

Once someone publishes something they should never unpublish it. You can remove links to prevent pagerank support. You can add statements saying “OMG, WTF was I thinking?”. But never unpublish.

On the flip side, what should you do when someone wants their comment(s) unpublished? That’s harder… especially if they’ve decided their comment needs a “OMG, WTF…” supplement (they can’t edit that comment to add it). I tend to feel that when someone posts on on my blog their words are still theirs, so I’ll delete but replace the comment with a “comment removed at the request of the commenter”.

Of course, I don’t think anyone should try to unpublish anything. It just compromises trust.

Once upon a time I wrote Cory. I don’t remember the original topic, but I remember that he had addressed a mistake. He stood up (figuratively) and said “Doh! I screwed up!”. I wrote him simply to say “Cool. Nicely done!” My respect for Cory skyrocketed because he pointed to his mistake and said “Hey everyone, ignore my steaming pile of poo over there. I’ll try not to do it again”. No unpublishing, no vanishing of his error, just an addition to say “my bad”.

I think Cory has the right philosophy.

mikesum32

I posted this one in the wrong thread. :-) You’re reading too much into it, and frankly all the name calling is childish. I’ll try not to continue your tit-for-tat table-tennis text tussle. Although, it is a little fun. ;-D That is all.

AlexReynolds

We didn’t attempt to silence Violet. We unpublished our own work.

“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. [emph. added] Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.”

- G. Orwell, Politics and the English Language

Now, granted, we’re not dealing with a Stalinist purge here. But on some level, all actions are political: the imposition of the will of the group upon an individual. Your choice of language used to describe the removal of Violet’s work and of any comments referring to her seems oddly hypocritical for a site with an editorial bent that rails so strongly against censorship. The way this was handled definitely seems to have left your site with a self-inflicted, and perhaps even deserved black eye.

shmegegge

this comment is the one I’m talking about.

I prefer not to detail the changes, since I imagine there’s a good reason they were made.

hagbard

I’d like to coin the term “denial of whuffie attack” but I don’t want to claim any royalties.

Shawn Struck

@ #844, Cavalier:

I mentioned that as well, but the post was deleted in this thread.

It was deleted.

It’s also currently #595 on the Moderation Policy thread.

Antinous

Shawn,

We don’t normally permit commenters to post identical comments in multiple threads. Pick one.

Burnchao

@Burnchao, if your intent here is to have a reasonable, civilized conversation, I’m very happy to engage. If your intent is to insult or be snarky for the sake of pixels, I don’t think that is a good use of your time, or mine.

I did apologize if I was sounding to aggressive, and I’ll do it again. I’m sorry if I’m starting to come off as snarky for the sake of pixels. I couldn’t think of a better way to convey an important point, and I should’ve waited until I did find a better way.

I do recognize that you and some other principal Boingers have been trying to bring the level of discourse down from the antagonizing level that your mods brought it to, and I appreciate that someone is finally starting to have an open dialogue with us.

So again, I’m sorry. I’ll try to sound less snarky.

Xopher

Will, you announced your intention to quit the thread and kept coming back to put in little digs. At 1649 you again claim to be done with it…and then you posted again.

If you want to be believed when you’re saying you’re quitting a thread, you have to not come back even if people address you directly. What you’re doing now is the equivalent of stomping off in a huff, then coming back and opening the door just so you can slam it again.

Either leave the thread, or stop saying you’re going to. The second is easier, since it doesn’t really cost you anthing at this point: no one will believe you if you say it again anyway.

John A Arkansawyer

What–you don’t like t-shirts?

strider_mt2k

How long before this thread becomes a Mexican soap opera?

Oops.

Joel Johnson

“Posting in epic thread.” (My quotes imply irony!)

GregLondon

In spite of my rage, I’m still just a rat in a cage.

David Pescovitz

Just wanted to say that I sincerely appreciate the words of support *and* the respectful criticism of the people who are posting here. Also, +1 to Joel’s post #399.

Jake0748

Unfortunately, this comment thread will surely pass the numbers racked up by “Untitled 1″, alas. That one was MUCH more fun. This controversy has given me a whole day of heartburn and a headache.

Ouch.

Poormojo

Hi Antinous,

You said this:

Once again, the majority of critical comments in this post are from first-time commenters. You yourself are a first-time commenter who has seventeen (17) comments in this thread, all of which are completely intact and visible. BoingBoing regularly posts about repression, torture, loss of civil liberties, global warming, deforestation and other matters of the gravest consequence. Yet half the comments in this thread are from users who have never bothered to weigh in on any of those matters, saving their outrage for this instead. Torture: no response. Year old post removal: explosion of fury. The facts speak for themselves

I think this can be easily explained. When BB writes to condemn torture, repression, loss of liberty and no one comes out of the woodwork to comment it’s because people agree with and enjoy the articles. What point would commenting serve? We could just say, “nice job!” But that seems like a waste of time. It’s when BB does something that surprises and perturbs some readers that they show up in the comments to see what is going on and to express their support/condemnation/whatever.

It’s precisely because this is seen as being unlike BB’s usual behavior that it draws so many comments.

Lindsay Beyerstein

The question is not what BoingBoing may do, but what it ought to do.

Obviously, this is a private site and the editors are at liberty to delete whatever they want, whether it’s all the vowels on the site, every second post, or all content written by Scorpios.

That said, BoingBoing’s autonomy shouldn’t immunize its decision-makers from the questions and criticisms of its readership.

If BoingBoing does something rash or stupid, readers who care about the site ought to voice their concerns.

My friends are adults, and I can’t order them to do anything. That said, being a good friend sometimes requires me to give my honest opinion, even if it’s not what my friend wanted to hear. Doesn’t mean they have to listen, but I hope they will take the advice in the spirit it’s offered. Ideally, readers and bloggers are like friends or colleagues. Constructive criticism isn’t a sequence of orders or complaints from the top-down or bottom up, it’s a conversation between people who respect each other.

Here’s what bothered me about the way BB handled the Violet Blue situation: i) Deleting posts without warning or explanation; ii) Implying that Violet did something wrong without explaining what it was. If BB doesn’t want to air grievances in public, that’s fine. However, if that’s their position, they should refrain from implying wrongdoing on Violet’s part as well. BB has said that it didn’t want to be associated with Violet because of something she did, but it didn’t explain to readers whether that misdeed had anything to do with the quality of the work she’d done for BB in the past.

If BB believes that Violet’s posts were plagiarized or fabricated, or otherwise not up to BB’s standards, it’s only fair to tell readers so that we can discount that information accordingly. If BB has no problem with these posts, qua posts, then why have they been taken down? BB said that they don’t want to “lend credibility” to Violet, but if she gave them otherwise good material, why are they depriving themselves of whatever credibility she lent to the site by contributing BB-quality work?

Boingboing doesn’t have to listen and it doesn’t have to publish these comments. So, thanks, guys, for hearing us out and hosting this public discussion. I predict that a lot of good will come out of this forum.

David Pescovitz

@Takeshi (#1380), That video. Wow. WOW. Posted. Thank you.

mdhatter

I don’t know if my opinion of VB has changed much. But my opinion of her supporters (and detractors) has gone way downhill. I just want dialogue, not slapp, er, sockpuppety.

I’m going to the moderation thread to make a suggestion.

GregLondon

I think this thread simply proves that what BoingBoing did was irrelavant, and that pyromaniacs with gas cans and tinfoil hats will find a conspiracy anywhere and throw fuel on it.

The only difference is that probably few other places other than BoingBoing would actually put up with this level of complete bullshit from it’s own commenters.

So, every post by one of you nutjobs in a tinfoil hat, every post by some pyro trying to find anything at all that will burn, all your comments are doing is proving how insane you really are.

If half of what you said about BoingBoing was true, this thread wouldn’t exist at all.

George William Herbert

Two comments.

One – This is an excellent example of the law of unintended consequences. An action that was clearly legal, and presumably well founded, has turned around and completely backfired. If your goal was to remove yourselves from participation in any discussion of or promotion of Violet Blue, it seems that you have ultimately suffered an epic fail event.

It seems strange that this set of bloggers (BB contributors) would make that particular mistake. You all seem to be more aware than average of how events can get spun back on people on the web and net, and the dangers of appearances.

Two – While your unpublishing permit is in order, Mr Fagan will be remaining with us for the time being. Your license to unmake is hereby revoked. Unseemly public display of eldrich powers by public figures is a Class 3 Infraction, punishable by indefinite suspension of unmaking privileges and a fine of $13 and 400 blogs of community service. Unmaking privileges may be restored upon completion of a tactile public good such as production of an article demonstrating a creation event in “Make Magazine” or the like, or contribution of similar tactile object or construct to Burning Man or Maker Faire.

Shawn Struck

Antinous:

Ah, okay, thanks. Apology accepted… I guess it was a little unclear to me that the “you” was the broad “you” and not the “me” you.

GregLondon

Broken links are only one part of this; they happen to be the part about which I personally care the most. That doesn’t make them the most important part, but it doesn’t make them irrelevant, either.

OK, keep fighting the broken link problem. This isn’t one of those problems.

It’s not a normal shitstorm because the behavior was not normal for BB, despite contrary protestations by Teresa and others.

How would you know what’s “normal” for BB if this is the first thread you’ve ever posted on? Are you claiming to be a lurker for years and this is your first post?

And what damage does that do you you if BB is not “normal” all of a sudden? How does that harm you?

What harm does BB foist upon you for suddenly changing from its “normal” ways especially if you were never around when it was “normal”?

What damage to you?

Profession

Are we there yet?

Euryale

This is not censorship. It’s the quiet revocation of an endorsement. All Boing Boing had done in the past was provide links to some of Violet Blue’s content. The content is still there. You never needed Boing Boing to access it. Boing Boing no longer wants to endorse it, so this is the best of both worlds: you can still access the content and Boing Boing isn’t endorsing her. I’m utterly baffled as to why so many people have a problem with this.

Poormojo

I find all of the entreaties to “grow up” very interesting. See, I’ve always felt that grown ups care about things, feel a responsibility towards their culture. And that’s it’s adolescents who frequently meet the world with a shrug and a “who cares.”

I don’t think being interested in the ethics of the internet is a sign of immaturity. The internet will only grow more popular and more used as time goes on, and events like these that happen to forerunners like BB set precedents for others to follow.

The comment that had saddened me the most so far is Remmelt’s “It’s a blog. If you care, you lose.” Just stare at that sentence for a second. Think about it. Of course we care. If we didn’t care we wouldn’t be here commenting or even reading the site. And it’s obvious you, Remmelt, care as well or you wouldn’t be posting here. The entire internet is just a well of people caring about everything. They care enough to knit steampunk doilies, or to write Tron rock operas, or to stage livejournal protests.

What is BB if not a record of people caring very much about blogs?

Xeni Jardin

@Burnchao, I appreciate that, but please also try to have a little empathy for the difficult job of Teresa, Antinuous, and the other BB moderators here who have the unlovable job of being cops/traffic guides/insert your analogy here, but it doesn’t always involve hugging and kittens. Nobody likes the cop. They’re people too, not just nyms, and everyone here cares a lot about Boing Boing or we wouldn’t be at 1200 comments in this daggoned thread.

Mostly what I’m still kind of baffled by was the notion that we’re censoring someone else’s voice, or flipflopping on our ethics. I made a choice to remove a small amount of my own work from public view a year ago, and nobody cared. Yes, we understand that BB 2008 isn’t the same thing as the personal blog that launched in 2000, and we’re thinking all of this through, to see what can be learned. But nobody likes to be bullied, and we want to take time to think about what’s best for this thing we love so much, and for readers we respect, and those we have yet to meet.

GregLondon

random832: that was a bit over the top.

From someone who repeatedly invokes hypothetical futured potential worst case oh my god the end of the internet as we know it damage that amounts to someone thinking about a link for a second, it must take quite a bit of muscle control to type that with a straight face.

glamajamma

If these posts were just “unpublished,” considering the ensuing shit storm, why don’t you just REPUBLISH them?

Matt Staggs

At #1. I’ve found a new favorite phrase. Thanks! :)

mortis

I’m hoping it has something to do with Little Brother, cause seriously, i can’t get enough Little Brother.

atteSmythe

I’ve spent some time thinking about this today, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I couldn’t care less. I would be more shocked to learn that the editors don’t occasionally go back through the archives and purge material that they no longer agree with.

sirkowski

Lots of anal trolls in this thread.

If this is about Violet Blue copyrighting her name, yeah, I’m with BoingBoing.

Al Billings

That’s because you aren’t…

zedkitty

I have only been reading boing boing for a short while and I must say I enjoy the somewhat slapdash and yet sometimes erudite nature of the subjects reflected upon in the various posts. That said I have at no time confused boing boing for a news outlet! I go to a news outlet when I want to get updates on Darfur, the latest Obama update, the progress of bills through Congress, etc. boing boing, the way I have read it thus far, is more along the lines of a diversion…a well read, well informed diversion, but i certainly wouldn’t put the weight on it that I would say pbs.org or an outlet of that ilk. So, to all of you so flamed about this whole Violet Blue deal…am I missing the whole point of boing boing or are you?

brownbat

I apologize for posting after Nina explained the situation, it’s hard to catch every comment in a list of 1200.

Thank you for clarifying the situation, and please be kind in disregarding my embarrassingly belated post.

nina

@Ambrose #1427

… it’s not all about “Person A”

This all seems to me to be a very complicated issue, that has emotionally drained many involved- and at this stage of the game, the discussion is in it’s 3rd overtime. For the hockey fans among us, that’s a reference to 2 teams in the playoffs having both played for over 2 hours of ice-time, over usually 5 hours of real-time; and what was once an exciting and pep-filled hockey game of skill and play, is now just ‘night of the living dead’ on ice.

The BB’ers have been diligently responding to most concerns for the last 2 days; and have been appearing to be reading all of them.

I think everyone needs a break- and maybe at a later date, when everyone has had requisite sleep, non-tech time, and time to discuss in meatspace among friends and colleagues- maybe a richer discussion can happen at a conference, tech town-hall, or something.

At a minimum- everyone does need a beer, some fireworks (ok, maybe not the best combination), some cake, and definitely some human f2f interactions with folks outside this discussion.

So: shall we take a breather?

tarastar42

I vote for “remove from public view”. “Unpublish” may be the right technical term, but it is back-end jargon and has a creepy feel to it. “Delete” has a vaguely sinister connotation and is incorrect from the back-end perspective. “Remove from public view” is value-neutral, factually correct, and comprehensible even by those who are not MT bloggers.

arkizzle

They are indeed good suggestions, but most of them where suggested the same day the moderation policy went live, in March.

Adam Rakunas

Thank you. This is the kind of post from BB I’d hoped to see.

mdhatter

Reminds me of when ESPN disappeared Gregg Easterbrook’s Tuesday morning Quarterback column in 2003 for making anti-semitic remarks (involving corporate parent company CEO Michael Eisner) in a blog on another site.

Except of course it’s entirely unlike that. GE was a poster there, or had posted, or was supposed to.

That does not appear to be accurate in the VB instance.

NEXT!

Fabricationist

I think I’m lost, I was looking for the forum on running things into the ground.

Never mind.

Cronan

This is all double plus ungood.

holtt

Personally, I think if BB offered an “unfavorite” vote option for posts, it would add a lot. It might be fun to have some options for tagging commenters as well, such as “Annoying but makes me laugh” or “troll”

holtt

Yeah…the Nazi comments are unacceptable. It trivializes something horrific.

I’m suprised there haven’t been any similar comments in the Monochrome Nazi Petting Zoo thread.

Freddy de la Cruz

One more “puppy post” and this “violet thing” will be out of the front page… more kitties, more circus!

David Pescovitz

Xeni, thanks for bringing up the question about what to do when people want to delete their profiles and/or specific comments. Folks, we’ve been trying to figure out the right thing to do with regard to that long before this situation. I appreciate any good suggestions or pointers to best practices in that regard. In fact, I think we might want to raise that in a separate thread later on too.

Gary61

If VB had invested in more battery-powered ‘Hello Kitty’ vibrators, maybe she wouldn’t have pissed off so many powerful and important Boingers (and others across the intertubes).
Instead, she’d be at home, writhing violently on the floor, making little ‘grrr grrr’ noises in the back of her throat.
And THEN what would we talk about???

bolamig

Boingboing, thanks for taking the high road and not spewing the private reason out in defense. Stay classy.

Eduardo Padoan

@331, 350: this valleywag.com is really mean spirited, turning the thing into yet more gossip.

I still love bb. They not always make the best decisions ever, but so what.

AlexReynolds

The comment that shmegegge is referring to is this one, in which Xeni originally said:

“[T]his is our home, we are proud of the home we built and the guests who visit here with us, and we like spending time here ourselves — so we don’t like to leave piles of shit lying around on the floor.”

Some believe that the implication is that Violet Blue is one of the “piles of shit” in Xeni’s comment.

The comment appears to have then been subsequently revised to read:

“[T]his is our home, we are proud of the home we built and the guests who visit here with us, and we like spending time here ourselves.”

A web cache copy of this page which may include the original, unedited copy may be located here.

mullingitover

Hagbard:”This whole thing is a minefield. Literally any response from anyone at BB is an opening for an attack. What they get attacked with depends on what they expose.”

Um, sorry, no. There was an obvious right way to handle this. The parts that they have been “attacked with” are the breathtaking errors in judgement. Ironically, Teresa posted the proper steps herself a while back:

(1.) Get out there and say something, fast.

Epic fail. I can’t believe a sober person made the call to keep pushing Disney memorabilia posts and other run-of-the-mill content on the site while this was festering. (Note that this has been stewing for a week. Not only did BB not respond, they actively squashed discussion about it in comment threads.)

(2.) Acknowledge that there have been screwups. Avoid passive constructions.

Note the first sentence in our post here:”Boing Boing has been caught in the middle of a real internet shitstorm and pile-on over the last few days.” Bzzt. Wrong. The first words should’ve been something along the lines of “Mea culpa.”

(3.) Explain what youâ€™re doing to help fix the problem. Be telling the truth when you do it.

The action items we see here are: none. Instead BB is telling readers to go elsewhere if reading the redacted items is something you’d like to do.

(4.) Give up all hope of sneaking anything past your listeners. Youâ€™ve screwed up, the internet is watching, and behind each and every pair of eyes out there is a person who knows how to Google.

The failure in this step is the whole reason we’re talking about this.

(5.) Corporate-speak will do you more harm than good. Instead, speak frankly about whatâ€™s going on. React like a human being. Talk like one, too.

The fact that none of the principals wrote this post, and instead pushed it off on poor Teresa, is the epitome of corporate and it’s kinda cowardly. Whomever made the call to delete the content should be defending it here. If that was Teresa then the principals should be backing her up.

Will Shetterly

Antinuous, boingboing isn’t known as an important site for “repression, torture, loss of civil liberties, global warming, deforestation and other matters of the gravest consequence.” It’s known for boingboingy things–its most serious issues are about how governments and companies should behave on the internet. I suspect that’s why lurkers like ErosBacchus are speaking out now.

I’m going to work really, really hard to keep from saying “The facts speak for themselves” from now on. Facts are just facts: they require context.

ErosBacchus

Xeni #1198, serious question: How does one person start a shitstorm?

To put it another way, how can you hold any one person responsible for the passions of thousands?

A shitstorm by definition consists of a great many unhappy people. One person cannot start that — unless they are the person who made all those people unhappy.

And nobody cared a year ago because nobody knew. That, indeed, goes to the heart of what BB is being criticized about, and it’s disturbing that you still don’t seem to get that part. Deleting stuff from your archives? Meh, I wish you wouldn’t, I think it’s bad for the internet and I have you guys in my “good for the internet” mental categories. Moving you would be a pain. But deleting stuff from your archives and hoping nobody will notice? Then using how long it took us to notice as a justification for doing it in the first place? Now we’re getting into shitstorm territory.

People did care as soon as they found out. As for me, I cared from the first day I learned about it, after confirming by checking the broken links in my own archives and watching with astonishment as they 404′d on me. I never thought I’d see a 404 at Boing Boing, or if I did, I thought it would be a technical glitch resulting from CMS technology changes over time.

I don’t see how you’re going to find a way forward through this shitstorm while you continue to blame somebody else for it.

Will Shetterly

Greg, you pronounced this thread glue at 1565, yet you’re still kicking the horse at 1583? We won’t believe you think it’s dead until you walk away, maybe sniffling a little, but with a determined stride, knowing somewhere there’s another thread you’ll love, maybe not as passionately, maybe not as innocently, but wisely and kindly and well.

Good luck!

hagbard

TAKUAN

I’m sorry Takuan, which that are you referring to?

Anonymous

I think a post that linked to a blog that linked to a blogpost of mine, which made mentioning of Violet Blue has also disappeared. This is too odd to be true. ‘Unpublishing’ is like the ‘Unlawfull combatant” of publishing. BoingBoing: Go hide under some rock will ya?

aj

Violet has her own blog which is easy to find, so I have a hard time getting worked up about this.

romulusnr

bngbng scks!

… prmptvly dsmvlld t sv y gys th trbl.

lolandon

Wow, what a mess. Sounds like you guys lost about twelve “long time readers” with this personal choice you made on your personal blog last year. Shit. Do you guys need like, some money to pay the rent or get some food? Should we start a paypal donation in your names?

I mean, seriously, and I totally agree with these twelve guys. I mean, I’m sure they never, ever deleted a tweet or blog post, or a photo from their Myspace or flickr account, or tore out a page of their diary and burned it, or forged their tax records (oh yes, I know) or ever did anything like that, ever. They’re clearly superior to these so-called Boing Boing bloggers and editors and we should all care what they think.

Oh, and in case you couldn’t tell, I was being sarcastic.

Xeni Jardin

For all the complaining about deleted comments here, I’d like to point out that this thread is nearing 900 comments, and many of them contain criticism, strongly expressed feelings, arguments, whatever, stuff that doesn’t sound like whitewashing to me. Stuff I might not agree with, but that is being stated in a civil way, without including material that violates what we’ve cobbled together as our moderation policy. So chill out, nobody’s “unpersonning” or “disappearing” dissent here. The moderators are following guidelines that are posted on the site. We’re trying to keep it civil and as focused as we can.

As for the remarks about the unpublishing/deletion/takedown clause being added to the policy: Teresa linked to it in the post. We never thought before that we needed to have an explicit policy on when or how an editor might edit or take down or refuse to take down their own work (we operate pretty autonomously here, we don’t ask each other for permission or approval). We figured since some people were asking as a result of this kerfuffle, we should go ahead and have a stated policy. We debated among ourselves, figured out some wording that didn’t make everyone want to hurl, and linked to it in the post.

Is the wording perfect? Is the policy perfect. I don’t know. What do you think? We’ll probably keep changing this document as time goes on. Blogs change, people change, documents about our policies will change.

When the post went up from Teresa, we were all trying to act quickly to address something, it’s a little difficult to deal with decisions that require synchronized action from a bunch of people in different time zones with other things going on like travel and lives. We did our best here, and the fact that the change in the policy wasn’t specified in the post more explicitly was an oversight if anything, not a sinister decision to “disappear the truth.” Sorry if we made a mistake in how the information was presented, I can understand how that might lead to mistaken impressions.

XJ

Joel Johnson

So, hi!

There are lots of separate but related concerns being voiced about this whole thing. I appreciate that, even when very valid points were couched in vitriol or vehemence. We weren’t being twee when we said we were listening.

I apologize for being too defensive or even antagonistic at times in this thread. It’s hard to parse criticism when you aren’t sure if it’s from concerned friends or mawkish ghouls — not that being either validates or invalidates any specific critique made — but in situations like these, we’ve got to be willing to soak it all up. We’ll do better.

In the meantime, can you guys give us a few days to digest all this? Despite what you might conceive, Boing Boing is a highly asynchronous, individually autonomous group of people. If our choices as a group are as important as many of you say they are, I don’t think it’s too much to ask to let us sync up and discuss this more.

Now I won’t promise what, if anything, will be different in a few days — we may agree that we’re fine with all our choices, at which point you may feel free to promptly reapply your boot to our ass — but we need a little space to figure this out.

Archeaopteryx

And amazingly none of these people who care so much about these links care at all about what Wendi Sullivan Blue (VB) did to real flesh and blood human beings that deprived them of their livelihood?

zipster

#743 posted by Takuan , July 1, 2008 10:50 PM

sometimes people in my life do things I think are foolish or even stupid. If I love them anyway, I don’t really notice.

Hide your skirt, your double standard is showing.

mdhatter

Does anyone else agree that the angriest comments here are from some of the first time commenters, and many of those angry comments are basically that BB has fallen fast and far and should just be burned down and forgotten?

If they were not so all alike I would not be so suspicious. I hope no first-time commenters are discouraged by this possibility, as some of the best ideas have also come from first timers.

It must be hard to be so good at what you do that the haters come out of the woodwork to pile on and sockpuppet you when you slip up even just a little.

hagbard

#1433 PeaceLove

Weren’t you the inspiration for Dolores Umbridge?

Seriously, your comments give me reason to doubt your motives.

AGF

Wow. ok. I think this is about it for me – but: The us/we thing. So Xeni unpublished posts a year ago. No one noticed. no issue at the time. Then it all went nuts – so then the Boingers talked, and decided to have TNS put up this post – for them. Hence the we/us on this post. This post is from all of them. Theresa said in the post “We were trying to do the right thing quietly and respectfully, without embarrassing the parties involved.” so I would understand that not only means VB. It also means they didn’t want to say – “oooo Xeni did it and didn’t tell us – it’s all her fault.” That wouldn’t be very nice would it? I figured this out by just reading this post. It’s no conspiracy. No one is out to destroy Boing Boing or hurt you or the internets. It’s just humans doing what they can to share and live in this world together. It will never be simple or perfect or completely black and white. So please try to be charitable and try to see other people’s side. Really. We are all together on this – it’s a community right?

paul beard

Where I lose the plot is that these posts (and comments referencing them?) disappeared a year ago and only now does anyone notice. And in that time, no one thought of a way to communicate that to the teeming millions? Or that it needed to be presented in a favorable way? Does that seem believable?

And who will be embarrassed by the facts of the matter coming out? Violet Blue? One of the BB crew? It looks to me like the only ones to feel embarrassed are the boingers, for doing something that seems counter to their public personae and for failing to defend their decision convincingly. Like it or not, you have an audience and they have some expectations. As noted elsewhere, it will be hard to take you all seriously on issues of transparency after this, trivial as it may seem now. I realize BB is not the anyone’s government of public utility and has no legal obligations to be open, but I suspect a lot of BB’s readers have expectations beyond the merely legal.

Munkcy

@Talia #366: Even neo-Nazis need to have a unicorn chaser every now and then.

Robbo

Wow.

What a massive load of comments.

Passion. Intrigue. Desire. Fervour.

I think everyone needs to take a deep breath and then all clamber into the same room together with a shit load of lube.

Work it out that way.

Sometimes words can only take us so far.

Breathe. Get quiet. Get slippery.

And then move on.

By the way – my heart’s with both sides.

So there.

Cheers.

Antinous

Robbo,

Did you have to say ‘shit’ and ‘lube’ in the same sentence?

Lewis Haidt

@HOLTT and everyone else using the term “Nazi.”

Did you have any relatives die in the Holocaust? Did your mother and father just visit Poland with their synagogue and pray at the sites where the dead – 6 million real Jewish people — not to mention millions of other victims, including Polish resistors perished.

This thread has gone hay-wire and would be upsetting if it weren’t so narcissistic. What BB did is problematic, but to throw terms around in such a careless and irresponsible manner, right before July 4th, when my grandpa fought the Nazis so assholes who are commenting on this blog can feel such entitlement is f’in pathetic.

The navel-gazing, echo-chamber effect is real. For those of you whining about BB actions, how much human rights work like Xeni have you done? Have you gone to Europe and organized resistance to US Trade Rep and creates alliances and project were none existed.

I’m signing off after this, but the blind embrace of a wounded, creative class[less] EGO is pathetic by those ignorant and shameful enough to exploit the Holocaust for your rhetorical, digital masturbation.

Xeni Jardin

@1200 (!!!!!) Lindsay Beyerstein: Thank you for the thoughtful spirit behind your comment, but I have to point out that your arguments are predicated on the misunderstanding that this person “did work for” Boing Boing, was an editor or author for Boing Boing. This is not correct. The posts that were removed were posted by me, at the time (about a year ago) I considered them representative of my voice and my work and my person, and felt it was within my right to do what I wanted with them. I do hear and understand all that has been said here about BB being a bigger thing than a personal blog, and I get that. I’m just trying to explain the initial context, and point out a frequently-repeated misunderstanding about the nature of what was unpublished.

mdhatter

Xeni, more ducklings in compensation for your awesome work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkBSkFyUyv0

maybe it’s an allegory of some sort?

Salguod

Add me to the list of the perplexed, and also the list of those who feel it’s somehow… unseemly.

Yes, BB is a private blog. No it’s not the NYT. No they haven’t formally subscribed to a code of conduct. Yes, the hyperbole of “first amendment” “1984″ and “unpersons” is way over the top.

But still it just seems … skeevy, distasteful and incongruous for BB to do something like this.

Will Shetterly

People who say this thread is simply a matter of bb-haters versus bb-fans are oversimplifying the situation enormously. I enjoy boingboing and despise Violet Blue’s abuse of trademark law as much as anyone.

But I’m troubled by unpublishing. Boingboing is an influential commercial site that criticizes the practices of others. When BB’s board makes a mistake, it should do what it expects the people in charge of other good businesses to do: apologize, and set things right for their users.

Talia

To quote something that’s become cliche elsewhere..

“you’ll get over it.”

Or you’ll leave and spend more time at ZealotsRus.ConspiracyTheories.org, I suppose.

It just occurred to me its foolish to be getting so angry about the huge amount of selfish ignorance parading like drug crazed angry penguins through the thread, so I’ve decided to just laugh about it instead.

Trust me greglondon I know exactly what you mean, but there’s no point. If people want to convince themselves that people removing contents from their own blog is EVIL and BAD and ZOMGZ TEH ARE TEH DEEVIVLL, well, not much you can do about it really. Its not worth getting so worked up over. Just laugh at them and pity them.

DragonVPM

I find it interesting how many people are furious about the “unpublishing” of the articles in question and they use the NYT, LATimes, etc… as examples of how BB acted inappropriately.

This seems odd to me because it seems to ignore that fact that even newspapers have engaged in a form of unpublishing by often times making it difficult (or harder than absolutely necessary) to find their material at all, or online. The NYT’s former policy on charging for online access to archival material would be an example of that.

We seem to take for granted that, today, we can edit for spelling or grammar mistakes. Fix or even change coding and actually change the entire look of a site, CHANGE content (as was done in this post), and do any number of things that couldn’t be done before in print media, and as was demonstrated in this situation, we can also remove something from the public eye (i.e. “unpublish”).

While I hope that BB doesn’t start to make a habit of mass episodes of “unpublishing” I do think that the complaints from many people feel a bit disingenuous. If we look around us it’s apparent that we are absolutely used to dynamic websites. No one would think twice if the most popular MySpace or Facebook user/group/band changed friends lists, added or removed comments, screened posts, etc… They could easily “rewrite history” by deleting someone from their online presence and even if they had 100,000 friends we wouldn’t really begrudge them that.

Clearly BB isn’t quite in that situation, but it’s not so far from it. One of the things that makes BB special is that it does post whatever grabs the attention of the editors/publishers and nothing is given more or less attention. It has a pleasant stream of consciousness to it that is a pleasant change (combined with the content) from your standard sites (particularly news sites).

However, BB is not the news (I’ve always seen it largely as entertainment). Steampunk, unicorns, funny videos, etc… it’s interesting stuff, but it’s not some crucial archive of “history” or “culture” the way that a newspaper might be. Furthermore, even newspapers have had to evolve and I see plenty of examples where they’re still trying to figure out what works for them AND their audience (so it’s not just about what YOU want ;-).

Sometimes I think we forget that “publishing” online is still a relatively new concept that is still evolving and that doesn’t have the same restrictions that existed in the past (and that can be good and bad). Did “journalistic integrity” arise from a noble desire to preserve what was published in it’s exact form, or was that a function of the print medium which didn’t allow for easy editing after distribution? I don’t know, but looking at what happened here, I don’t think that BB did something terrible or unforgivable.

If the editors are still reading all these comments, I would just like to ask that you consider comments and access to them and the discussions that they consitute before deciding to “unpublish” anything in the future. The collaborative nature of posts is something special and I think that should inform some of the decisions about what to keep or remove. So, I won’t say, don’t ever do it again, I just ask that you keep in mind that unpublishing a post with comments is not just affecting something of _yours_. You opened posts up to comments and in doing so you give up some degree of possession, certainly not all of it, but some. I hope you can respect that and perhaps raise the bar (if necessary) for what will warrant being unpublished.

hagbard

#1377 Bruce Arthurs
#1378 LarryC

I think it is safe to say that people have registered that many don’t like the word “unpublish”, but it would be re-writing history (a thing we apparently NEVER do on the internet) to say either that it was a mistake to use it in the first place or that it was used dishonestly.

If you have read the entire thread, you can see that the term was initially used quite accurately and precisely. If it is the correct term, it is not dishonest, yes?

Nor, I would argue, was it a mistake; in the sense that I don’t believe Teresa could possibly have anticipated that using the correct term to describe what actually happened would cause such an extremely emotional reaction. I certainly wouldn’t have.

I think it’s fine to make a case for what term to use going forward, balancing technical accuracy with public comprehension (a line all techie types walk with varying degrees of success).

There’s just no need for the narrative to be written as a courtroom drama. It’s really more like the Death Star Canteen scene.

Burnchao

#1432 Xeni, using the web archive to surf old BB (which you guys recommmended), I found this (podcast #15) to be unpublished (which I commented on), then looking closer, I found this (gone) and this (gone). I haven’t checked every single podcast, so maybe some are still around. Maybe many are still around. Maybe I’m super unlucky, and the three I tried are the only three missing ones. I don’t know.

But I guess you’re right about needing a break from BB. I’ll take your advice and disappear for a while.

boyhowdy

Kudos for making a good call.

Those who don’t understand that the archival nature of blogs, coupled with the perceptive fact of hosting — even archival hosting — as a tacit form of active support, makes “choosing to NO LONGER HOST at your own expense” a perfectly valid part of blog “ownership”, regardless of the reason, don’t really understand the internet.

“Unpublish,” indeed. Choosing to no longer host isn’t hushing — because there is no “after the fact” in the internet. It’s choosing to no longer support via hosting, period.

rodbod

Websites change. Deleting old content that you don’t want to keep is perfectly reasonable. BUT: blogs, with their diary-like, timeline based nature, seem to offer a fixed record of events: changing ‘the past’ breaks that illusion, and feels wrong.

The word ‘unpublishing’ feels very Stalinist / Big Brother-ish.

cherry shiva

@neon:
“It’s my blog and I get to do whatever I want on it.” Nope, life doesn’t work like that, never has. The reasons why should be pretty obvious.

what are you talking about ? leaving aside the notion of how life works, of course that’s way blogs work. always has been.
lets not conflate the two.

@burnchao:
i completey agree with greglondon. calling this “rewriting history” is baloney and rather myopic. boingboing is not in the business of writing history at all. it’s just a blog, not a government archive. it’s infotainment, at its best inmho. jeez, this has gotten so absurd.
i might change my name to blue violet just to see what happens.

BIZKeT

Don’t care. Move along. Nothing to care about here.

oheso

@1197

Nelson, thanks for the dialog. First, I wouldn’t consider Teresa’s language “fightin’ words” … if they weren’t coming from a moderator. My impression on reading #553 was that while she may have been attempting to moderate (i.e., lessen the intensity of) the discussion, her tone was (as others have said it) pouring gasoline on the fire.

As to seeking her dismissal, I’m not. I understand how you might have inferred that from my comments, but it’s not what I said.

I can appreciate it was a very bad day at the office for Teresa.

sirdook

AGF,

Here’s the offending sentences:

“Violet behaved in a way that made us reconsider whether we wanted to lend her any credibility or associate with her.”

Based on subsequent comments and the linked interview, this is extremely (and pointlessly) misleading, even on the most charitable reading.

Archeaopteryx

I saw a lot of postings very uncomplimentary to the Boingers that were this my blog I would have deleted at once, but they remained and remain on this thread.

minTphresh

dave@1739, effin brilliant! bravo, homie, i’m freekin cyin here!

David Pescovitz

@Grobstein (#7), I think you’re right. It wasn’t a big pact of secrecy though. We are geographically distributed and it was the weekend, so it took time to get everyone on the same page, up to date, and figure out the right thing to do.

mdhatter

#348 – I think if you read the post carefully you will see nothing was ‘erased’.

Imagine (for 10 seconds) BB as a print magazine – BB will not provide THAT PARTICULAR back issue to you. You may find it elsewhere and BB tells you where that is and wishes you luck in your quest.

Is that not their prerogative? Isn’t that less offensive than the other active options of disemvoweling and delinking or maybe entirely replacing the posts with angry rants against Ms.B?

The arguments about old links driving new traffic are very relevant, and I’d imagine someone did something to deserve this treatment.

I don’t need to know what. If this happened all the time I would be as deeply annoyed as some here are, but it doesn’t.

If Xeni and Joel et al. felt something brought the quality of their site down, and mocking it wasn’t worth the effort, then they should remove it.

glamajamma

Talia @ 1670:
“#1667 in a way its somewhat like four personal blogs.
That just became very, very popular. ”

I don’t agree. Boing Boing is not very different than a TV channel. They post items that require very little attention span to process and provide a numb place to go and relax my brain for five minutes while at work. They collect revenue from advertisers. Sounds just like TV, they even have videos with commercials.
Now that I think about it BoingBoing doesn’t act any differently than an AAN paper.

They are free
They collect revenue solely through advertising
They tend to have rather schlocky journalism, no offense, I never thought you were shooting for good journalism
And they are self righteous, once again no offense, but there is a great deal of proselytizing on this blog.

mdhatter

FrankShipley, you strike me as just the sort of elitist you apparently cannot tolerate. You sure do sound like it. So what’s really got your goat?

Joel Johnson

The policing the comments thing was delicate, for sure. We probably should have said something like “We hear you, but we’re not ready to address it yet.” But sometimes when you have people trying to force your hand before you’re ready to respond it’s frustrating.

gabrielm

500?

eustace

Marley9 writes “What we see more often than not, is the reply “Oh yeah? When then your an idiot…”

This hasn’t been my usual experience. You may be overgeneralizing from your own experiences. But I wouldn’t want to sound too critical of someone who speaks for so large a part of the BB readership.

Islington

Wowzers. 1200 yet? I have to admit, as a blog of self declared wonderful things, this thread certainly belongs. Sure, some folks are being berserkers, but more than half (gods, i hope) of the posts are genuine and passionate. I feel as though we’ve all been attending a town hall meeting for the past couple of days…and while we may be moving in circles from time to time, some of us (myself included) are having a blast discussing this with even-headed individuals. Thanks to Joel, David and Xeni for participating – without your participation this thread would mean one hell of a lot less. Personally i’m still unsure of what i think of the whole thing, but damned if i don’t find it interesting to hear others weigh in.

As an afterthought, i’ve still got that ice cream for everyone that i mentioned earlier. Mint chocolate chip or cookie dough, take your pick.

emdub

What’s really hilarious, and yet terribly sad, is the made-up word “unpublish.” I imagine the unpublishers also unlisten to music and untake photographs while they unsing a song about unringing a bell.

Just say “removed” or “deleted”, because that’s what you did.

“Unpublish.” Sheesh.

PeaceLove

#1436

Hagbard,

I don’t recall Dolores Umbrage ever calling for peace or love at Hogwarts.

Why do you doubt my motives? Is it something suspicious in my message or something closed in your heart?

Phikus

“The Marching Morons”

XOPHER, you just named my next band…

geekpdx

Well, I’m glad someone said something. That metafilter thread was too hard for me to ignore, and frankly, I have work to do.

Regardless of what anyone says, it’s a nice thing to try and keep personal problems from being blown out of proportion publicly – but hot damn, what a cluster.

I don’t know what happened or exactly when the un-publishing occurred, and I know that hindsight is 20/20 and all that – but once valleywag and mefi hopped onto this a clear communication (even along the lines of “a statement is being prepared, stay tuned”) would have been a good idea. Leaving the Internets speculating in lieu of throwing something out there begats loud raspberry.

Also, just curious – was this a group decision, or the action of a single or minority group of editors?

mdhatter

Pedant @#186 – Your choice of language used to describe the removal of Violet’s work and of any comments referring to her seems oddly hypocritical for a site with an editorial bent that rails so strongly against censorship.

They removed their own work.

No work of VB was removed as far as I can tell, just some free publicity for VB, the privilege of which they no longer wanted to extend.

turing_machine

Interesting that you mention not giving relevance to Ms Blue, and you don’t mention why you took down other comments. Were they also somehow gaining undue relevance in their criticism of you taking down content, so you took down additional content?

Seems like you might want to rethink this particular explanation and excuse. It doesn’t seem all that logical or likely.

SightseeMC

Wow, I could only make it through about 60 of the comments before my eyeballs melted.

Xeni, I think I have commented on BB/BBG exactly once, and that was to warn you about riling up the internet trolls. I had no idea they were just so willing to barge into your house and play paddywhack on your head no matter what.

To the whole BB crew: it seems to me that you are handling this quite well, and with an even-tempered hand. You acted, you explained, and you explained your explanation. Well done.

And is there a “Godwin’s Law” for when someone calls “censorship” over a private posting in a private space? Maybe we’ll have to call it “Violet’s Rule.”

Shawn Struck

Antinous:

Thank you for the explanation.

psyco_path

@884 THIS.

@950 Inflammatory language is ment to inflame. If it upsets you then the author has done their job effectively.

I’m not thrilled that the level of shadiness by the BB staff has gone up in the last day since this was posted. I can only imagine that they can’t wait for this to get off of the front page.

tillwe

@Will: the one part BoingBoing has indeed a bit reputation in is the topic “loss of civil liberties”, i.e., how governments and companies should behave (on the internet, or elsewhere). At least that’s my impression. Otherwise, you are right ;-)

@GregLondon: What’s so funny about long-time lurkers starting to post comments exactly at the moment something seems to go wrong? I’m more or less one of them, too. Poorimojo did explain the reasoning behind that really well. Not every person posting for the first time, and with fury, in this thread, is a troll.

@all: Is there a graceful way to say “you just don’t get it?”. If so, some of the last comments would surely demand this. (And I’m also sure that “you” — that are not “us” — must have the exact mirrored feeling for quite some time).

Burnchao

Crap, I just realized that it looks like I’m implying that you’re implying I should “disappear”. I’m not implying that. I’m just taking a break. That’s it. Crap.

GregLondon

will@1629: I think it’s time for me to leave this discussion

will@1632 …
will@1647 …
will@1648 …
will@1649 …

Gee, will, I wonder what it would look like if the world held you to the same unforgiving standards of perfection and absolute interpretation of your word that you hold BB.

It’s like you keep promising stuff, and then keep backing out of it. Can I trust you to do anything you say?

in 401, you compare BB deleting blog posts to Stalin.
in 997, you admit you’ve deleted blog posts.

in 1616, you still want to use Stalin to label BB
in 1619, you think “drama queen” is an unfair label of your behaviour.

It certainly seems like you have two standards here. One for yourself and people you agree with, and one for BB and people you disagree with.

GregLondon

@186: we’re not dealing with a Stalinist purge here. But

But? Are you fricken kidding me? We’re not dealing with a Stalinist purge here but??????

You talk about “choice of language” after a little gem like that?

Doctor Pickles

@362
“And as has been mentioned numerous times on this site, the content is not influenced one iota by the sponsors.”

What proof do we have of that claim other than the word of the BB staff?

What reason do we have to trust the BB staff on this issue when they hypocritically violate the rules they expect others to behave by?

Forgive me for my impetuousness, but I have no reason to believe that BB is any less beholden to its advertisers than any other media outlet.

shmegegge

well done, sir.

Talia

I liked that fellow called violent blue who posted earlier.

Random832

#948′s link also contains a list of the entries that were removed – not quite “over 100″, but, especially considering it’s not a complete list, not quite short of it by enough to justify including “Overstating the number of entries about her.” in the list of VB’s “demonstrable lies”

Burnchao

@#1198 Xeni

@Burnchao, I don’t know what “disappeared comments” you’re referring to

Um, I haven’t been talking about “disappeared comments”. I’ve been talking about (asking about, actually) posts, published to the BB homepage, by you, Cory, David, Mark, et al. Posts that don’t mention VB, but gets unpublished for other reasons.

How much else of BB has been silently unpublished? Has there been other unpublishing? What was unpublished? I don’t know how to be clearer. I’m not asking about comments from readers, I’m asking about posts from editors. Has anything else been unpublished?

chriscook

The “paying to host it” doesn’t hold, you are making money on advertisements on all of these articles.

I can understand that you may have ‘personal’ and ‘private’ reasons for doing these things, but have you told Violet why you’ve done this? She still claims to be in the dark.

Chemical Orphan

Talia: So apparently what you meant when you challenged readers to look up the definition of censorship was actually a challenge to deduce YOUR PERSONAL definition of censorship, expressly tailored to fit your syncophantic support of the practice of so-called “unpublishing.”

Why didn’t you say so in the first place?

Regardless, it really is censorship.

And the more I think about it, it’s not just Boing Boing who lost credibility, or you who lost your challenge AND credibility, but all of us readers who lose information and a site worthy of our time and attention.

I guess I will be following George Carlin’s advice and at least keep the late Boing Boing’s bookmark around for another six weeks.

boingboing ate my name

@ Teresa: Seriously, your comment number is #581 and you couldnt find a single thing in the previous 580 comments worth a serious thought? All we get from you is snotty comments and non-answers. Is it really so much to ask of you to at least try and respond to some of the more thought provoking comments. After all, you did ask us to comment, do you think so little of us that if you respond to us at all its just to sneer?

Ripcord3

Again, it’s very amusing that Theresa is bothering to respond (and so combatively with the folks making garbage posts) – as if she believes it will do anything but feed the fire.

When the Internet masses start blathering like this, there’s not much that can be done to calm it down short of locking the thread, or just ignoring it (it WILL die down in a couple of days). It’s like arguing with a two-year old.

mdhatter

Will,

Nobody has said BB was an important source of anything, just a regular source. Antinous was accurate in #1077, and you have chosen (#1086) to slightly mischaracterize his comment to score a semantic win.

Is that ethical? Is it wonderful? Is it a willful mischaracterization? Or just Will-ful?

You decide.

Takuan

Pie Fight!

Kevbo

Hey, lookit that, everyone. The world is still turning.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator

MikeSum32 @1777: Not only is that comment a tendentious piece of axe-grinding, but you posted it in two threads at once.

Knock this off. Take some anger management classes or something.

FreakCitySF

I think she’s a B anyhow.

see

“We hope you’ll respect our choice to keep the reasons behind this private.”

If it was a public action by Violet Blue that triggered the unpublishing, then no, I can’t respect BoingBoing’s choice not to name the public act which provoked the public act of unpublishing. The only thing being done by “privacy” in such a case is protecting the judgment of BoingBoing from evaluation, which is craven.

If it was a private offense, but BoingBoing is refusing to tell Violet Blue what she did that was privately offensive, then again, I can’t respect that. While it is perfectly proper to keep a private offense out of the public eye, it is not proper to refuse to explain to the offending party the reason for the public disassociation.

So, no, I’d have to say my respect for BoingBoing is reduced by this.

Talia

On the upside, less than 100 posts to go before we overtake Untitled 1! Never let it be said that pointless internet pontificating never accomplished anything! :P

ErosBacchus

Greg, you’re smart enough to know better than to equate posting behavior with reading behavior. Lurkers, perhaps you’ve heard of them?

(There’s also the purely technical aside that I don’t take care to track all my trivial net logins. I’m pretty sure I once had another commenter account here, but I seem to have lost access to it, or perhaps forgotten the screen name I chose. In any case, I have commented here before — not that it matters or affects my credibility in any material way.)

As it happens, I run a modest sex blog that’s got a very short list of “Daily Reads” non-sexblogs on it, the few I really do read every day and recommend unreservedly to people. Boing Boing has been on there for four or five years now. So, yeah, I think I’m minimally qualified to comment on what’s normal for Boing Boing, and I’m sure as hell qualified to comment on my own perceptions thereof.

Anyway, I’ve shot my wad in trying to explain to you that your disrepect for the motives people bring to this discussion somehow invalidates their participation. And I’m outta here for a few hours at least. Have fun impugning people’s motives while I’m gone!

Anonymous

What many people here have failed to recognize is that blogging, if done right, is performance art. In its own unique way, BB is a kind of penetrable art, something far more than â€œposting.” BB is a performance art piece. One doesnâ€™t read BB for the posts, per se. We read it for the performance, for the art, for this â€œthingâ€ that gets created when the penetrable web, us avatars, and that which we create anew when we hit publish recombine into a thing that we had not seen previously, which makes us feel a sense of wonder. Bloggers who get this have no interest in contemplating apologizing for their art or what they choose to do with it. Blogs are experiments, they are performances, they are art piecesâ€”and mutations are an important part of the performance itself. Sometimes, these pieces have a beginning, a middle, and an end. They will live on and they will die again, in our minds and online. All this mindless arguing about censorship and unpublishing fails to understand on a deeper level what is really going on here. A long time ago, Carolee Schneeman got naked, covered herself in mud, and read from a scroll that she pulled from her vagina. These days, nobody is bellyaching over the transience of that art piece. And in the double zeros, part of the abiding beauty of the internet is its true transience, as much as its transparency. Those people who are attacking BB and its editors in this situation are too stupid, too ignorant, or too blind to see the art of it.

Will Shetterly

Xopher @1640, how is that Greg is behaving appropriately when he calls people drama queens, but I am trolling the thread when I accept the title rather than get miffed? Seems to me that once Xeni brought up drama queens, the subject is about as on-topic as it could possibly be.

To make this extremely on-topic: Have we reached comment #1647 because the drama queens have united to do it? Or is it possible that there might actually be some matters of principle here?

Also, I like John A Arkansawyer’s joke. I was beginning to wonder why Greg kept adding comments to a thread he had declared dead, but I now see he was right to keep this going: there are still good bits coming in.

nilesgibbs

It’s sad that this has blown up so much.

BB has always been vocally supportive of open and free culture. Removing posts from BB itself doesn’t conflict with that, as it is their right as owners of the site to control what copies of their posts are available here.

Xeni’s example of her father burning his own paintings maps well onto this situation. From what I understand, he destroyed works that he had created but never released into society at large, and so there was no attack on culture. And in the case that those paintings had been published publicly, he still has the right to destroy his own personal copies.

The only “wrong thing” he could have done would be to publish his works into public consumption, thereby making them a part of our culture, then go out later and destroy every copy that existed. Without *all* of those circumstances, he’s in the clear, in my mind, from a “Free Culture” standpoint.

Now for this controversy, we have a collection of works (posts) that are published online at BB for the public at large, and have without question become a part of our culture. Now, if these works existed only on BB’s servers, and they deleted them, that would wrong as it would be destroying every copy that existed.

But if you actually read BB, you’ll know that the nature of the Internet doesn’t allow for things to disappear. Cory’s been chanting it for years: “There is no future in which bits become harder to copy.” There are copies of BB everywhere, in fact, it would be near impossible to do the “wrong thing” and destroy every copy to wipe it from our cultural log.

Hell, even traditional newspaper’s couldn’t easily “unpublish” something, unless they could recall every newspaper they printed. Arguing that they’re “the public record” is moot point, because they couldn’t unpublish even if they wanted to. The “public record” argument was more valid 200 years ago, when a publisher had a more reasonable chance of destroying every copy that existed of their work.

People are only confused (and then angry) because they can’t separate the BB server from the BB content. The BB server contains but one visible copy of each post, the original copy to be sure, but just one copy.

If someone destroyed the Declaration of Independence, it’d have no effect on future generations benefiting from its text. Sure, symbolically, it’d be a big loss, but it’s not like then all of the other copies would “unpublish”.

The only metrics that matter form a positive relationship: how many people are influenced by it and how many copies are available.

The more people that are influenced by a work, the more important that all of the copies aren’t destroyed. As the internet quickly and efficiently copies popular works everywhere, the less it matters that any one copy is destroyed.

BB could pull the plug on their site right now, and we’d still have copies of everything available.

shiva7663

Thank you for not screwing around with the Wayback Machine.

Halloween Jack

To the commenters who belabor comparisons of this matter with Nineteen Eighty-Four, or insist that they need need need to know what VB did, may I suggest that you strive to get over yourselves. The former displays a stunning lack of reading comprehension, and the latter is mere gossip-trolling.

George William Herbert

Also, a social observation -

This event demonstrates the fuzzy boundary between web publisher and web reader, particularly when blog comments and blog links are factored in.

In a sense, the deletion seems like a more old-school media answer than a new media aware response. The new media environment is that the readers and commenters feel part of a community related to the blog and posts. The participation of readers creates a feeling of ownership. Old-school media responses make some or many of those participating readers feel like a social contract was broken.

Actions done in public may be argued over, but actions done in secret are more likely to be seen as betrayal.

Again, sort of incongruous for this set of bloggers to have missed / neglected / not predicted that.

Without knowing the underlying issue, I can’t comment on whether some reaction was necessary or appropriate. But BBers being surprised by the response when it finally became public seems odd.
It seems entirely predictable to me…

gabrielm

Woo Hoo – I made the 500th post!

Moderators,
Please do not “unpublish” any comments that would rob me of this special honor.
Thank you.

elvix

All in all, I’d have to say this is an entertaining thread and (good and bad) it points to the amazing community that has grown around BoingBoing.

The Boingers have the right to run their site as they wish, but I strongly disagree that they don’t owe their readers anything.

Once BoingBoing started taking ads (and valuing them highly), it established that there was a strong site/reader relationship — that there were standards and trust between the two parties, not to mention “policies” (see this page’s footer).

So, to suddenly turn about-face and say, “oh, it’s our personal site, and we can do what we want,” seems a bit disingenuous to me.

You can’t have it both ways.

Antinous

Once BoingBoing started taking ads (and valuing them highly), it established that there was a strong site/reader relationship — that there were standards and trust between the two parties, not to mention “policies” (see this page’s footer). So, to suddenly turn about-face and say, “oh, it’s our personal site, and we can do what we want,” seems a bit disingenuous to me.

To the contrary. The personal site thing is mentioned almost every week. You seem to be arguing that the Boingers should adapt their content based on the perceived desires of readers in order to maintain ad revenue. That would be selling out. Should BB start holding focus groups and test screenings to make sure that posts appeal to the all important 18 to 49 year old male demographic, too? I don’t think so.

Random832

#957, but we need a little space to figure this out. – Haven’t you supposedly spent this whole past year on an “evaluation of what to do”, according to #5?

GregLondon

will@1086: I suspect that’s why lurkers like ErosBacchus are speaking out now.

uh….

will @1074: “Tribe trumps truth.” We’re seeing a lot of that now.

You think that maybe it has more to do with the fact that ErosBacchus’s website erosblog.com is a blog about sex and related topics and that maybe ErosBacchus has identified Violet Blue, noted sex talker, as being on her team????

Or does that “team” thing only work one way?

YOu wanna know why I got involved in this nonsense? Because nutjobs kept insisting on pushing my button which is using language to misdescribe violence, making references to 1984 and Stalin and other nonsense. And then they went on to push my other button, which is using language to misdescribe… reality.

What really happened here? Compare that to the outrage running rampant among certain folks. You think ErosBacchus is describing reality when she argues that the reason she is here is solely to fight the fight of broken links? Or do you think a bit of “team versus truth” might be involved?

All I know is I can’t get anyone to give me a completely straight answer as to what BB really did to them, really, as in in reality, without invoking vaguities like “values” or some such spongelike concepts.

p00pyhead

I for one hope they don’t operate their blog with rules suggested by 1193 or so comments. Boingboing is a blog about the latest wonderful things, it’s not wikipedia. Web content is ephemeral. Is anyone still wincing at 2 girls 1 cup or LOLing at LOLcats? If you really wanted to find it you’d go to Google not BB.

What’s at issue seems to be the surprise upon realizing that BB isn’t the CMS of the web. It shouldn’t be. People momentarily fell for the censorship/transparency hype incited by drama mongering. Once more people realized they’d been ‘had’, the topic switched to moderator bashing. All mobs demand a sacrifice. Someone must be made a scapegoat even if in this case it’s really not warranted and the editors have been incredibly humbly responsive. Hopefully reason, detachment, and common sense will descend upon the angry mob and we all put down our pitchforks and spare the hunchback another day.

As a regular reader of Boingboing, I trust the judgement of the editors. Just because their motivations are private, if they feel the need to withdraw support from someone, then so be it. Boingboing is not the PR service of other bloggers and in fact if they have information that results in them withdrawing support from someone, then they should stay true to that opinion. Unpublishing is a more honest, transparent, and legitimate act than leaving things as is. If a store starts selling you shoddy goods you communicate your disapproval by no longer patronizing that store. Discretion was not to hide but to avoid embarassing someone. Who knew that public blog war was exactly what they wanted!

It’s like back when you were in the closet your room looked like a frat boy’s locker room and now that you’re out you have to tear the chick posters off the walls, burn all the Meatloaf and whip out the Barbra Streisand. Let them!

BenBurch

Yep. Concern Trolls. That covers it.

joshmillard

I’ve been following this thread with a great deal of interest (I’m “cortex” over at Metafilter, one of the three moderators on the site), so I feel a bit silly about jumping in only now and starting off with a random comment on implementation issues, but here I am and here I go:

We would love to implement those ideas, but the MT interface doesn’t support some of them.

I appreciate that customization isn’t ever freeâ€”either you’re spending your own time or you spending money for someone else’sâ€”but a number of the idea Damon_TFB listed do seem worth looking into, and while I don’t know MT from Adam under the hood I’d be a little surprised if it couldn’t be modified to make this work. There has to be some mindshare in the BoingBoing userbase and the site’s social networkâ€”it’d probably make more sense to tap that to get a spit-take from someone with expertise on what MT can and can’t be plied to do than to just set this stuff aside as “can’t”.

I don’t know that that’s even what you meant, but it reads a bit like that.

Some specific thoughts on your objections. Some of these would, presumably, require the MT tweaking we’re talking about above.

- Have each comment’s number fixed. I have seen many references by other commenters broken.

The majority of renumbering comes from approving anonymous comments, which appear based on receipt time, not approval time. It’s really better to use a name or pull a quote when responding to a comment.

Two approaches:

- Preserve the comment numbers at anony-submission time; if an unapproved comment has reserved #3, skip #3 in the comment ordering. If the comment is ever approved, no change. Never approved? Ditto.

- Eschew comment numbers. It’d be a significant change, which might be a sufficient argument against as far as your users are concerned, but it is also more or less the best way to guarantee that folks do indeed use quotes and names. No numbers means no laziness or brokenness with numbers, and a greater emphasis on actual usernames. It may present a headache in threads with a large proportion of anonymous commenters, as well; I don’t know what your usual balance is, so no comment there.

- It’s fine to ignore comments that never made it onto the page, but if a comment is removed after being served to even one pageview, leave a simple “This comment was deleted.”

We have no way to do that except to overwrite the comment under the existing username. That would be a much bigger problem.

Customizing MT to treat deletedness as a flag that prompts the display of an alternate message (either a stock “comment deleted” marker or an explicit note) would do the trick here. This is functionality that could tie in to the previous note as well.

- If a user wants to have their account deleted, that’s fine, but don’t delete their comments. Just change the username to “De-Registered User #42″

Username changes are not retroactive, so it wouldn’t make any difference anyway. I already test drove that option.

If it’s a question of anonymizing someone’s comments under a specific username after the fact, this could be done as a one-off db query. If it’s not something you expect to do on a regular basis (which, I gather, is the case?) then this might even be worth building a tool for.

Again, I don’t mean to say “poof! it’s easy!”. There are time and testing and maintenance costs to doing this sort of thing. But take a look at what those costs are.

tylersweeney

dangerous territory. telling us to be weary of those who threaten free speech, then threatening free speech yourselves. i agree with number 6. it is as if one day you can proclaim the world to be flat, and then when irrefutable evidence that the world is round is made, you can go back, un-publish the post and say “we never said the world was flat”

very disappointed.

odejoy

Come on, admit it, you are finally victims of your own success !!

Tomorrow is another day. See ya!

mdhatter

#358 – I totally respect your comment, because it is thoughtful, it respects our hosts, it makes no utterly false associations, it is calm, and it is simultaneously productive and not defeatist.

Faustus

@Mullingitover

you see you and me, we differ on around step two of your grand plan. I don’t think they did anything wrong, so there’s no need to acknowledge screwups.

This argument has gone on long enough (through various people) that I’m sure whatever I say won’t convince you, but I’ll bash my head against this wall anyway.

For me, I agree with the analogy of the bookstore that Valchael posted at #570, if the shop owner doesn’t want to stock a book he doesn’t have to, and this offends noone. If a shop owner has stocked a book, then chooses not to stock it without telling anyone this is also totally up to him and not only that, it’s totally morally fine as well. The only bad that comes of it in my opinion is people coming to the bookstore looking for the book he no longer stocks, it’s a bit of a pain for them. I don’t think the fact that some people were inconvenienced is enough to force the shop owner to stock books he doesn’t want to. It’s a free world.

for tl;dr : it’s not censorship, it’s like lasering off a tattoo you don’t like anymore :p

demoman

Antinous @1077

I’m a first time commenter (weighed in a couple times yesterday) who has read this blog for several years, daily. I’ve never been moved to comment on ‘matters of the gravest consequence’ because, well, I didn’t really have anything to add that didn’t seem obvious. I come to this blog because I generally appreciate and agree with the thrust of the editorial content.

The reason I was moved to comment on this issue is because it seems, and still does, that the boingboing crew are missing something very important. I saw a spot where I could be helpful (along with hundreds of other posters who may or may not regularly post comments).

You seem to be hell-bent on trivializing your audience’s reaction to this debacle. I guess that’s your job.

Like many others, I’d appreciate Cory’s take on all of this.

Also, those of you falling over themselves trying to paint VB as WORSE….are missing the point. Whether she lied, whether she brings unfair litigation against defenseless sex workers, whether she is ‘evil’, or a ‘pile of shit’….is really neither here nor there for me, and I suspect many others weighing in on the issue. The issue is all about boingboing’s actions, and there willful disregard of their readership’s concerns about transparency, fair play; and how, in the aftermath of the unpublishing, exasperated character smears, insinuation, and both active and passive aggressiveness have been the order of the day to try to ‘handle’ the crisis.

It’s been depressing to watch this unfold. BB has been one of my online homes for far too long not to care. This would matter a lot less to me if it happened elsewhere. I put boingboing in a rarified spot and expect better.

Antinous, you do a disservice dismissing first-time poster’s reactions.

The longer this drags on without resolution, the more trashed BB’s and VB’s reputations become.

glamajamma

Unpublished is relationship between the database and its blog. Deleted is the relationship of the readers to the blog, so the articles were most definitely deleted from that relationship of Boing Boing readers. Unpublished just changes the status in the database and how it relates to the blog. Deleted means the relationship between readers and those articles have been eliminated and that is, without a doubt, true. Boing Boing deleted the articles.

Either way live by the blog, die by the blog.

AGF

sirdook – I see what you mean and why it bothers you. I just think it was said because they didn’t want to put it all on Xeni. I don’t think it was meant to be misleading. Just gentle. I mean imagine it’s your best friend – wouldn’t you publically just say we and take the hits? Xeni choose to explain further and that’s awsome.
You were just asking why the first post didn’t explain and I think that’s why. As far as being charitable – you were just asking – so sorry if I sounded grumpy!

Bob Doles Communist Doppelganger

@Chemical Orphan, #340

I question that the definition of censorship you’ve posted is really relevant here – it requires that a “censor” be the one doing the removing, and in this case, it appears that the content was removed by those who wrote it, because they no longer wished to appear to support the person to whose site it linked.

If old items were removed due to lack of storage space, would that be censorship?

If future planned items were not written for the same reason the posts were removed, would that be censorship? What if the link was determined to contain a virus? Or if the BB folks collectively decided they were tired of running a blog and took the whole thing down?

Where does “not supporting things you don’t like” stop and “censorship” begin?

ROSSINDETROIT

To me Boing Boing has always been more like a hyperactive kid sister than an authority figure. Enthusiastic, experimental, energetic, curious, sometimes maddeningly unbalanced but always lovable. I don’t expect perfection and I always appreciate your honest efforts. Keep up the good work, flaws and all.
(SMOOOCH!)

wnoise

When did “We reserve the right to unpublish or refuse to unpublish anything for any or no reason.” get added? Unfortunately, the internet archive cuts out after August 2007, when it wasn’t there.

GregLondon

The term “NAZI Moderator” has been around the internet for a long time. Like the term Troll it’s got legs for a reason.

Argumentum ad antiquitatem. Other things that have been around for a long time: sexism, racism, fascism.

Also, just because things “have legs” don’t neccessarily mean they’re aren’t the tactics of an asshole. Whipping up a non-event-that-harmed-no-one into some massive emo-echo-chamber shitstorm wasn’t invented here. It’s just that some people are following that playbook to the letter.

Because it works, not because it’s right.

See also SwiftBoaters as a recent example of “legs”

Will Shetterly

Xopher, my credibility on leaving threads was shot to hell on GEnie or Compuserve or Usenet–long before the web, anyway. People joke about it: “Will’s said goodbye. Setting the stopwatch for his return now…” It’s my cross, and it’s easy to bear. If you’re afraid of looking foolish, you’ll never have any fun. More importantly, you’ll never do anything that matters.

eustace

No! Not the moderation thread!
You might as well bounce Happy Fun Ball. Or wish for cake.

acb

Boing Boing is a collaborative personal blog, not an institution with obligations of impartiality or public service. Which means that the authors don’t have to be fair, impartial or even remotely reasonable, but merely interesting to its audience.

It would seem that some people are under the impression that as soon as a blog on the internet becomes sufficiently popular, it turns into the BBC or something, and becomes subject to various nebulous obligations to The Public, which if it fails to live up to amount to betrayal of that trust.

Burnchao

I visit BoingBoing more times a day than any other site. I’ve been a fan and a loyal reader for quite some time, and have never understood the hate-on that some people have for this place.

I’ve never been a fan of Violet Blue, and whenever BB would make a post about her, I could never understand the interest. The little I know of her I don’t like.

But this whole thing was wrong. Changing your opinion of someone and deciding to no longer support them is one thing, BB changed their opinion of someone and decided to pretend that BB never supported her.

One my main reasons for liking BB is because of the politics it supports, and is against. But now I feel like I’ve been lied to the entire time, and that BB has just been pretending to have the beliefs claimed. I’m disappointed and disillusioned.

Faustus

@TILLWE

Sure you can say that, you have the right :)

Brettspiel

Jeebus, you numbskulls, google “unpublish” and learn a thing or two.

For what it’s worth, I love me some boingboing, even if Cory is a little heavy on the “look what I did!” some days.

Also, Violet Blue nauseates me.

This excision is sort of unboingly.

Can some bloggy person tell me if it is impractical to just remove the links to VB instead of unpublishing the entire article?

Valchael

Perhaps before you condemn Boin Boing for unpublishing the entries, it would be good to look at how people found out about it.

From posts on her blog and a subsequent comment on a post after the first Violet Blue says:

“@ Seth â€” I agree. when I made this post Iâ€™d been emailed about it over the weekend and wasnâ€™t sure what to do. asking why theyâ€™d taken the posts down seemed accusatory, so I figured Iâ€™d make a statement calling attention to it â€” at the very least â€” rather than being silent while still trying to figure out how to address something so bizarre. I figured that was the most open and accountable way for me to address the questions and rumors, while still not knowing what the hell is going on (and being not sure what the right thing to do is in a situation like this). I mean, Iâ€™ve never seen a well-known blog take down so many posts in a mass deletion without a peep â€” let alone that it seems to be about me. plus, I thought I was friends with Boing Boing, so it feels incredibly awkward.”

And from there it seems it went to other blogs including the latimes and valley wag. And the LA times blog has quotes from Violet Blue. If she thought that she was friends with them wouldn’t it be normal for her to ask someone from boing boing? Calling it open and accountable is funny because it seems more like she told everyone except boing boing directly unless she contacted them and didn’t get a reply. But with her “openness” wouldn’t she have said something like that?

Considering that she said nothing about it would make one assume that she didn’t try to contact Boing Boing and simply got it publicized in places with high traffic based on Boing Boing’s name specifically. Giving her publicity as the wronged party.

So what is Boing Boing supposed to say that will satisfy people? Give a reason for their actions that might include some private stuff that may embarrass people? Plus in such a public space such things might be considered slander or libel and could have legal repercussions.

On boing boing simply saying that they didn’t support Violet Blue anymore when they took down links to her could affect her ability to work even without giving the reason. It could even do so a year after the fact based simply on their reputation. After Violet made it news anything they could say could cause any sort of consequences for everyone involved. Giving the reason might be even worse.

Just because Violet Blue decides to talk about every part of her life on her blog doesn’t mean that it’s prudent for other people to do so. Especially when the people have some form of celebrity. Any sort of news can affect their livelihoods.

SamLL

Maybe this comment is going to be immediately discounted because I don’t leave a lot of comments, and maybe there are more than enough people speaking their minds in this thread already, but I am mildly upset by this action which contradicts what I thought were Boing Boing’s core values.

Nephilim

I’m not your friend buddy!

ROSSINDETROIT

For those of you keeping track at home, the Cory countdown clock is now at 8 days and ticking. CRY WHT GVS?

How much work do you do while you’re on vacation?

Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator

AisleFive, Grobstein, we were trying to avoid embarrassing people. In the end, it was unavoidable. I expect she’ll survive it.

Talia

#375: reference post #349. He explains it better than I can.

Antinous

gabrielm,

Your honor is safe with me. Mazel Tov.

Michael Brutsch

The fanboys will stay, the people who care will leave. I guess we’ll remember this as the day BoingBoing died.

David Pescovitz

It wasn’t a change from a previous policy about unpublishing. There wasn’t one stated. In fact, we didn’t really have any policies posted at all until a few weeks ago. So as our policies evolve, we’ll make that known. When we commented on this matter, we linked to the policy with the additional wording. But we’ll try to be even more specific and clearer in the future with regard to changes. Thanks!

ROSSINDETROIT

@1388: see #5 “The posts still exist in our archives, and they’re also available on the Wayback Machine.

Does that square with your definition of ‘deleted’?

Read a bit before you dive in and start flailing.

hagbard

I’m saying that your saintly demeanor is just as believable as hers.

You’ve accused BB of psychological violence, passed judgment on them (and I don’t grant you the moral authority to pass such judgment). You’ve demanded their surrender and sought to impose penance on them. You’ve declared who is sufficiently contrite and who is still damned. You’ve even threatened them. And you’ve sought repeatedly to draw Cory into your office so you can help save his soul too.

Suspicious? “It’s so interesting to me that Cory is away when this all breaks. The one voice so many of us are the most interested to hear from, strangely silent.”

Wow, when you put it that way, it’s really clear that Cory’s silence must mean something’s…what’s the term? …closed in his heart.

Your posts are entirely consistent with my original thesis about this whole process (#474 and others).

For a brief while today, they had gotten to a point where there was constructive discussion about good policy. Trying to fold that into your narrative of violence, pain, sin and contrition, with you as Sister Mary Headmistress does a sort of “psychological violence” to that dialog.

How do I know psychological violence has been done? Because I feel outrage. And once you start feeling my pain, you’ll understand how to respond to me. By showing proper contrition, isn’t that right?

What, you don’t think I’m in a position judge your saintliness and demand apologies?

Robert Anton Wilson (RIP) said that there can be no communication except between equals. Time and again I’ve found that observation to be valid.

You are my equal.

Cory, Xeni, Joel, Dave, Mark, Teresa, Antinous, et al, are your equals as well.

Stop treating them as if they are grovelling at your feet or failing to grovel properly, and then maybe they can dialog with you as well.

GregLondon

I hope bb is Y2K compliant, cause we’re bordering on rolling over to MM base roman posts here. sheesh.

hokano

This is a directory of wonderful things. If we no longer think something is wonderful, we have every right to remove it from your directory.

Ah, that’s doubleplusgood!

blacken blue

This has nothing to do with censorship. It was their own posts they removed, not anything she wrote. Admit it! Y’all just want the gossip.

What, you all would rather BB criticize someone in public over a private matter?

You want drama, just go to tinynibbles:

“A is stalking me”

“How dare that damned porn star B take my name! Now I have to ruin my sex-positive sex-worker DRM-free rep and sue that bitch and have her re-edit all that porn she did before I even knew what a blog was.”

“Rape! C is stalking me! Do you know what it’s like to be a woman?! Rape!”

“Great. Now I’m deleted. Transparency!”

“D assaulted me. Stalker! Child molester! How dare he! What about the children? What about our rights?”

Wrong blog. That’s tinynibbles fodder not boingboing’s. Crying censorship won’t change the type of content they post.

fylateri

hey, could you unpublish this post from a few years back for me? it will save me having to criticize you in public in order to have it removed. many thanks in advance!

http://www.boingboing.net/2004/05/04/apple-deleting-criti.html

Shawn Struck

Xeni:

It was said a bit better than I could elsewhere (link: http://www.metafilter.com/72928/Boing-Boing-Finds-21st-Century-Trotsky#2168901 ), and I’ll quote him here:

“File me in with the surprised and disappointed on this front. As much as I’m willing to listen to the arguments some folks at BB and ML have made that deleting swaths of content is generally kosher and expected (willing to listen, bound to disagree), I had assumed that the policy page over at BB was at least a reliable artifact. Changing it in the last week to fit their needs is dirty pool.

Look. Policy changes. It grows. Thing happen that make you realize that your current public-facing account of what you will and won’t do doesn’t match the needs of your site. It’s something we’ve dealt with over here how many times, in Metatalk discussions and additions/revisions of the FAQs and posting guidelines? It happens. It’s understandable.

But you talk about it. You acknowledge it. You say, “okay, these things aren’t congruent. Need for action x doesn’t match up with stated policy y, and we’re going to make a change.” That’s transparency.

You don’t make an expedient change and then point to it as if it’s long-standing policy.”

That’s what people are having a problem with; it seems almost tin-ear-ish. And now, as I’m composing this reply, I see that you’ve edited your own comment again (to add more clarification, I guess), with no note that you’ve edited it!

Islington

Now who wants ice cream?

firsttimecommener

Has anyone else noticed that post ” #581 by Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator ” has been disemvowelled?

just saying

Long time, first time. Iâ€™ve followed this thread since its beginning and I continue slogging through it, even as it devolves into nearly 100% noise as all long threads eventually do. At the risk of becoming among the unpublished, allow me to explain why Iâ€™m sticking with the thread. Since Iâ€™ve read so many of his strong opinions on the practices of others regarding transparency, revisionism, and quasi-Orwellianism, I have to ask the question, where is Cory on this issue? Or, in the language of the unposted, WH_R_â€™S C_RY? TH_ S_L_NC_ _S D__F_N_NG.

Steven Brust

Some are so devoted to BB they will hear no evil.
Some are so out to get BB they will hear no good, and are just glad for a great chance to stick their knives in.
Some (like me) were initially upset, but feel like most things have been explained and trust the Boingers with what they won’t explain.
Some are thinking that this is a great excuse to try to pry intimate details out of someone who has chosen not to share these details.
A large number of readers are uncertain, and waiting, a bit suspiciously, for the answers to why, and what next, and all like that.

And some are just hopelessly confused, but don’t realize it.

Intellectuals* can’t live without principles, which is not a bad thing. But when they discover themselves suddenly without principles, they feel the need to rush right out and pick one up off the ground, and, if there are none lying around, to grab some cardboard, duct tape, and magic markers and invent some so they’ll feel less naked. This will often have spectacularly wrong-headed results.

Thus we find, as a “matter of principle,” Do Not Ever Remove Your Blog Posts. But the question of when to remove a given blog post is not, and cannot be, a matter of principle in the abstract; rather other principles need to be applied to each situation: are there larger issues involved, what are they, and what is my position on them? if someone is being hurt, why is it okay to hurt someone in this way under these circumstances? how responsible am I to the community, and what effects will this have on it? And so on.

When I say I that I trust the Boingers, what I mean is, I believe it is these questions, in general, that they’ll be kicking around over the next days and weeks, and I trust them to find reasonable answers.

One last thing: Yes, it is easy to find a definition of “censorship” that applies to this case, all you need to do is open a dictionary. But that misses the point. To call this censorship is to underestimate the real dangers of real censorship–much like calling any authoritarian act “fascist” weakens our understanding of fascism, and makes it that much more difficult to identify the real thing when it appears. And with what Bush is doing, and what Obama and McCain seem to favor**, it is more important than ever to be aware of exactly what it means when the State uses armed might to suppress information and dissenting opinion. In other words: sure you can call this censorship; but why would you want to?

*I don’t mean to use “intellectual” as either a compliment or an insult; rather I refer to someone who habitually tries to abstract the general law from a particular situation, and to solve a particular problem through the application of the appropriate generalization. I consider this a good thing if done well, otherwise not so much.

** To me, support of undemocratic domestic spying is a step on the road to many things, including censorship in its most dangerous form, though I admit this isn’t intuitively obvious. We can argue it elsewhere.

Joel Johnson

@geekpdx: Your curiosity is natural, but airing (and hence overblowing) the details is exactly what we were trying to avoid in the first place.

Eduardo Padoan

Seems like comments with the valeysomething.com links that I was talking about at #370 are gonne. Better this way, but made me look like a idiot (which is quite normal, I dont care… :P)

aargh

now look here. i read the first 60 or so comments, and i assume the other 4oo+ is just more of the same. which is to say, ridiculous. i can’t remember the last time i saw so many references to 1984 all in one place.
so let me just say these: 1. BoingBoing is not the only channel on TV. If you don’t like what you’re watching, just change the channel. 2. When BoingBoing starts charging for access to their site, that is the moment we can start complaining about their content or practices. As long as it’s free, SHH!
That is all.

Eduardo Padoan

#958: No need to spend you words with this guys: you just need to invoke Godwin’s law. This is what it is for.

Takuan

your last paragraph

Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator

It was a group decision. Why do you think it took so long?

mdhatter

#198 for the win.

sushispook

i have the perfect face-saving solution for all parties involved…

i’m going to go to bed. and when i get up tomorrow, there’s going to be a gleeful and giggly post about how this was actually a collaboration between boing boing and violet – a bit of social engineering to drive up eachother’s traffic, and kudos to us, dear readers, for so zealously participating!

and the top five most vociferous comments shall be awarded with steampunk strap-ons. HUZZAH!

…. really, it makes about just as much sense as this entire kerfluffle.

BenBurch

@1260 @Nina – I have made a Wiki Admin aware of your posting and have referenced it on the talk page for VB’s article. That is just an amazingly bad thing you say she did to you. This person (VB) appears to have some serious boundary issues. I’m sorry this happened to you, but given what people have been emailing me about their own alleged experiences with her, I am not surprised in the slightest. You are not at all alone.

complicity

“We didn’t attempt to silence Violet. We unpublished our own work. There’s a big difference between that and censorship.”

Interesting that I can’t find my previous comment that I submitted in this discussion – basically pointing out what would happen if commenters would want to “unpublish” their own comments.

Censorship?

Takuan

and any with common sense moved on long ago

Drew from Zhrodague

I have had my mentiond on BB deleted as well. Not over a disagreement or web-(bum)-fight or anything. I think our project just got stale after a while (and we had our own drama). http://www.WiFiMaps.com

Am I upset? No. I miss the linkage, though. I still visit BB and jump into the fray wit ch’all.

What to do? I’ve experienced similar situations, where providing links to someone is a good idea at first, and then some drama occurs where doing someone a favor (like linkage, article, etc) is no longer a good idea. What to do?

GregLondon

Forgive me for my impetuousness

The first bit of honesty this entire thread…

Jake0748

But Michael, maybe there are some fanboys (and girls) who care. I guess your second sentence is wrong.

sexyrobot

OK, seriously, I’m done with this site

In light of recent activites on your website ‘BoingBoing.net’, I no longer wish to be associated with the site in any way.
I hereby request that you cease and desist using my comments or screenname on the site. Please ‘unpublish’ ALL of my comments and delete my ‘happy mutants’ profile, screenname: ‘sexyrobot’

thank you.

according to your policy page: “When readers contribute content to our sites, you retain ownership of the copyright, and you also grant permission to us to display and distribute it.”

so yeah, i’m invoking the first part of that, but not the second. why? because your policy page has been invalidated by this clause:
Changes in This Privacy Statement
If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes to this privacy statement, THE HOMEPAGE (my caps, your words), and other places we deem appropriate so that you are aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it.

specifically as it pertains to this recent addition NOT posted to THE HOMEPAGE:
We reserve the right to unpublish or refuse to unpublish anything for any or no reason
which, in light of recent events, I find morally reprehensible and displaying a lack of journalistic ethics so atrocious I no longer wish to have any association, however marginal, with your site ‘boingboing.net’ Please remove my profile, please remove my comments…all of them. I fully realize this may totally bork the continuity of your comments threads, but maybe you should of thought of that before shovelling posts down the memory hole.

thank you
‘sexyrobot’

So-Called Austin Mayor

Does Boing-Boing’s decision to “unpublish” VB posts mean that some action of hers was more objectionable — more contra-Boing-Boing — than the vile behavior of the Walt Disney Corporation?

Or will the myriad Disney posts be “unpublished” as well?

Or is Disney too big to try to control and/or punish in this manner?

Just curious.

– SCAM

acx99

Oh hi. Did I mention that I liked cake?

ROSSINDETROIT

Everyone who managed to ignore the dozen or so explanations of the technical term ‘unpublish’ and its specific characteristics, as well as the descriptions of how to find the unpublished articles:

Go stand in the corner. No dessert for you.

Nelson.C

Sirdock @1481: No, it’s a perfectly understandable collective “we” that you use when one of your friends and your shared enterprise is under attack by flying monkeys from the short wavelength end of the spectrum.

If Xeni acted alone and without consultation, the rest of the boingers have elected to support her while the shitstorm blows over. You should hope to get as much support from your workplace when you are mobbed by avian simians.

Will Shetterly

Greg, if the horse was dead, you wouldn’t have to mention it. If you did have to mention it, your post would be the final post. If you did have to mention it and a fool like me insisted it was not, the fool’s post would be the final post. Shall we see if my post is the final post?

Frankly, I’ve seen a number of good posts turn up recently. Picking only two of the more memorable, I liked the lawyer and the fellow who talked about performance art. Okay, a third: I like Random832′s point that BB trufen think anyone who questions any BB decision is a hater. The haters got bored and left a long, long time ago. The haters who didn’t get totally bored are having their fun at metafilter, not here.

And the comments by first-timers that cover old ground? That’s how they vote. It would be nice to think two people could debate this issue and then call an end to it, but democracy and anarchy are messier than that. Which is why hierarchists prefer to impose their will, of course, but I prefer freedom to tidiness.

So, if the horse is truly dead, last post!

hagbard

#1636 Blue

That’s me told.

I’m utterly embarrassed how easily I was drawn into that.

Mister Moofoo

Save the drama for Anung Un Rama. (sorry, had to).

Sean Eric FAgan

We were trying to do the right thing quietly and respectfully

I’m sure you were. Externally, however, how is that any different from (to pick an extreme, fictional example) what Winston Smith and his coworkers did?

Now, I have to quickly say I’m well aware of the differences between private and government censorship, and it’s your site, so your rules.

But you are also aware that other people have links to your stories, and now those links are, inexplicably, gone. With absolutely no explanation on your part, and (near as I can figure) no redirection.

To put it bluntly: it stinks to high heaven of a cover up. And if you act like a secret cabalistic conspiracy, don’t be surprised if some people see a secret cabalistic conspiracy :).

Lilith999

Just my tiny opinion:
I’m glad to finally hear something from BoingBoing’s side but now I’m just more confused than ever. And sad. I love BoingBoing. I really like Violet Blue. I respect both. To see these two entities taking a stance that’s any less than cooperative really boggles my mind. Why must two sites I really like be against each other? What could Violet have done to get deleted by BoingBoing? I didn’t know that anyone could do anything (besides incessant spamming and trolling) to get totally deleted like that. I totally respect BB’s right to do what they choose on their own blog and I can understand the urge to keep certain things quiet, but now there are even more questions and the silence seems suspicious. Was the issue that original caused her posts to be taken down really worth all this bad publicity and animosity now? I’ve previously agreed with all of BoingBoing’s policies, but now I’m not so sure. In the past few days I’ve seen several different blogs comment on this situation and they all make BoingBoing out to be the bad guy. I really don’t want to believe that, but without more information what am I to believe? Maybe there are issues you don’t want to reveal, but if you have a valid reason and don’t reveal it, it appears as if you have no reason at all.
I still love BoingBoing and I’m not trying to be over critical. I’m just really confused and hurt. It’s like two good friends are fighting and I can’t hang out with both of them because they refuse to be in the same room together. I know that’s not literally true, but that’s what it feels like. I don’t know what’s going on, I don’t know who to side with, and I really just don’t want to have to choose in the first place.

Joel Johnson

@Random832 (#961): No, we haven’t. And even if we had, we obviously have a lot more information and perspective to add to the equation.

Will Shetterly

Greg @1079, for a simple example, I can no longer trust BB’s archives. Suppose I wanted to find the Top 10 Sex Memes from 2006 that VB wrote and Xeni posted–it’s gone. What else is missing? Should I even bother to look for things here, since they can go without warning or explanation?

Mdhatter, it’s true that if you have low expectations, you’ll never be disappointed. But I don’t think “lower your expectations–we’re business as usual!” should be boingboing’s new motto.

I’ll try to disengage from this debate now.

hagbard

1199 Burnchao

I have to take exception with your characterization of what happened:”I do recognize that you and some other principal Boingers have been trying to bring the level of discourse down from the antagonizing level that your mods brought it to, and I appreciate that someone is finally starting to have an open dialogue with us.”

I’ve read the entire thread, and participated in much of it. The moderators did not bring the level of discourse to the level that it reached. It was there already, and it was going where it was going, and it took some time to burn out. Reread the whole thread if you don’t believe me.

Archeaopteryx

People involved with a project often say “us” and “we” when that isn’t actually accurate.

Will Shetterly

Since the boingers are considering changes in policy, I have a serious one now: Drop all politics from the site. Then, if a post disappears, no one will wonder if it was removed for matters of principle, and if a moderator disemvowells someone like Zosima in the current Tibet thread, no one will think the moderator is abusing his or her power for partisan reasons. Politics are messy. Perhaps Boingboing should stick to things that make people go boingboing.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator

TylerSweeney, you haven’t been a very careful reader. Go back and try again.

dwdyer

I can’t wade through all the comments, but I figured I’ve been a BB fan since it was in print, so I might as well join the hoards trying to boil the ocean. IBTL!

1. Censorship it’s not.
2. Yes, BBfolk can do whatever they want with the site.
3. Just because something is not censorship and because BBfolk can do whatever they want with the site doesn’t mean an action should be shielded from criticism.

IMO, unpublishing blog posts, unless the posts presented unwarranted legal exposure, is antithetical to the Spirit of Blog. (If there is such a thing.)

Someone way up there in this thread said that having a link constituted endorsement and removing the link was a way to retract endorsement.

That’s akin to the fundies who think that if the government legalizes something, they’re endorsing it.

But here’s what this reveals, and why the Spirit of Blog is B.S.:

1. Everyone’s petty.
2. Everyone’s out to create and maintain their reputations, if not make a buck.
3. No one is immune to this.
4. Everyone’s shocked when these truths are revealed.

No, BB is not a wonderful happy place of idealism and extended virtual family.

It’s run by people promoting themselves and their ideas, and if they believe those ends are best suited by deleting old posts, they’ll delete them.

Nothing hating in what I said — I do think that the reaction here does indicate that maybe the BBfolk should ask — are we a business that generates traffic and ad revenue? Are we a community forum? How are we different from other nifty-cool sites? How do we want to interact with our readers? Are our readers our customers or our product?

-W-

woid

Coupla things, kind of OT, but at this point in the thread, what isn’t?

People who cry out “conspiracy theory” might stop and think. A conspiracy is people working together (in secret) to do something. Deleting — sorry, “unpublishing” — VB’s posts was done by a group (the BBers) behind the scenes. My theory: that’s a conspiracy.

People on the web use “conspiracy theory” the same way they use Godwin’s Law — to squash whatever someone’s saying, ignoring the non-Nazi-referencing parts of what they have to say. In this case Hitler’s been replaced by Orwell, with people shrieking that this is NOT “1984.” No, it isn’t… but “unpublishing” is still doublespeak.

It amuses/annoys me when “conspiracy theory” is the buzzword aimed at people on the web who talk (not that I necessarily agree with them) about, shall we say, alternative narratives behind 9/11 or the motivations for the Iraq war. Of COURSE there were conspiracies in those cases. The question is, who conspired?

The use of “conspiracy theory” as an argument-ending putdown started, I think, with the JFK assassination — although, 45 years later, we still don’t know if there WAS a conspiracy there.

Not to elevate the BB/VB dustup to that kind of historical level or anything. But let’s use words to mean what they mean. This was (self-)censorship. Whether or not it’s justified is another question. And it was a “conspiracy” too. No reason to shut down debate.

Personally, I agree with all the commenters who’ve said that BB was within its rights, but handled this stupidly.

Finally… after reading 300+ comments, here’s a simple key to who’s wrong here. The many commenters who put apostrophes in the wrong place are wrong. Disregard them. Also the ones who leave out apostrophes that should be there.

Unless, of course, the apostrophes were merely “unpublished” by Boing Boing.

nemo

Just in case anyone was wondering, Violet has stated she has no idea why her posts were 1984′d.

http://www.tinynibbles.com/blogarchives/2008/06/when-transparency-does-not-equal-erased.html#comment-1705

Talia

The fanboys will stay, the people who overreact will leave.

FTFY

johnny_action

I don’t care at this point about VB or what ever she did/did not do. I love boingboing and as a directory of wonderful things I think it is totally permissible to change your mind about linking or posting to something.

I for one know that I’ve gone through and made posts private or friends only after thinking twice about it.

I applaud BB for letting us know they removed the content and also where to find it.

As for journalistic integrity this blog shows much more integrity than your average livejournal.

ROSSINDETROIT

So many bytes devoted to this issue and no end in sight. I never thought I’d look back fondly on the squabbles over Little Brother book signings.
C’mon, Cory! post the bestseller rankings or something. Anything to yank us out of this terminal rut.

acx99

I love this site and its editors/contributors but the silent application of the Airbrush of History is not cool. What were you thinking?! Moreso its not like no-one would ever notice, and if/when the target of the “unpublishing” noticed you’d be guaranteed to have a good ol’ shitstorm of an Internet Argument on your hands which combined with your frankly weasel worded statements worthy of only the lowliest government spin doctor (“we didnt attempt to silence…we unpublished our own work” – come now, you’re better than that) and lack of openness and on the situation is one you’d be guaranteed to lose, which of course you have done – hence the ~1500 post thread.

So you had a spat with a one-time friend and contributor. So what? Stop accepting her contributions.

I still enjoy your site though, and I still will, but please guys – practice what you preach and behave like the cool people you really are :)

remmelt

Re: the chocolate cookies.

I’ve left them in the fridge for a while and now they are stuck together and I can’t get them apart for the life of me.

(to all the people who want to know the nature of the issue between bb and vb: you are gossips. It’s OK, just admit to it (see #355) and move on. You can now scroll up and (re-?)read comment #199)

jcushman

To the BoingBoing crew — I would like to chime in as one more person disappointed by this choice. Your voice has been a powerful one for transparency and the free flow of information on the internet, and it will be just a little less powerful now.

Consider, for example, this deleted post about a Google algorithm change that inexplicably dropped sex-positive blogs in the rankings. Posts like that are an important watchdog for the community, but if you posted the same thing tomorrow, you would have to start by distinguishing your own opaque deletions. Your distinctions might be right — but readers would have to wonder if the real distinction was just that it wasn’t you doing it.

Again, I appreciate all the work you’ve done, and I understand why you might feel jumped on right now, but please don’t dismiss all the complaints — some of them are because we like you.

Antinous

Single-serving commenters who’ve shown up to stand in a circle chanting, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” won’t know this, but regular readers will. We get comments every day accusing BoingBoing of Orwellian, soul-sucking, Stalinist censorship. Every day. Day in, day out. And those concerns have been addressed every day. Being puffed up with outrage may be new to you, but it’s old to us. Come up with something that hasn’t been said a hundred times and it’ll be taken seriously. Really, we’re very conscientious here at the Department of Disemvowelment and Unpublishing. Keep calm and carry on.

GregLondon

1091: I’ve shot my wad in trying to explain to you that your disrepect for the motives people bring to this discussion somehow invalidates their participation

Your “wad” consisted entirely of fighting broken links. That’s is. That’s the only claim you have in this thread. I”m not invalidating your position, because that’s the only position that you would claim for yourself. Everything else is wrapped up in passive voice stuff like “there are reasons for this shitstorm”. Well, I was asking you what YOUR reason was. If you’re just here because everyone else is, then you’re just partaking in a pileon. If you have some other reason that YOU are here, you haven’t stated.

The only other thing that you mentioned was Teresa saying your point was “nonsense” which seems to have made it personal for you. And you seem inconsolable on that, so, not much I can do other than try to get you see it from BB’s point of view, but since you’re not willing, I don’t know what else to tell you.

Lindsay Beyerstein

@Xeni

Maybe I’m misunderstanding how the Violet Blue material ended up on BoingBoing.

Were the posts under a VB byline, or under your byline?

If the deleted posts were your bylines about her, then I don’t see a problem. I figure bloggers have the right to delete their own material–unless there’s some overarching institutional policy, or stated individual commitment, to maintaining a more comprehensive record.

mdhatter

@1387 – until 2 days ago I forgot how much I like pie.

Archeaopteryx

I have a nifty game for us to play; Who is Jonathan Moore’s sock puppet(s) on this thread? Because you know he absolutely HAS to be here as he is just very involved in editing her article over at Wikipedia at the moment.

Winner gets an free McDonald’s Double Cheeseburger and the acclaim of dozens!

joshmillard

People are only confused (and then angry) because they can’t separate the BB server from the BB content.

That’s far from true. I wouldn’t describe myself as anything like “angry” about any of this — I’m an occasional reader and don’t hold any hard-line position that BB shouldn’t be allowed to take down its own content, and have grappled directly with these issues as a moderator over at Metafilter. And I know full well that most of it is probably cached (e.g. Wayback) or excerpted/copied (misc. other blogs), for someone who is likely to assume it was removed by BB (and not just a bad link) and who is willing to go digging for it.

For all that, and calm, essentially disinterested third party that I am, there are aspects of the initial event (setting aside any discussion of the post-blowup handling etc) that bother me.

The removal of content at the source is something that should only be done for a good reason, and a reason in scope and scale with the removal, and should be done with disclosure to the degree possible.

(And let’s be clear here: you can dismiss the BB link as “just a copy”, but if that’s the link one goes to follow (and traffic fountain that BB is, in many cases it likely will be) and that’s the one that’s dead, that other copies exist is at best a thin mitigation of the damage done.)

Xeni can argue scope and scale re: her close-to-the-vest reasons for the removal, but disclosure of the removal wasn’t even in the neighborhood on this one. I think that’s just a plain bad call, personally, and there’s a lot of other reasonable, non-wingnut folks on the internet who have been saying the same thing for the last few weeks. They’re neither necessarily angry nor confused; they’re surprised, and disappointed.

Nora Rocket

Yep. Save the drama for the llamas.

redsquares

Anytime anybody says anything and takes it back, or recalls a memory with a bit of fluff, or withholds facts about what they did with their girlfriend last night, I’m gonna call them a First Amendment Hater, a lover of Censorship, and make those all so creative references to BigBrother.

@ Boingboing: Handled poorly, but right.

tillwe

@Faustus:

“I luv boingboing, but you(1) shouldn’t do this”

(1) by you I mean bOINGbOING, not Faustus.

Matt Sanderson

There’s no way I’m reading this entire thread or keeping up with it, but I just thought I’d throw in my two cents.

You have every right to control what you post (or “unpost,” as the case may be) on your own damn blog. Why this isn’t common sense to everyone here, well, it’s beyond me. It’s not like they’re censoring her. They’ve simply decided that they don’t want to promote her anymore.

Good grief, people. Grow up.

mdhatter

I gotta defend Antinous here – he’s pointing out that many of the most negative, most vitriolic statements in this thread have been made by first timers, and isn’t that interesting.

I didn’t read it as being the other way around. Truly, most of the angriest least productive comments are from people who have made no positive suggestions here, or other comments o other posts, and are acting like their eyeballs will be missed. I doubt they will be. I doubt most of them were readers in the first place.

David Pescovitz

The only other posts that I personally know of that have been unpublished have been dupes, like when I post about something that, say, Mark blogged about two years (or two days) previously and I forgot about. I can’t think of any others at all.

zaxis

Links are the driving force of the internet. Every “link” is support for the resulting page. If you no longer support someone or something, you should remove the link; Even if it results in removing past blog posts.

Gainclone

Has anyone here ever read a book that wasn’t written by George Orwell? You know there are other books, right?

Like “Everybody Poops”

Tubman

@#399, Joel:

As we said in the original post, there was clearly some fucking up here on our part, although I can report that even in our internal discussions we weren’t entirely sure what a better course of action might have been. And it’s difficult to say “We’ll never do that again” when we’re not sure what a better option would have been.

Are you channelling Donald Rumsfeld?

A few observations:
i) a lone moron will usually reach better decisions than a committee of smart people
ii) unpublishing is to self-censorship as water-boarding is to torture
iii)private issues are not best dealt with via your publication.

Next time, try amending your Christmas card lists.

Oh, and now would probably be a great time to dig 50 or so “wonderful things” out of your reject piles.

Tarasbulbasaur

IMO, the way out of this was to say something like …

“About a year ago, we marked a few old posts as hidden, because they referred favorably to someone we no longer want to be associated with. Many of you called us out for making that choice, because we so often advocate for other media outlets to leave their content open and visible. And you’re right–we tend to prefer that major publishers from Digg to the New York Times leave up the meaningful content that they’ve already published. That’s a pretty high standard, and to be honest, we just hadn’t thought of BoingBoing as being in the same league … We hadn’t thought of its archives as a cultural artifact to leave alone, in spite of any flaws. Indeed, we’re still not sure that’s the case, and we may revise our content policy in the future. But we’ve marked the old articles as published in response to your thoughtful feedback. The past is what it is, and we’re fine with anyone having a look at it. Please understand, however, that for personal reasons we no longer wish to be associated with Violet Blue, and we don’t intend to publish articles about her in the future.”– Signed, Hypothetical Boinger

But that’s just what I like to think I’d have done in your position. I’m slightly more sure I wouldn’t have called people blockheads or liars.

Shawn Struck

David:

But we’ll try to be even more specific and clearer in the future with regard to changes. Thanks!

And thank you for listening, acknowledging, and seeing where you all l can approve. Your excellent and even-headed manner is pretty much what is giving me hope for BB, and keeping me here still visiting the site.

tillwe

@1312 Oh hi. Did I mention that I liked cake?

You don’t like cake anymore?

PeaceLove

#1442 Hagbard:

You’ve accused BB of psychological violence,

You are totally misrepresenting what I wrote earlier. Here’s my exact comment:

“I agree with Hiram in principle. Removing all references to a person on a well-known blog can be a kind of emotional and psychological violence. Whether the term is correctly applied in this situation I don’t know, since I don’t know the circumstances that led to the removal. Without any intended insult to Ms. Blue, I tend to trust the integrity and good intentions of the BoingBoing team.”

Gosh, pretty damning stuff, eh?

You’ve demanded their surrender and sought to impose penance on them.

Are you referring to this:

“This isn’t fatal to BB, and most of us assume your intentions were perfectly noble. But many of us feel you messed up big time and need to respond in an official capacity immediately.”

I was trying to communicate that their silence, and their decision to defer their response to undiplomatic moderators, was helping to turn this incident into a major PR disaster for them.

You’ve declared who is sufficiently contrite and who is still damned.

??

You’ve even threatened them.

Whu-what? What on earth are you talking about?

And you’ve sought repeatedly to draw Cory into your office so you can help save his soul too.

Have you even read my comments? They’re all there in my profile if you need to see them again.

Here’s what I said:

“I’d like to see Cory address this; among the editors I think he carries the most authority on matters of free speech, Net transparency, and the structure of the Web.”

This sentiment has been expressed by others in the thread. It has nothing to do with me or anyone else “saving his soul,” or even suggesting he or anyone else has a soul in need of saving. It’s because I and many others love his writing and am interested to know what he thinks of this whole brouhaha.

Suspicious? “It’s so interesting to me that Cory is away when this all breaks. The one voice so many of us are the most interested to hear from, strangely silent.”

I didn’t mean to say it was suspicious, in a conspiracy way (you RAW fans!). I said it was interesting in a “the universe act in mysterious ways” way. Sorry if you misunderstood me.

Please read peoples’ comments more carefully before throwing around such accusations in the future.

PeaceLove, for real.

Gainclone

It’s your blog, you can do with it what you like. I will continue to read it because it is fantastic.

I wasn’t up on this Violet Blue issue, but it sounds like a mess, and I think the best one can do with a mess is clean it up! You’re not revising history, you’re IMPROVING it!

I probably would have done the same thing, anyway. If the shit hits the fan, then it’s time to stop throwing shit.

And probably get rid of the fan. Then buy central air conditioning.

Talia

Thanks for the update, it’s appreciated.

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“vryn pstng nlgs, hypthtcl sttns nd tryng t rsn t wht th crrct thng t d r mssng th pnt.. Tht’s nt wht hppnd. Th rsns fr th ctn r nknwn t s”

hng23

I’ve been skimming through comments here & I cannot believe the presumption & hysteria & vituperation of some commenters. First of all, BB is only a blog, regardless of its popularity & influence. Secondly, it’s not your blog; if you don’t like BB’s peaches, quit shaking their tree. Thirdly, how important will this ‘thing’ be in 5 years? Five months, five weeks? Next week? I see an great deal of energy being expended on something that, in the grand scheme of things, is awfully unimportant.

Talia

“Come up with something that hasn’t been said a hundred times”

The BB moderators are all actually 16-armed lizardlike flying telepathic aliens who club baby seals and stalk Barbra Streisand.

What do I win?

Antinous

The BB moderators are all actually 16-armed lizardlike flying telepathic aliens who club baby seals and stalk Barbra Streisand.

Pics or it didn’t happen. Also, Cory’s vegan, so the seals are out.

tillwe

@antinous (somewhere around 600): After skimming 550-775 after breakfast I have to agree that there is much repetition. In fact, the usual scheme is A-B-A-B-A-B…-A-B, with A (or B) one of the post of the suspects you named stating and repeating the reasons why this is something we did not expect from BoingBoing, and the other one is by someone like GregLondon, Talia or even the Moderator telling us that we are wrong and there is nothing to see here. Either one triggers the others to restate their position. I demand ;-) a official name-calling of the B-group for repetitive positing, and are happy to have found some C and D opinions in my morning reading. And I’m still waiting for the official Z posting setting things straight, finally.

@Hagbard: in regard to the transatlantic time-lag, and the length of the thread, I won’t go into the specifics of Creative Common etc.

ErosBacchus

Wow, I hate that I’m starting to feel like I have to screenshot Xeni’s comments, because they’ll be different in minutes or hours than they were when I read them first.

Xeni, do you understand that when people read what you wrote, they sometimes respond? And that when they respond to what you wrote the first time, and people who came by minutes later see you as having written something different, it makes the responders look bad?

Do you further understand that it’s not nice to make people look bad in this way?

Even a little “comment edited [timestamp]” tag would serve to avoid this. Is that too much to ask?

holtt

There’s ice cream in this BBTv thread

Lizzle

Mdhatter at 1384 – if this were Wikipedia, I would be coming after you with a tag about now. Where are these posters you think are sockpuppets?

It’s probable that first-time commenters will be coming here angry – after all, if they are regular readers who have been reticent about commenting before now, something pretty anger-making must have happened just now to encourage them to set up and use an account when they’ve previously been happy just reading BB. I don’t think that it points at conspiracy, rather that it points at the fact that there are a lot of different ways people find themselves feeling emotionally invested in websites – through taking part in comments threads, through regular reading of the main text, and, for some, lurking in comments without posting.

AGF

I could never watch the flying monkeys when I was a kid. I’d hide. I think my husband actually made his dad leave the theatre with him for that bit of the movie. Flying monkeys are freakin scary! I want pie and puppies to share it with ;)

Will Shetterly

On the other hand, perhaps Boingboing should spend a few days directly addressing politics. If you’re pro-CIA/NED/RWB, just say so. It’s nice to know people’s biases.

And that, I pray, is the last thing I have to say in this thread. Those who want it to continue will have to carry on without me.

Church

Teresa, considering that you won’t talk about what VB did to merit the bb memory hole yourselves, I think it’s entirely appropriate to call that off topic, yes.

I’m concerned about bb’s actions, which are, as far as I understand, entirely independent of VB’s.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator

Bubbleman @1749, I believe that’s been said too.

Church @1750, 1759: I’m finding the concept of Boing Boing’s actions being entirely independent of Ms. Blue to be very attractive indeed. From your mouth to God’s ears, as they say.

Let me restate my earlier question: If we haven’t zapped messages in wholesale lots for irrelevancies far less arguable than Archaeopteryx’s, how is it your place to demand that Archaeopteryx conform to your idiosyncratic notions of relevancy?

If on the other hand you insist on declaring war on irrelevancy, when are you going to get around to chiding all those other, much more glaring instances in the comments? You’re way behind on the thread.

DamonTFB @1757, don’t think I didn’t notice that.

Jim @1751, I believe they’re still talking it over.

Xobmai @1753, see Johne Cook @1754. Everything sounds Orwellian if you say it the right way. Orwell manufactured horror out of plain standard English.

ggolan

Greetings,
I have avoided saying anything in this thread because I felt that there was nothing I could say that had not already been said by those smarter and better informed than myself. I have lately only returned with the hope that there would be some nugget of information hinting to the more complete response promised to us weeks ago. What I find is something that has degraded into anything but wonderful.

I come here now to implore you, Boing Boing to shut this thread down.

Free speech is a wonderful right that we have, but as a community we generally decided that blatant hate speech is simply unacceptable. Regardless of the nature of the reason for the unpublishing, we should not accept people wildly speculating and eventually slandering all those involved. No one here in their right mind would knock on all their neighbors doors telling them that the Johnsons down the block liked to kill puppies with a spork on the roof of their car at the full moon. Yet thanks to the anonymity of the internet people are embolden to scream from the rooftops just that.

Though the moderators have thankfully taken a relatively relaxed stance on this topic to give people the leeway to express their anger and frustration at both VB and BB, that should not preclude them from moderating the things that are said only to hurt and defame others. This discussion has at times become too heated that the moderators themselves have had to be moderated to remove their own acidic, slanderous statements, but for some reason I return to continued hate and anger being tolerated and possibly even encouraged.

So again, I implore you Boing Boing, stop this. I want nothing more than to give you as a collective the chance to think this through and deal with it appropriately. Evidence in this thread shows that quick and rash statements have only caused more trouble. Your silence does hurt, and to a degree I feel like I am being ignored, but I am willing to tolerate it in order to give you the time to reach a place were you feel comfortable with your decision.

None the less, letting this continue makes you complicit to the worst that is being said. I have been listening to you all for many years now and I know full well that this complicity is simply not true, but the feeling is getting harder to ignore the longer this is allowed to continue. The thread has served its purpose, a great discussion was held here about something that is crucial to this new age of information, but it is done, do not let the worst of those who would participate tarnish your reputation any longer.

Infamous Brad

I don’t pretend that my blog is even 1/100th as important as yours, and I’m not in the habit of telling other bloggers how to run their blogs — but I wouldn’t have done what you did. At the very least, I wouldn’t have done it without one holy heck of a reason.

I’m guessing that I know what this is about. It’s entirely your right to decided not to let her publish more stuff to the blog. But was it a sane, reasonable reaction to go back and mass delete everything she ever contributed? It doesn’t seem like one to me, and it absolutely seems like an over-reaction to the personal politics she was going through at the time.

GregLondon

@196: I can understand that you may have ‘personal’ and ‘private’ reasons for doing these things, but have you told Violet why you’ve done this? She still claims to be in the dark.

Do you honestly care? Or are you looking for something flammable to keep this bonfire going?

Antinous

Ross,

To me you’ll always be that cousin that I really like but will never visit because he lives in Detroit.

Valchael

Ah, Crap. I left out one thing even though I previewed my comment:

The propensity for blogs to air their grievances with another party by instantly talking about it with their readers publicly instead of working it out with the other party simply screams “LOOK AT ME!!!!!! LOOK AT ME!!!!!!” and the medieval “I DON’T KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON REALLY BUT I MUST GET REVENGE FOR THIS.”

Sorry for caps and having comment number 777 is exciting in a small meaningless way.

Blue

(my first name is NOT Violet – plz don’t delete my account or tell people I never existed. thx.)

I take it with this fiasco and the recently added ‘unpublishing’ endorsement on the policies page, BoingBoing will nolonger be a champion of anti-censorship, standing against secret revisionism and standing up for journalistic integrity and ethics?

A shame, since they were the core values I identified with here.

Still, there are always the papercraft posts to keep the site in content!

(Awaits the first papercraft unpublishing Hoo-Ha with … indifference.)

GregLondon

tillwe@1089: @all: Is there a graceful way to say “you just don’t get it?”.

Yeah, tell me what harm BB did to you by deleting its posts about VB? That’d be a start. Put this into real terms, rather than having first timers posting with “fury” that no one “gets”.

If it was emotional harm, try to be specific.

If you can’t explain it directly, I’m not sure how you expect people to understand. Who did what to whom, when, and the damage/harm it caused YOU.

Xeni Jardin

@p00pyhead I wish Movable Type allowed us to stick kittens next to comments we felt a fondness and enthusiastic agreement toward. I would give you a lot of kittens.

@Lindsay Beyerstein, they were under my byline, some of them were about her work, others were not but included a reference and a link as thanks for a tip.

@everyone, +1 to what Pesco said about the nature of other deleted or unpublished items. We’ve made many errors, addressed them publicly, and left posts intact; we’ve changed our mind about things, and left those posts intact, too.

Part of the issue here, as we’re realizing, involves the power of a link — which, if a blog has large enough footprint, can involve money.

Nelson.C

Please close this thread. If we’re stuck in a loop of explaining what “unpublish” means and why the word was used, followed by yet another commenter who has apparently read enough to form an opinion about the word, but hasn’t read any of the dozen or so previous loops of explanation and complaint, then it has come to its natural end.

Satan

To say BB “removed their own work” when they “unpublished” Violet Blue’s words is the kind of spin job of the highest caliber. I salute BB’s resolve in keeping the peasants at bay. After all, a private entity run by very astute individuals owes no explanation to the masses. I admire the jackhammering logo of BB as a true symbol of strength as we continue to make this world wonderful by destroying and erasing away those who refuse to conform with our wonderful goals.

Talia

if they left the posts up, you could potentially still find those links doing a search. Those posts, old as they may be, are new/current to the viewer. Finding articles related to the person in question still implies the media outlet is supporting said person. And as previously mentioned, any derivative web traffic the person recieves is, in fact, unintentional support.

So what do they do. Be all half-assed about their non-support?

Antinous

unpublishing is to self-censorship as water-boarding is to torture

Thanks, Tubman. We didn’t have enough histrionics yet.

Burnchao

@cherry shiva:

calling this “rewriting history” is baloney and rather myopic. boingboing is not in the business of writing history at all.

boingboing altered their archives to make it look like they never performed action X. They rewrote their history. It can’t be described more simply than that. If you pretend you never did something when you actually have done it, you are rewriting your history. I don’t believe you when you pretend you don’t understand that.

Antinous

If you pretend you never did something when you actually have done it, you are rewriting your history.

What’s the pretense? This happened a year ago. Nobody gave a shit. Had anyone asked a year ago, it would have been answered. What are you on about?

Archeaopteryx

Xeni,

Can you comment on how BB, or at least you, feel about the trademark litigation against the porn actress now known as “Noname Jane?”

Thanks!

Nelson.C

Teresa disemvowelled herself? That’s hard-core moderation.

mdhatter

@1534 – Well said. Very well said. I think you just made me look at blogging in a new way. Thanks for that.

Church

“Good enough for you to keep demanding access to the dirty laundry of a company you don’t work for, and whose product you don’t pay for, and who still extend you the privilege to ask them questions anyhow.”

Which company? Verizon? AT&T? Bell Canada?

just saying

ROSSINDETROIT #1656

Again, that’s adorable. But, the man has responsibilities to his principles.

alephnul

s fr s “crng wht hppns n Bng Bng”, Dn’t nymr.

ws jst chckng n t s f y hd gttn vr bng Mcrsft whrs, nd ths s th frst thng s. Y’ll r jst gng t sld n dwn tht slppry slp s, s dn’t thnk tht wll vn bthr chckng bck n nymr.

Gd lck n ll y d. Y sd t hv grt blg.

AlexReynolds

You talk about “choice of language” after a little gem like that?

If you can try to extrapolate from the larger point Orwell was making, then it’s clear that using the terms “unpublishing” and “own work” as euphemisms for the censorship that appears to have taken place is troubling for a site that claims to be against censorship. Indeed, that such terms were used would seem to indicate a level of discomfort with the act of deleting material of VB and others who referred to her — why use doublespeak, if there is nothing wrong with deleting the material in question?

David Pescovitz

@JCUSHMAN (#509), Thanks. I hear you.

hpr122i

Xeni: “I considered them representative of my voice and my work and my person.” (1206)

So could you say that, at the time you decided to unpublish those post, made by Xeni0 at a certain time, were not reprentative of Xeni1 a couple of months/years later?

I may be wrong, but I think many people would have cut you a lot of slack if you had replaced them by somthing like “The post you are trying to access has been removed. For personal reasons, I no longer consider them representative of my voice, my work and my person — XJ.”

At least I would have.

But then yeah, the jackasses at ValleyWag would have gone “OMG Xeni Violet OMG”. But we already knew we can’t have nice things.

Johne Cook

I agree with #1378 in that honest conversation begins with the terms, but argue that in order for that to happen, we should be using correct terms, and not just familiar ones.

How can we have any kind of constructive debate if you can’t even see clear to accept the actual industry language of the software when it has been clearly explained?

Anybody who has seen the back end of a blog understands the concept of “unpublished.” Whether it is the terminology used by Movable Type or the terminology used by WordPress or other blogging software, the concept itself is straight-forward.

Anybody who has read (or even skimmed) this thread should understand by now what “unpublished” means as used in this story and this case; that “unpublished” has a specific meaning apart from “deleted” or “removed” and even “redacted.”

“Unpublished” is a software term that refers to an unmangled, non-deleted post that is no longer viewable by the public-at-large at the site where it was originally published. Those posts continue to exist in a database but are no longer available for public consumption. At BoingBoing, it does allow for archived copies of the posts to continue to exist elsewhere, just not here.

Because those posts are still available in some form, “deleted” is incorrect terminology at best and disingenuous at worst, which doesn’t help the debate. The posts weren’t nuked or destroyed, they were simply pulled back out of public view while remaining in existence. It’s not a trivial distinction.

As much as I understand the argument for “redacted,” the term carries baggage of its own, suggesting in at least one sense that the posts may have been edited or revised. They were not. While they were pulled back, they remain whole but outside of immediate public view.

“Removed” could sound like deleted, although I grant that depends on the context of the sentence. One could write the posts were removed from view but still exist in the database. However, as we’ve already learned, there’s already a single word that means just that, “unpublished.” I’ve long said that the single correct word, regardless of size, can take the place of many smaller, dumber words. I usually grin when I say that. ;)

There are real questions to be asked and debated and pondered. Continuing to make a stink about the terminology used obfuscates those more pertinent questions.

ROSSINDETROIT

You’re pretty cute yourself, but it’s a blog, not the drafting of the Magna Carta.

funeralpudding

I went to the Violet Blue thread and all I got was this stupid T-shirt.

madrabbit

Based on the stated reasons for unpublishing the posts, it seems there’s a good and simple middle ground balancing the desire to not promote VB and the readers’ desire to not see retroactive editing (if the latter is a fair summation of dozens of individual posts).

Simply go back, repost dimemvoweled versions of the original BB posts and remove any hyperlinks that point into VB’s site.

blacken blue

Much ado about nothing. How would you all like it if your parents forced you to keep hanging out with the drama-mongering kid next door who makes a living writing essays about their crotch, suing indigent, single mom sex workers, and stalking their alleged stalkers by screen capturing every single thing they write and saving all their dynamic IP addresses? It’s like being forced to hang with the leper even if you’d rather play with your cool friends.

At least boingboing doesn’t cry RAPE or STALKER whenever a male does something they disagree with. Quietly unlinking someone is tons more mature and honorable than the former which is VB modus operandi.

This is a directory of wonderful things not one person’s PR vehicle.

Doesn’t anyone consider that her wondering publicly about this was a calculated ploy into forcing BB to publicly address what should be a private matter? Most people ask for clarification privately and quietly wait for the answer. No answer IS an answer. Unless you’re a stalker.

This is a publicity ploy and you’re all falling for it. Just look at her wikipedia entry discussion and history page. Her ‘close personal friend’ is frantically updating it regarding this matter as it unfolds. Isn’t wikipedia supposed to be encyclopedic? Her’s is maintained up to date like a vanity blog.

Trying to garner sympathy from the hordes of people who don’t really know what’s going on is pretty pathetic. Majority does not always rule and wanting to handle something privately does not automatically make a person wrong.

Already way too much bandwidth has been wasted on this non-issue.

sushispook

#654 – see #650

hpr122i

Joel:

Have you seen this (http://www.metafilter.com/72928/Boing-Boing-Finds-21st-Century-Trotsky#2169169)? I can’t say I’m an expert, but it does seem like a good plan.

If you can’t get in touch with the other BBers, maybe a front-page post explaining that you need time to do so + closing comments everywhere?

Drastic, I know. Could backfire (not an expert here). In any case, please talk to disinterested people with experience on this. Good luck to you all.

mdhatter

Will, again, I didn’t say lower your expectations.

I said manage them.

Please, words are used for a reason. If you will-fully substitute what I say for what you want to hear, then you’re not engaging with me – but instead with a strawman you put in front of me.

Please consider my advice and manage your expectations.

My expectations have been raised by this s-storm.

transmothra

Wow. Speaking as a huge fan of BB, VB (though decreasingly so), and the individual Boingers, i can say that

1) Boing Boing is a blog, people. Get over it.

2) I don’t recall any promises ever having been made that Boingers will never ever modify any of their works nor take back anything they’ve said or done. That they are not always 100% perfectly perfect and their posts are not etched in granite for the rest of eternity is not a huge drawback here, especially since there are numerous sources which have archives anyway, if you really MUST have access to this material in order to survive.

3) This blog is an extension of the lives of some people who live in meatspace like the rest of us, who are imperfect like the rest of us, and who occasionally decide to hit the do-over switch like the rest of us.

4) I forgot what this one was.

5) To paraphrase Walt Whitman: BB contradicts itself? Very well then! BB are large; they contain multitudes.

Also, I can’t help but wonder: are there really not more important things to debate? Really? Nothing else happening in the world right now worthy of this much pixelsteam and textfire? Really? REALLY? You people must live in a far, far blander world than i.

GregLondon

People who cry out “conspiracy theory” might stop and think.

Thinking sort of went out the window a long time ago.

By the way, your tin hat is a bit slanted.

Faustus

@GabrielM

WIN GET! …although everyone knows that every get is really a mod get…

RobOz

Long time fan of the blog, first time commenter. (I’ll assume that all this fuss is a secret membership drive.)

BoingBoing is one of three blogs I read every day, no matter what, so I am a bit perturbed by the way Teresa the Parody of a Moderator is acting.

The situation with Violet Blue is a bad one, but as much as I respect the regular contributing staff of this blog, I trust that they made the right decision somehow. Teresa, on the other hand, should never be allowed to interact with BoingBoing’s readers.

The more I read the comments posted by her, the more I think this whole thing is a hoax, simply because of the over the top, ugly way she is acting.

Teresa, you would not have a job “moderating” if it weren’t for the people you are attempting to insult.

Xeni Jardin

Shawn, sorry, I didn’t realize that expanding my own comment, rather than adding a new post to this thread, would be problematic. I guess in this environment, given the tone of the thread, afterthoughts/additions should go in a new comment.

So: yeah, the fact that the post didn’t point to the changed policy was a screwup. Honestly. There was no coordinated decision to hide or downplay that change, I swear.

XJ

Righteous Bubba

Is anyone still wincing at 2 girls 1 cup or LOLing at LOLcats? If you really wanted to find it you’d go to Google not BB.

On the contrary I remember specific BB posts and try to look them up again when I think the subject matter should be passed along. In other words it fucks me up when stuff winds up missing as has happened. Obviously they’re not here to cater to my needs specifically and if they did it would be a more boring place, but the understanding of what this place means to the non-proprietors is a little off.

All newspapers, for instance, are private concerns and you can count on an uproar if they suddenly decide to purge their archives of mentions of X guy, regardless of whether or not it’s within their rights to do so. The pretense that blogging is somehow more ephemeral than news is rendered false by the number of people who archive stuff or link to stuff from years ago.

I don’t care much about the subject matter here, but the policy debate is interesting. Nice to see the bosses mixing it up.

Random832

Speaking of comment-permalinks, I noticed they are of the form “#comment-231022″ – I assume this number 231022 is globally unique (my completely unsupported speculation is that it’s an autoincrement field in the comments table)? You could display _that_ number to allow people to identify what comment they’re responding to.

I’d also like to mention again that as long as we’re discussing features that could be added to the comment system, how about dividing it into pages of 100 comments or so each. You could have options to do that or display them all on one page.

minTphresh

xeni, i’ve had ex’s before who have tried to insert themselves back into my life for whatever reason, and i wished i could ‘unpublish’ them or at the very least, ‘disemvowell ‘em! wash your hands of the beeotch, grrrrl, and get back to the wonderful. chicks, eh? what are ya gonna do?

Unanimous Cowherd

It’s your blog. You can do what you want with it.

It also reinforces my reason over a year ago to give up on Metafilter. After enduring endless rounds of trollflamepoutyfights and yesyoudidohnoyoudidnts, I gave up on Metafilter completely.

Haven’t missed it.

BenBurch

@1273 @GREGLONDON – “Concern Troll” is the word that comes to mind here for most of these critics.

Nelson.C

Glammajamma @1654: http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/01/that-violet-blue-thi.html#comment-228874

Maybe they will. They haven’t decided yet.

buttseks

How in the hell did I miss a thread this great??

evilgenius

we have always been at war with Eurasia.

Talia

Now, that’s not true, #387. If you criticize BB nonconstructively and are an ass about it, yeah, your post will be deleted. I’ve seen plenty of meritous, well thought out criticisms be left alone.

Some people dont understand the concept of posting civilly and/or intelligently, however. (Yes, I realize there’s some hypocracy there).

Satan

BB is basically saying: Shut up, this is our sandbox, we can do whatever we want to and we will. If you’re unhappy about it, then whine about it here in this designated contained area, and if you don’t agree with our decision, too bad. We won’t give you an explanation because we don’t feel you deserve one.

But hey, we’re listening.

transmothra

Also: kudos to Xeni and Pesco et al for being exactly as transparent and open as they feel the need to be. Now please, can we finally put the lid on their [own, personal] garbage cans and get on with wonderful things?

Rob Beschizza

[Bump to refresh archive]

MB

Well, there goes my traffic boosting blog-fight picking plan.

Damn, I guess I’ll have to stick to trying to write interesting things. Curses, foiled again.

Talia

#656: “boingboing altered their archives to make it look like they never performed action X.”

That’s not why they did it though. They did it so that the links wouldn’t be supporting someone they no longer choose to endorse. The goal wasn’t secrecy it was removal of support. Kind of like Obama leaving his church (to use a really outrageously extreme example that might get me into hot water).

remmelt

>The comment that had saddened me the most so far is Remmelt’s “It’s a blog. If you care, you lose.” Just stare at that sentence for a second. Think about it. Of course we care. If we didn’t care we wouldn’t be here commenting or even reading the site.

Don’t take it personally. I recognise and understand how you feel. My point is not that you shouldn’t care about BB (I know I do, and I would hate it if it would go offline or something), I’m only saying that in the grand scheme of things, even in the grand blogging scheme, the catfight between BB and VB doesn’t rank very high. It shouldn’t even register on the radar, and it really shouldn’t get 850 comments.

I would pleased if you don’t take my lines out of context. The context is what makes the line.

The original context was a reply to some guy on the internet who is taking this Very Bad Thing That Boing Boing Did personally. And in my book, that is pretty stupid. If you go home tonight feeling that we lost one more True Freedom Fighter, I think you may need to reconsider your priorities. That’s what I wanted to say with that line.

> The entire internet is just a well of people caring about everything. They care enough to knit steampunk doilies, or to write Tron rock operas, or to stage livejournal protests.

I don’t think I agree with that. Yes, people care about stuff. (Good examples, by the way.) They care, and then they write about it on the internet.
That makes the internet a well of information, but not a well of care. Or people, even.

(PS I’m still posting here because I hope we get to post #1984)

Gary61

I just stopped in to say:

“Pizza’s ready … come and eat before it gets cold … dammit, put that keyboard away right now, you do NOT know where it’s been.”

Thanx, I feel better now.

Burnchao

#1201 Xeni

I made a choice to remove a small amount of my own work from public view a year ago, and nobody cared.

This is the first direct confirmation (I’ve seen)of who did what. This does help us have a dialogue without thick language, so thanks.

Nobody cared because nobody knew. Nobody knew because there wasn’t an open dialogue about it.

I understand that maybe you didn’t have the open dialogue about it because you don’t want to air dirty laundry. I suspect everyone understands and accepts that. I know that I don’t want to know why (although it probably is important to know if happened because of personal, profession, or legal reasons).

If you want to stop supporting someone, that doesn’t involve dipping back in time to make it look like you never did. There’s plenty of authors (though I can’t think of a single name of one right now) who’ve ended up regretting some belief they’ve published. Some respond by publishing new material counter to the old belief, some respond by doing nothing. I’m sure there’s other kinds of appropriate responses that I can’t think of right away.

But unpublishing your work in away that makes it look like you never did {have belief X} when you did {have belief X} is dishonest.

A very good example: Suppose one day Cory outgrows his Mickey Mouse crush (I’m saying that in a light-hearted jestful way, not in a mean, snarky way (my wife has the same crush)). If he just stopped posting about Disney, no one would complain (except my wife). If he updated his old posts with a disclaimer like “Update: I’m so ashamed that I used to make all these posts about MM. It’s embarrassing”, everyone would understand, and agree (except my wife). But he unpublished every Mickey post, we’d be pissed off that he’s trying to present himself as someone who never was that into Mickey, even though no one gives a damn about Mickey (except my wife).

please also try to have a little empathy for the difficult job of Teresa, Antinuous, and the other BB moderators here who have the unlovable job of being cops/traffic guides/insert your analogy here, but it doesn’t always involve hugging and kittens. Nobody likes the cop. They’re people too, not just nyms,…

Their unlovable job is being a Customer Service Rep. I’m one too. I have to handle angry people, some of whom have lost thousands of dollars for sucky reasons. Yet I manage to talk with them without any name-calling, ever. And I’m sure your mods are paid better than I.

Johne Cook

#1385 – Surely you mean “Cantina.” [/ Star Wars geek]

Patrick Dodds

Is the plural of “penis” really “penis”?

Faustus

@TillWe,

yeah I got that, but it’s nice to know there are people so polite that even when I don’t take offence they’ll apologise :)

Also, all these people criticising the word ‘unpublishing’, boingboing didn’t just make it up, it’s the actual real word for an actual real thing that has nothing to do with any kind of newspeak as has been stressed many times in this thread. So please, stop making hilarious gibes about it.

Spoon

What could VioletBlue possibly do that would get past posts that referenced her beleted? I can’t really think of any crime that would cause someone to want to tear out all traces of an old acquaintance from memory… and I have an EllJay where I wrote about meeting my ex, falling in love with my ex, and my ex breaking my heart.

I guess if posts about you and your EX got you added to the ‘pornography’ list of several major internet filters and an accountant told you that those 4% in missed page views was a significant number now that you’re big… you know, a new car big, or maybe a used car big… or even car payment big… maybe it was even used car payment big… I sure know I would remove all posts relating to my ex for $50 a month… even if a few of my readers started reading because of the talk about my ex.

Michael Brutsch

@archaeopteryx: I don’t really give a damn what you want. You’re obviously a shill account, spewing anonymous vitriol from behind a pseudonym, and frankly, I don’t see anyone asking for your opinion. The “moderators” are too chicken-shit to defend their own policies in public, even when they have the luxury of secretly modifying those policies after-the-fact to suit their agendas. I’m sure this blog will continue after this, but its reputation, and the reputation of those who run it, have been forever tarnished by this debacle. Now howzaboot you take a timeout, and stop acting like TNH? This discussion doesn’t need any more prima donnas defending the scurrilous and dishonest actions of BB and its crew.

Zandr

@Brownbat 1309:
As I read it, Nina described a situation between her and VB. I don’t think Nina is a pseudonym for Xeni.

So while what happened between Xeni/BB and VB might be similar, it’s not that.

ROSSINDETROIT

“Making a stink about terminology” is bad?
Now you’re disparaging the work I was born to do.

mdhatter

Leave the honey pot open.

nilesgibbs

As I said, if the original Declaration of Independence was destroyed, it’d be a symbolic loss, but it wouldn’t affect the availability of it’s cultural impact on future generations.

Sure, when the main source of a work destroys their original copy, it can make finding the work inconvenient, and can be very upsetting, but in this day and age, it’s really hard to get rid of something that’s popular.

I too, am upset that they’d remove their original copies, and I agree that they could have handled the disclosure much better.

I am also regularly neurotic with worry about the loss of culture. I’m native Hawaiian and fully mourn the loss of cultural information that occurred when the Missionaries came (both by the Missionaries and the Hawaiians themselves who had predicted the the coming of a “superior” culture and had gone about dismantling their own).

But the loss on the BB server did not destroy the BB works. A real “unpublishing” of something with a strong cultural/historical influence that is available online is nigh impossible.

The only real way, at this point, of removing something from wide circulation would be to destroy the infrastructure that supported that circulation.

To destroy the work completely would mean not only the network, but all of the mirrors, caches, hard copies, etc.

I think then that we’ve more to fear from those electronic munching crazy rasberry ants than from Xeni’s editorial decisions.

Thomas

I have to join in expressing my burning curiosity about how Violet Blue “behaved” to prompt your unpublication of her. Could you at least post a link to something about the incident so that your readers can judge for themselves? The shitstorm is a-blowing and can’t be unblown. It cannot make things worse at this point to reveal what happened.

Sputnik

Stay classy, Boing Boing!

Alison Scott

It’s your blog, delete what you want.

On the other hand, if your aim was to deny the oxygen of publicity to Violet Blue, that would appear to have been an almighty fail.

You might consider, next time you disappear someone, just deactivating all the hotlinks in the relevant posts and sticking the pages in robots.txt or equivalent.

Jake0748

Speaking of flying lizards, Takuan is conspicuous by his absence. I miss him.

Zinjanthropus

Hi Xeni,

As far as best practise on removal requests, I think Linus Torvalds has the right approach. If someone requests that their contribution to the Linux kernel be removed, then that’s what happens, even if it breaks things. So I think that granting people’s requests to be removed completely to the best of your technical ability is the right thing to do.

acb

@Tylersweeney: Given that Boing Boing is not a public forum, they’re not “threatening free speech”. They have no obligation to maintain archives, nor to be impartial, nor to continue publishing articles by someone they do not wish to.

If you disagree, you can lodge a formal complaint with the Blog Ombudsman.

freshyill

Whatever it is she did to piss off the Boing Boing crew, Boing Boing is well within reason to remove references to her on their site. It’s not even remotely censorship.

A link from Boing Boing is a big deal. It’s a major site and it probably does wonders for your Google PageRank, which means your page is relevant, which in turn drives traffic and money to you.

If she did something so egregious as to piss off BB this badly, there’s no reason she should continue to reap the (very real) benefits of links from this site.

That said, I’m really, really curious to know what went down.

Camilo

Hi, is this the line to the bathroom?

Thanks.

Talia

#657: SWEET

I’ll be in my bunk. Or possibly someone else’s.

hpr122i

One small suggestion: Teresa already has “Moderator” in her nickname. But her helpers do not (and they might not always have their “moderator hat” on). It may be useful to add some kind of marker next to their comments so that people can know who they are. I was confused earlier in the thread because I thought someone with a position close to Antinous’s in the debate was a mod, which he or she wasn’t. For a moment there I thought there were two mods having a metatalk-style flameout (but my perception was wrong, fortunately.)

So-Called Austin Mayor

@1155 Xeni: What do you think? Seriously, I’m asking. I don’t know. We don’t have a policy for it yet.

I think that a good first step would be notifying the Boing Boing moderators that you “don’t have a policy for it yet” — and, therefore, there is no One True Church … uh… Official Policy that must be defended unto death on this comment string.

On the other hand, if the Boing Boing editors decided to let the moderators engage the haters in a ham-fisted manner to keep the editors’ hands clean — see also good cop/bad cop routine, political attack via surrogate — then the BB principles are even more brilliant than I thought.

And I thought all y’all was pretty damn clever to start with.

– SCAM

demoman

I’ve followed this drama on MF, Fimoculous, Violet Blue’s site, etc. In fact, it seems like the kind of story one might find on Boing Boing if the players were different.

I’ve always loved BB, been a faithful reader since 2000. I find it pretty disappointing that the site’s overseerers have chosen the path that you have. I’ve just come to expect more.

No doubt there are other blogging colleagues that were once part of your world (and archives) but who are now, for some transgression or another, persona non grata. Which is fine, normal, human, etc. But we the readers didn’t need to know about it, and life moves on for all concerned.

The way the Violet Blue association ended seems like needless character assassination, while long time readers are left with only an insinuation.

Weak sauce. It all seems very sneaky yet heavy handed, aloof yet exceedingly self righteous, and willfully obtuse in regards to your readers’ rightful confusion when looking back at Boing Boing’s long tradition of anti-censorship and free information.

I’ve quietly applauded as your collective work became more popular, more lucrative, more prominent. It feels now that your success has made you out of touch.

JeffB

I was hashing out a really long well-thought out response to the whole situation and then I read what Gracchus said in #125. I’d just like to say …uh what he said.

cherry shiva

meanwhile…

joellevand

@ANTINOUS

And you’re not standing right there with them, chanting along right now?

Pot, meet kettle.

oheso

How come when I go to the home page, it’s

http://boingboing.net

but when I come here it’s

http://www.boingboing.net/natokakantoka …

(Well, it said “Thanks for signing in, oheso. Now you can comment” … )

ROSSINDETROIT

Asking for breathing space from a group of anonymous strangers who are enjoying and prolonging your discomfort shows more faith in humanity than I would have thought the situation warranted. Lets hope that faith isn’t completely misplaced.

ninevolt

Gee. I walk away from the net for a few days to do some work outside in the big blue room, and come back to a big kerfluffle…. on boing boing? With conspiracy theories and all???

I’m heading back to the big blue room with my kids. We’re launching model rockets– more worthy of time and attention than worrying about who did what to who, causing what manner of hurt feelings, etc, etc, ad nauseam, und so weiter.

On second thought, my son wants to try and talk to people on the radio tonight. We’ll be on 10 and 20 meters, having a blast.

I sincerely hope all you take the opportunity to step away from the computers and do something fun and entertaining, personally rewarding, or the like— life’s too damn short to take this stuff seriously.

Ambrose

> I know the mods are doing their best to keep this unprecedented thread civil

Really? You’re serious? They’ve been openly rude and inflammatory. They’ve made things worse. They’ve insulted posters.

I guess you may well consider this “doing their best” but, wouldn’t that mean you have a low opinion of them?

Righteous Bubba

Most of your (well argued) point is hinged on either your right to know, or your feeling that you ought to be told anyhow. None of us have that right.

mdhatter for president.

Anyway, y’know what’d be a nifty script? An “Unpublished” – nay, “DELETED!” – page with a Wayback Machine link, summarizing the latest deletions, which’d be more than likely duplicated posts anyway. It’d probably cause more caterwauling than it’s worth, but it’d be an up-front log of site fiddling with a very clear pointer to the content. Or just a redirect or link from the original page to WM content if the issue is hosting.

QuarterlyProphet

“But sometimes when you have people trying to force your hand before you’re ready to respond it’s frustrating.”

“Bottom line is that those posts (not “more than 100 posts,” as erroneously claimed elsewhere) were removed from public view a year ago.”

Sounds like you guys had plenty of time to figure out a response.

acb

@185: AFAIK, the difference between unpublishing and deleting is that, when something is unpublished, inbound links are not broken. Unpublishing leaves the content intact, but merely removes it from public indices; external pages linking to it can still reach it.

Frank_in_Virginia

Why didn’t you just copyright the stories, that would have taught us all a lesson.

efnord

The BB moderators are all actually 16-armed lizardlike flying telepathic aliens who club baby seals and stalk Barbra Streisand.

Cory’s vegan, so the seals are out.

Hey, it says “club” not “club and eat.”

sharp

i just wanted to say that after a day. i feel my previous comment was probably too strong.

i’ve got different feelings on violet blue. i think shes got some good content. i appreciate that shes got a drm-free e-book publishing thing going on. “open source sex” always seemed like a horrible misuse of a buzzword and i do believe she has abused the trademark system.

however it is hard for me to believe that somebody would do something SO bad, that they would have all references TO THEIR EXISTENCE silently removed from a blog.

i want to respect the privacy of the bloggers of boingboing, but since i’m in the dark here, you gotta realize that this looks either (a) really evil (which i don’t believe,) or (b) really childish and immature.

and thats just the way it looks, whether boingboing has the right to remove things from their own server or not (which they do.)

Archeaopteryx

@HOLTT, are you going to answer @936, or does that not fit your agenda?

Vanwall

The salient point in all the criticism of Boing Boing’s actions regarding this subject seems to be that BB doesn’t own, manage, edit, etc. their own blog, especially after any sort of content has been posted for all the world to see – it is now set in amber, for anyone to examine at their leisure at no cost and no responsibility to the readers, and any changes, unless approved by said readers is a no-no and betrayal of trust, regardless if it was possibly done in even an altruistic manner. Yeah, I get the whole broken linky thingie, but there are always exceptions to any rule.

I see that the misconception that parts of BB being a set, immutable experience is implicit in that argument, and it is wrong – blogs are a bit like living things, and on occasion one must scratch a few annoyances out; there’s no rule that bloggers must suffer fools and fleas, and it’s their right to correct things even if they do so well after the fact. At present, we have no way of judging right or wrong on this one.

There are no public “rights” to any links and comments here, it’s the BB’ers blog, it’s certainly not anyone else’s, and they have the right to do as they see fit. You are certainly entitled to an opinion and it’s nice they allow us to express that, but once again, it’s their blog. They have no responsibility to keep anything they feel has been compromised as part of their blog history, and I don’t think they should, either. We have no real info on why this happened a year ago, so criticizing without the facts is unwarranted and a waste of bandwidth. They have stated it was a consensus private and obviously personal decision, and they owe none of us an explanation.

Yes, they have a general policy of transparency, which they seem to adhere to quite closely most of time, but it is their blog, and they can do as they want – if you feel this subject is a betrayal of trust, then so be it, but you are basing your judgment on incomplete facts. They’re asking you to trust them, and maybe that’s too much for some, but I’ve been trusting their judgment for while now, just in visiting their site, and as of yet I see no violations of it. Personally, I don’t care if I ever find out, as it seems the argy-bargy on this one is an artificially induced situation by outside elements.

Xopher

Will, you are now trolling this thread. Please cut it out.

gabrielm

I have much respect for all of the BB editors, but this really does seem hypocritical. How is this any different then a site-wide filter to remove any reference to a particular phrase?

It’s your blog – so do what you want. However, with all the post archived on the Wayback Machine… this just seems petty.

Clay

Certainly it is within the moral rights of the happy mutants that publish this fine blog to retract things they no longer support.

Certainly it is in good taste to avoid embarrassing someone in parting ways with them.

Alas, these two have just now proven themselves somewhat mutually incompatible. Perhaps it might have been preferable to replace the “unpublished” posts with something like:

“We’ve unfortunately had some major disagreements lately with sex blogger Violet Blue and decided that it’s best if we remove our old posts about her. Out of respect to her, we won’t go into details about it.”

David Pescovitz

@Alexreynolds (#496), I think Xeni removed that phrase because it sounded inflammatory and insulting in a way that she didn’t intend.

Also, I ask that people please don’t continue with the nasty names or post stupid, sophomoric insults. The moderators will do their best to remove or disemvowel those comments, whether they’re about a Boing Boinger, Violet Blue, or anyone else.

Antinous

The moderators will do their best to remove or disemvowel those comments, whether they’re about a Boing Boinger, Violet Blue, or anyone else.

Thank you to those who flagged comments with vile epithets. I have disemvowelled the offending language.

Archeaopteryx

@626 – I had to google Congdon – She got Amanda Congdon fired? Because Amanda didn’t say nice things about her?

@749 – She really called herself “The Fifth Boinger”???

@772 – No she doesn’t settle disputes privately; She sues.

I’ve learned a lot more than I knew about her reading this thread, and none of it is good. Come right down to it, as far as I can tell, she is not a good person.

But you know, I am betting the real reason is worse than anything we have seen exposed here, and I am better we’ll never know what it is. But what I’ve seen here is enough.

And she’s a bad writer.

Xeni Jardin

ErosBacchus, I didn’t gut or delete or rewrite the body of my comment. Sorry, I tend to think of something I wish I’d added more clearly right after I hit “publish,” and I’ll just add a whole new comment next time. A “comment modified” timestamp would be great, wish MT came with that.

ZippySpincycle

Joel @957: That you have managed to keep such a level tone in the face of being compared to Hitler, Stalin, and even L. Ron Hubbard, is a matter of some astonishment to me. Like many of the commenters here, my initial response to this incident was dismay and a sense that BB had betrayed its principles, but you have already gone a log way toward winning back my trust. Everything I’ve read so far convinces me that this was more a matter of boneheadedness than evil, and you all appear sincere in your commitment to putting BoingBoing’s house back in order.

Random832

Good enough for you to keep demanding access to the dirty laundry of a company you don’t work for, and whose product you don’t pay for, and who still extend you the privilege to ask them questions anyhow.

When the fuck did I ever “demand” or even ask to know the reason for myself?

All I asked for is why VB wasn’t told the reason. Not for the reason itself. And, you know what? I don’t even need to know that – It’s a rhetorical question. Because there is NOTHING that anyone could do to deserve not even getting an explanation for this.

heypal

bb staff have obviously made the decision to not share what happened because they don’t want to feed the fire anymore. As they said: they didn’t start the fire, but they did make it possible. Were they to go public with their reasons, they would be throwing gasoline on the flames and assume more of the liability for the fire.

Theoretically, this whole blogfight could give someone who has lost a large source of their income (by insulting on some level the person/people who are responsible for diverting traffic to that person’s front door) a boost in traffic. Anything that fuels the fire would drive more traffic, so throwing another log on would be counter to the original move of removing all of VB’s posts.

Burnchao

So what is Boing Boing supposed to say that will satisfy people?

It’s beyond saying something. Excuses are worthless, and legitimate reasons aren’t there.

The more I learn about about VB, the more I don’t like her. So why aren’t I over there complaining about her actions?

I’ve never been a fan of hers. I’ve been a constant reader and fan of BB for many years. Maybe Seven? Nine? I don’t know. And now I found out that BB has rewriting its publications for at least a year. This revision has been done changing views to the complete opposite of those at publication time.

So now I know that when someone at BB has a change of opinion, all previous publications will be altered to fit this new opinion. If Cory loses his Disney crush, BB will pretend that Cory never had a Disney crush by altering all previous publications, however remotely associated.

So its beyond saying something. You haven’t been able to figure out what to say to make it right because there isn’t anything that can be said to make it right. BB has been lying to its fans and supporters for at least a year, and we aren’t going to be happy about it no matter how you spin it.

Archeaopteryx

Xeni, you have done nothing at all wrong, and BB has done nothing at all wrong in keeping that terrible woman from using this site for her self-aggrandizement.

transmothra

I would be tempted to agree with Nelson.C, but no doubt that would cause a shitstorm of a shitstorm. Maybe just post an empty entry just so stoopid ppl can wail on each other about semantics.

p.s., anyone who can’t infer the intrinsic meaning of “unpublish” probably isn’t looking at BB for the insightful text. Perhaps more pretty unicorn pics to keep them quiet?

cherry shiva

is this how evolution works ?

nina

Food for thought: “Needing To Know”

http://www.kickingpebbles.net/?p=107

Not including my blog-link to pimp my blog… which most I can assert, will find to be generally irrelevant and boring, in it’s entirety.

Only posting as a link, because the scrolling and ascii-overload of this post, is already over the top- and, the post does not directly discuss details of this article.

DeuceMojo

I am a meat popsicle.

BrooklynBS

The sense of entitlement by some of those commenting is ghastly. It’s been my experience that people like this are not creators or risk-takers, just self-involved windbags.

Eduardo Padoan

@#392 the stories are copyrighted, and released under a Creative Commons licence.

ribonucleic

It’s hard for me to imagine that even the most pro-BB commenters here won’t feel a twinge of embarrassment for the bloggers the next time it publishes a story about censorship.

I accept (grudgingly) that the backstory is none of our beeswax. But the editors would be well advised to take a cold look at how seriously this episode has damaged their brand.

Since I know everything, I advise them to de-unpublish this material, make a terse but sincere public apology to their readership and She Who Must Not Be Named, and get back to business.

Will Shetterly

Antinuous, how often have you had to answer those charges in a post? I don’t keep up on comments, but I’ve been reading Boingboing for a few years. I don’t remember anything like this posted before.

And, no, I’m not saying this is somehow analogous to any number of Eviler Things. What’s happened here stays simple: Boingboing’s past was rewritten without explanation. That’s the sort of company behavior that the old Boingboing would have mocked with glee.

kevin143

Are we allowed to speculate about why this might have happened?

I doubt it was anything personal against Violet Blue. Boing Boing has some pretty big advertisers. They want to make their advertisers more comfortable by linking to less “adult” content.

holtt

GregL said…

All I know is I can’t get anyone to give me a completely straight answer as to what BB really did to them, really, as in in reality, without invoking vaguities like “values” or some such spongelike concepts.

Speaking for myself, I have zero interest or concern about VB, internal BB politics and so forth.

What I care very much about is whether people (bloggers, politicians, individuals, companies, etc.) can espouse a certain philosophy or belief, and then stick to it when tempted by unforeseen circumstances.

If they can’t stick to their beliefs then they need to rethink them or their commitment to them.

holtt

The cake is a lie

a random John

Xeni #1357,

I think my comment indicates that I know exactly what “unpublish” means. Knowing the technical meaning of it I still thought that it was a terrible choice. If you want to defend “unpublish” ’till your dying breath that is fine with me. I think the better option is to admit that it was an incredibly stupid thing to say and move on.

Why was it incredibly stupid? Because many of your readers (and most LA Times readers) have zero idea what it means and see it as double speak. Even those that do know what it means think it has Orwellian overtones. “Removed” would have worked much better. I’d have considered “retracted” but it isn’t a good fit because it implies that there was something untrue about the posts, which seems to have not been the case.

Seriously, when you’re know you’re about to step into a firestorm, why make it worse for yourself?

I see no comment on the rest of what I had to say. I hope that you didn’t decide to “unregard” it because you think I don’t know what “unpublish” means.

sicklecell

I can’t believe I was so oblivious to the drama. I feel a little left out.

SaulTSack

I just spent 20 minutes skimming the above comments. I’d like the contact info for whomever I need to sue to get compensated for wasting my valuable 20 minutes.

Meh – what a bother over a whole lot of nothing. You all, in a word, need to chillax and get over yourselves. Those that can’t need to beam up to the mothership pronto.

Now if we could just unpublish all the damn steampunk nonsense.

Jim O’Connell

I don’t like Violet Blue.

I lost respect for her a while back, when she participated in the argumentum ad hominem against the censorware guy who was found to have posted in the adult diaper newsgroups, but I don’t agree with BoingBoing’s decision to remove her from the site.

This is the sort of thing that you would be outraged over if a similar group did it.

It’s bad form.

Please consider re-instating her content and instituting a policy to not behave similarly in the future. While BB is a private blog, it has a greater responsibility to the community than you may realize.

Perhaps you could update the links that pointed to her site and point them towards her Wikipedia entry instead.

zagboodle

Okay, we’re 2/3 of the way through to 1000 comments. Come on, Boingers, we can do it!

Takuan

mmmmm, yawn, smack-smack. ? Did I miss something?

Johne Cook

#1488 – Perhaps she just “unpublished” the vowels. ;)

rushkoff

The whole thing really boils down to money, doesn’t it? That’s the part that’s interesting to me.

I had a debate a couple of years ago with Jeff Jarvis, where I argued that accepting ads on a site changes the character of the site – even if the writer(s) of the site haven’t changed in their intentions. The context is just different.

If BoingBoing were still an absolutely unprofitable zine done for the pure fun of it, then removing something or changing their minds would be fair game.

But because a bb link now equates – for some – into business value, the removal is somehow more pertinent. Add to that the fact that BB is, to some extent, a profitable business itself, and readers feel there’s a different sort of obligation implied.

If I cut something on my blog, chances are no one would care. That’s because my linkage doesn’t really help so much financially (unless I really really push, as in the case of saving Arthur or RAW) and because my site is unsponsored.

The lessons learned here are, first and foremost, the law of negative effects. Undoing something almost always makes it worse. And second, the rules of anti-censorship and value creation from the periphery are actually incompatible with business as we know it.

If the BB people were all at home, they probably would have simply decided to republish the stuff once the hubbub started, and said something like “thanks to our community, we realize that the unpublishing was contrary to the ethos we’ve been espousing and reconsidered our actions.” Or, if Cory had a rationale for what happened that he could articulate (as only a guy like Cory can) in a way that satisfies the most FSFish amongst us, he’d have done it.

What fascinates me is whether the energy spent here might have been directed at Blackwater or some other malfeasant corporation, and how to generate the same sort of outrage for more significant crimes against humanity.

acb

Have fun with your boycott, @Alephnul.

mherdeg

Hi folks,
Just curious whether this is the first time you’ve tried this trick. Are there are any other former community members you’ve tried “the silent treatment” on?

Is this generally a reliable way of removing someone from your community? It’s very “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” — one can almost imagine the BoingBoing editorial staff mentally ticking down Ms. Blue’s Whuffie.

It looks like this is the first time that this approach has failed, by earning the target _more_ public exposure from prominent places like the LA Times blogs and Romenesko, in what another commenter mentioned is commonly called the “Streisand effect.” But is it the first time that you’ve done this? Or just the first time you’ve been called out?

Just curious.

martha_macarthur

someone should “unpublish” this thread as it is definitely not a wonderful thing and it’s seriously boring

Xeni Jardin

@hpr122i:

It may be useful to add some kind of marker next to their comments so that people can know who they are.

Totally, I think we’re already in the process of modifying things so that this is the case. you’re absolutely right.

dllacina

The fact that many BB supporters at the moment (and BB themselves) keep feeling the need to bring up that this is a “PERSONAL” project/blog/whatever is distressing to me.

It’s only personal in that, it’s owned by them. Which, great, do whatever you want with it. But don’t forget, the INSTANT you release something to the public, it is no longer your own.

Any writer worth their salt knows this. Any artist, any journalist, anyone who labors (even if only for love) and shares their work PUBLICLY must understand this. Or they better never step into the public realm.

Yeah, it was yours, until you hit submit. And then it became the product of the world. Which is odd because I thought that BB understood this with the constant ranting against Copyright. Yes, I know they are different, but conceptually the BB argument and mine are intertwined.

BB needs to understand that, this may have started as a personal thing, but it was only personal until the first person got their hands on the original stapled copy. And once it got online, it became even more personal.

And so, when they hide behind the “It’s our site, we can do what we want” defense, it smacks of naivety and makes them lose credibility.

Add to that the circular and vague explanation of their actions and it just widens the gulf between them and credibility. They’re not journalists. They’re bloggers. But they still have responsibilities. And the handling of this shows that they either don’t understand, or care for these responsibilities.

And that’s sad, because unfortunately, BB is one of the things that sets the standards for how the web and the people using it should act and behave.

just saying

Thereâ€™s no evidence that in the past BB has waited for a politburo meeting in order to formulate an immediate reaction to the ham-handed behavior of *others*. Now that the hypocrisy comes from within, why the need for committee work?

joshmillard

Second to last paragraph should read “…might not even be worth building…”. Oof.

romulusnr

Trying to figure out what VB did a year ago that would cause BB to dump their association with her.

In October she sued a porn star using the same name. But that’s not a year ago. (That same month she opened a DRM-free sex bookstore, seemingly a BB-pro thing.)

My GReader search finds that VB was last name-dropped on BB on 7-29-07, about N De Samim, a lingerie website. (‘course, it ain’t in the BB archive now.)

The snowball has started rolling, guys, all the disemvowellment and “unpublishing” in the world won’t stop it.

Joel Johnson

@376 (See): Well, it wasn’t supposed to be a public disassociation, specifically because it would have provoked these same inquiries about a private matter. I get that people are curious. I get that “You’ll just have to trust us” is a fairly weak offering. But we’re still trying to strike a balance between (belated) forthrightness and decorum.

As we said in the original post, there was clearly some fucking up here on our part, although I can report that even in our internal discussions we weren’t entirely sure what a better course of action might have been. And it’s difficult to say “We’ll never do that again” when we’re not sure what a better option would have been.

We’re all hearing the “You should have told us what was going on” remarks. I can only speak for myself, not everyone, but I think that’s a fair point and were a similar situation to arise in the future — ugh! — we’ll take a different tack.

Dave Thomsen

â€œThere’s a big difference between that and censorshipâ€

In my opinion â€œunpublishedâ€ is just another word for censorship, The next time someone posts something in my forum that breaks our T.O.S I am going to reply that they were â€œunpublishedâ€ and not deleted I donâ€™t believe the individual in question will see the difference .
After reading multiple stories from many sources I have come to the belief that ad revenue may have been a motivating factor in this decision. Of course this is your blog and you have the right to publish and or â€œunpublishedâ€ (as you call it) as you see fit however, This in my opinion does and will hurt you creditability.
I personally come to Boing Boing to primarily read Mr. Doctorowâ€™s posts in regards to Privacy and Copy write reform . Most of the other posts are typically available on the other sites I frequent Digg, Reddit ect (nothing personal, any blog posts of journalistic integrity will appear on many sites) As such I would be quite curious to hear Mr. Doctorowâ€™s take on the situation.
My own opinion is that this was done to placate an advertiser and secure future revenue streams. I make this assumption based on other stories that I have read and the fact that posts to Boing Boing have to first be reviewed by your editor Xeni Jardin. If this is the case I believe that Boing Boing just took a steep on to the slippery slope.
Of course I could be wrong â€¦â€¦â€¦..

Oddity

Many people have said what I already feel. However – my thought is that one of the BB staff should create a post about what they feel is wrong and why, rather than childishly hiding behind the “private blog” and “we don’t want to offend anyone” arguments.

Even VB apparently doesn’t know what’s wrong – which means this is some sort of high level socio-cultural experiment being put on between VB and BB, or BB has just lost a lot of the credibility for many of their arguments.

Joel Johnson

Okay, everyone. Despite thinking we might be able to beat Metafilter’s own comment count on this subject, I don’t think we’re really moving forward anymore in this thread, so I’m going to lock it down. For the evening, at least, but perhaps for good. I can promise this won’t be the last we have to say on the matter, but as I said above, we’ve got to get everyone together and think this through and we’re just not built that way by default. Half of the editors are on vacation with their families, but they’re still checking in as they can.

I’m going to leave comments up on the rest of the site, but I’ll be removing any comments that are wildly off topic. Given the nature of the whole situation, you can be sure I’m not trying to stifle conversation, but after over a thousand posts I’m issuing you all an executive break. And us, too.

Thank you all for getting into the thick of it with us, even if it’s only been to criticize. This has been a crash course in whatever it is we’re doing here.

Update: Added a “the” and highlighted the top in bold to draw attention to it.

David Pescovitz

Oh, also regarding my comment #1215, I vaguely remember deleting a quick post about something when I was unaware that another one of us was working on a longer or more informed post on the same subject. So I might have taken down my post as a courtesy and to “make way” for the more thorough post. I can’t think of any specific instances of that but it did pop into my mind just now.

aguane

Erik that is beautiful. I almost want to print it out and hang it on my wall.

Sean Eric FAgan

(I really should add: I don’t think there was malicious intent; I don’t think it’s all that important; and it’s the internet, so people love making mountains out of grains of sand. But it’s very hard to hide some things, and when you try to do so, it looks suspicious. And people love a story that has a good suspicious act in it.)

Antinous

And you’re not standing right there with them, chanting along right now?

No, I’m not.

tillwe

@GregLondon: “Yeah, tell me what harm BB did to you by deleting its posts about VB?”

Simple: I trust BoingBoing to be a trustworthy resource that fights for transparency and empowerment of internet users, and find them doing something I perceive as going against their own ethics, so this lowers my expectations and my trust into BoingBoing. That is something I don’t like, so it’s “emotional harm” — and I really don’t want to feel “cheated” (to big a word) by a blog I link to frequently because I have high opinions about it.

I’m not sure if this simple explanation (and I read many others as feeling a similar harm) is understandable if you don’t share the same assumptions about how social networks, blogs, trust, reputation and attention works.

beergood

I lost all basic interest in Violet Blue when she sued an adult film star for appropriating the same Crayola name as her.

As if before this blogstress came along no one had strung the words “violet blue” together.

I support Boing Boing’s (or is Boing’s Boing more grammatically correct?) right to make any of their articles available/unavailable at their own discretion. Curiosity is nagging me a little, though.

Anyway, I got go, I’m meeting with a guy about trademarking Beergood.

absimiliard

Geeze, all this fuss over some censorship.

1. It is censorship, it’s just not [i]Government[/i] censorship.

2. Of course it’s BB’s right to pull this stuff.

3. Yes, it does make them look hypocritical, and it harms their believability on future articles about censorship as well.

4. Of course we want to know why this happened, by making it all secret and stuff that just piques our curiousity. But we don’t have the right to know, and it’s probably impolite of BB to say, since it’s pretty clearly a personal issue rather than a philosophical difference of opinion.

Sooooo . . .. I will hereby reveal the TRUTH behind why BB did this.

You see, a while back VB and Xeni had a thing going, but VB turned around and slept with Cory behind Xeni’s back, which irked several people. Add to that the videotape that Mark and David made, and threatened to send to Teresa, and things started to get really hectic. VB decided she really didn’t want to get involved a Quintangle, which doesn’t sound much like her, but hey, and asked to have the video deleted. Unfortunately it had already been sent to Teresa, who discovered that the only way to not have the video get posted to teh intarwebz was to delete all references to VB’s blog.

There, now does it all make sense?

-abs, thinks that sigs aren’t nearly as offensive after hearing about this. So how ’bout letting me sign off with “-abs” instead of making me turn a four-character sig into a full-fledged production running sentences, if not paragraphs, in length and distracting everyone from my wonderful explanation of what really happened here?

Tubman

@#513, Antinous: Sorry, I couldn’t work out a pithy enough way of referencing Stalin’s airbrush work on those Bolshevik Party Congress group photos.

Care to fill us in on the rest of that irregular verb? If it’s ‘we unpublish’ and ‘they censor’, how does the second person go?

mullingitover

Faustus:”you see you and me, we differ on around step two of your grand plan. I don’t think they did anything wrong, so there’s no need to acknowledge screwups.”

I have to give credit, it’s Teresa’s plan, I just agree with it. Step two is automatically broken if step one is broken, silly. If you don’t get any kind of message out, you’ve screwed up. Then if you don’t admit *that*, you’re continuing to screw up and fail to admit it, creating a feedback loop of fail and leading to a legendary whuffie inferno. As we have here. O noes.

Joel Johnson

Also, I’m going to try to shut down the comments but I hope it doesn’t accidentally remove them all. I only wish I were joking.

But if they blip I’ll bring them back.

p00pyhead

#1219 Righteous Bubba

Regarding wanting to pass old stuff along that’s missing. But that’s why you have Google! I see BB as a reflection of the zeitgeist of the web on any given time and if someone is no longer cool, BB reflecting that is also valuable information in itself. I can see maybe still linking to something that’s a week or maybe even month old but definately not something from a year ago, That’s downright pre-cambrian in web years!

Johne Cook

#1397 – Nothing of the sort. I wrote “Continuing to make a stink about the terminology used…”, essentially saying what you said in #1391, only your post was shorter, and therefore superior to mine. I still get my dessert, although, regretfully, I shouldn’t eat it.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator

Will @1647:

Have we reached comment #1647 because the drama queens have united to do it? Or is it possible that there might actually be some matters of principle here?

To quote Jim Macdonald, never ask a question unless you’re sure you want to hear the answer.

@1648:

Since the boingers are considering changes in policy, I have a serious one now: Drop all politics from the site.

1. Have you been reading more than a handful of threads on Boing Boing?

2. Do you actually think it’s appropriate to propose silencing the Boingers’ right to talk about politics, and by extension their readers’ as well, just because you don’t understand why Zosima got moderated?

This seems excessive. Is it intentional?

Then, if a post disappears, no one will wonder if it was removed for matters of principle,

The three main reasons comments are disemvowelled or removed are bad manners, spamming, and acting in bad faith. Suspending or banning commenters is done when a commenter keeps repeating the bad behavior and also ignores warnings from the moderators; when some piece of misbehavior is so egregiously awful that assuming good faith is not really an option; or when the account is being used for what is obviously automated spam. The reasons Antinous suspended Zosima fell entirely within normal policy and practice around here.

Also: have you thought about whether this is an ideal moment to assert that if you can’t see why we did something, we must needs be dishonest?

and if a moderator disemvowells someone like Zosima in the current Tibet thread, no one will think the moderator is abusing his or her power for partisan reasons.

Do you know that when you phrase it that way, you sound exactly like someone who’s insincerely proposing a policy change as a weaselly way to accuse the moderator of acting in bad faith? Those of us who know and value you are aware that you’re capable of putting your foot in it that badly purely by accident, which is astounding but must be written off as one of your supernatural powers. However, you should be aware that to people who don’t know you, it makes you come off like a demi-troll.

Which is so not like you.

Politics are messy.

I’m observing a moment of mourning here for the really beautiful long paragraph I just deleted, on the grounds that its tone was inappropriate and other readers wouldn’t know what I was referring to.

Let me just say instead that your political arguments would be a good deal less messy if you didn’t leave it to others to sort out your logical structure for you at the same time that you’re arguing with them.

Perhaps Boingboing should stick to things that make people go boingboing.

Do you ever stop and wonder, before you say such condescending thingss, whether those to whom you speak have been repressing consdescending remarks they could have been making to you?

If you have anything to say in reply, or if anyone else wants to talk about moderation, take it to the moderation guidelines comment thread. I’m declaring it off-topic here.

Random832

@Arkizzle, I got the impression that “fact checking” means “verifying claims made in the post” (what else could it mean?) – which doesn’t have anything to do with determining if it’s spam, and from which it’s a short step to “do I agree with the argument made in the post”.

99% of comments posted don’t contain a URL, and I assume that legitimate anonymous comments would have a similar proportion.

For identifying anonymous users that are the same poster, how about http://infosthetics.com/archives/2007/01/ipbased_identicon.html ?

John A Arkansawyer

Hm. I hadn’t considered partial disemvowellment. That does make it harder. Maybe a tag for disemvowelled text? I’m sure that’s doable, but feasible? Or a second column which holds disemvowelled text, and pull that column if it’s not null?

QuarterlyProphet

Also if I had to make a guess over what BoingBoing got their panties in a twist about, I would say it had something to do with Violet Blue trademarking her name.

ROSSINDETROIT

I’m not surprised that there’s a controversy over someone being de-listed and unlinkified from BB. I’m astonished that this appears to be the first significant case of it. Considering the large volume of material presented here 7 days a week for years, it would be remarkable if some material and links didn’t subsequently become inappropriate for some reason.

ErosBacchus

David #521, in this climate nobody thought that silently going back and editing something out was maybe a bad idea?

Really, it’s the silent edits that create the worst of the bad feeling, because it makes us all go “am I crazy, or did that used to say something different?” In my world, doing that to people is a hostile act.

Valchael

@#784 posted by Burnchao

I have the same concerns as to whether other things could have been altered and it would probably be a good idea for them to figure out a general policy for informing about edits.

Maybe a separate page listing edits for public record that is automatically generated.

Or adding the edited info at the bottom and crossing out the wrong stuff or something. I know I’ve seen updates on entries before.

In this case however, I would find it hard to accuse them of lying to us readers.

If I were to have to consider deleting posts I’ve made somewhere about a person for private reasons I think I’d probably decide not to say anything as well because saying something could very well bring attention to stuff.

Lewis Haidt

I took the Set Top Cop seminar with Cory Doctorow while he was a USC Professor – http://uscpubd510.blogspot.com/.

Throughout the class, Cory and I engaged in civil debate with a profound disagreement at its core: I felt that the A2K/CC/Free Software/Open Source projects all impacted one’s identity at a ethical/spiritual level, specifically in the way knowledge flows through a networked, global society for the first time in 2,000 years.

In contrast, Cory, specifically in an oral interview on his work in the A2K project stated (where I still have the audio from) that he and his treaty co-writers utilized “koans” and other rhetorical instruments so that the treaty appeared in a legalese, Western-American copyright-centric language. Thus, in my first reading of the treaty, I actually thought the treaty supported DRM when, in fact, its various legal clauses made the MPAA version of copyright incoherent. I would have been completely confused had I not been fortunate enough to taking the seminar with Cory.

As my final comment in the blog showed, this debate has profound implications. If one ignores the ethical/cum spiritual level, then there is no problem to “un-publish” an annoying fellow Silicon Valley celebrity blogger.

The bottom line is BoingBoingers are now media celebrities and they want to have it both ways: be activists/journalists promoting the digital commons, but reserve the right to remove or “unpublish” someone who annoys them.

I obviously believe they made a mistake, but I still love the blog; Cory is one of the most important mentors I’ve ever had; and the reaction from the BB community is revealing in that everyone is so SENSITIVE. While BB has a strong community, there are much more important issues than a feud between bloggers.

I wonder how many of the Creative Class, Echo-Chamber BB readers would show this much passion on a project that wasn’t as simple as hitting a keyboard and feeling so [over]-connected.

Righteous Bubba

I see that the misconception that parts of BB being a set, immutable experience is implicit in that argument

They are certainly a set and immutable part of my experience; one of the hobby-horses here is the ownership of culture, that your memories are someone’s toys they can pick up and go home with. Is this not culture?

ROSSINDETROIT

How in the hell did I miss a thread this great??

Just lucky, I guess.

geekpdx

@ Joel
I guess I wasn’t trying to get at the sauce of this matter so much as answer a more general curiosity of whether a group consensus must be reached before something that materially changes content in such a manner is done. I expect that editors have a lot of leeway with what they can post and edit without calling in TEH COMMITTEE, and was wondering if this sort of thing crossed that threshold.

Of course, I can see that copping to whether this was or wasn’t a group decision could strain things further.

@ Teresa
Not sure if you were responding to me, and if you were, I’m not sure if you meant that the un-publishing or the statement was a group decision.

merreborn

For those continuing to wonder what happened, my best guess is that #40 nailed it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violet_Blue_%28author%29#Lawsuit

Using trademark law as a weapon to “protect” your lame blogger pseudonym is not cool.

David Pescovitz

@ShawnStruck (#861), Thanks so much. Policies like those are very new to us and we’re definitely learning *a ton* about how to write a good, honest, and fair policy, how to update them, what’s legal, what insurance companies stand firm on, etc. There was a great discussion about our policies when we posted the first rev and we will *absolutely* take into account what the community posted there (and here!) as we continue to revise them.

Tavie

Crap, I’m actually addicted to this thread. I’m sitting here hitting “refresh” instead of trying to sleep because I have to be out of bed in less than 7 hours.

Damn, people.

And now I just added to it. Feel free to delete this. Sorry to clutter. I’m just… damn. Too many posts. I got hooked.

hagbard

#1396 Johne Cook

At last! A new word to argue about!!!

No, I mean canteen, though I’m sure they come from the same source. A cantina has the sense of a bar (where droids are not served), while a canteen is like a cafeteria, originally one under regimental control (which it would be, if it were on the Death Star).

You can look it up on YouTube to see what I’m talking about.

Bookyloo

Taking down all the posts about somebody you’re mad at…and not telling her…and then just leaving it to be discovered…seems kinda shitty to me.

The author Peter Carey, after his divorce, wanted to retroactively remove the dedications to his former wife from all his earlier books. This looks like the same bonehead kind of move.

You can’t un-ring a bell. I know nothing about this situation except, it appears she was a friend, and now she isn’t. But why remove all evidence of a positive relationship in the past?

Of course now everyone will want to know what she did to piss you guys off so bad. I’m sure as hell curious now.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator

Sean Eric Fagan @23:

…it’s your site, so your rules.
But you are also aware that other people have links to your stories, and now those links are, inexplicably, gone. With absolutely no explanation on your part, and (near as I can figure) no redirection.

Gad! Just like every other website that removes material! What a strange and inexplicable act on our part!

In fact, almost all active websites remove material. I’m sorry to have to say this about anything having to do with Boing Boing, but it’s dead normal.

And how much hardship did the disappearance of those hypothetical links create for readers? By my reckoning there can’t have been much of it, given that the entries have been gone for more than a year, and no one remarked it until VB kicked up this fuss.

Maybe that’s why she did it: she was tired of waiting to see whether anyone else would notice.

To put it bluntly: it stinks to high heaven of a cover up.it stinks to high heaven of a cover up. And if you act like a secret cabalistic conspiracy, don’t be surprised if some people see a secret cabalistic conspiracy :).

Oh, come off it. Dramatize yourself on your own time.

It would be very easy to configure this site so it’s not archived by the Wayback Machine. It would be even easier to not provide a link to the Boing Boing archives there — which, you’ll note, we just did. If this is a cover-up and/or conspiracy, it’s so devilishly sly that you don’t stand a chance against it, no matter how much you try to warn the rest of the world.

Kiss your ass goodbye, Sean Eric Fagan. You may struggle, but our eldritch powers shall prevail, subtly reworking the very fabric of space/time itself in order to make you look like nothing more than a person who sometimes posts foolish comments in weblogs.

AlexReynolds

@Alexreynolds (#496), I think Xeni removed that phrase because it sounded inflammatory and insulting in a way that she didn’t intend.

That’s fair. But it seems rather unfortunate that the comment was edited in a discussion about whether revisionism and secrecy are generally ethical practices in a public medium. Having an unedited version available on the record allows people to decide for themselves if that behavior is acceptable.

Lilith999

The bit on zenarchery.com (the link is in post #827) is the best thing I’ve read about this whole fiasco so far. IMHO the guy seems intelligent, experienced, level-headed and not insulting. Seriously worth taking a look at Boingers, if you haven’t already.

As someone who’s been following all this mess since the beginning, back when VB first made her post, my feelings about this whole matter have shifted in the past day. I’ve read BoingBoing almost every day for over four years and VB’s blog regularly for the past few years. In the past day I’ve come to feel I don’t know either blogger(s) quite as well as I thought. I’ve already commented twice, so I won’t repeat my initial impressions. Now, I’m a little more skeptical of VB’s intentions and a lot more sympathetic to BB’s dilemma. I don’t envy you guys having to be in this situation. Before, I couldn’t quite understand why you would ever do what you did, but now I see some valid reasons. But I think the heart of all of the drama is that no matter what anybody did, a lot of people held BB up to standards that were not met. Whether or not BB should be held to those standards is a much larger question. Perhaps this is where the making of policies for the site comes into play. I do think changing/deleting/unpublishing/whatever without any sort of notice is in bad taste and feels like it goes against the spirit of BB. It is completely within your right to do, but it just doesn’t sit well. I think a lot of people just wanted BB to be better than that. But no matter what, I still love BB and they can’t help but learn from this situation.

I would also like to say something to all the folks that complain that this post has gotten almost a thousand comments but that more important topics get very few. You’re right that there are more egregious things going on in the world that people should be concerned about, but I think the reason those posts get less comments is not because people don’t care but because people already know that those things are wrong/horrible/etc. and it’s not that surprising when someone like Bush does something to take away our rights. There’s not that much to discuss because people are mostly on the same page already. But what we have here is totally different. There is no clear right or wrong. There is no definate bad guy. There is no specified reason. There’s a whole lot of grey area here and that’s what spurns on the discussion. BB has taken actions that plenty of people didn’t think they would ever do. That is the surprise. That is the issue.

I would also really love to hear from Cory about this. His voice is strangely absent.

hagbard

#1220 Burnchao

Hmm, I also don’t agree with your characterization of blog moderator as customer service rep. Perhaps variations in this perception is what causes different reactions to moderators talking back (as someone mentioned earlier).

emdub

Yes, we’ve read the made-up definitions for the made-up word “unpublish”, none of which change the fact it’s a made-up word which is being used because words like “removed”, “hidden” or “deleted” would effectively illustrate how BoingBoing has engaged in the same sort of behavior for which its authors vociferously and ferociously attack others while BoingBoing claims to “fight hard for openness and transparency.”

If BoingBoing values openness and transparency, it would behoove them to use real words instead of inventing new words in order to avoid being criticized for the behavior for which they criticize others.

Nelson.C

dllacina @1447: BB doesn’t rant against copyright. It rants against abusive use of copyright and other IP laws. There’s a big difference.

Anonymous

I had an opinion a while ago (had to do with thinking of links as part of a gift economy, as I think was already mentioned, and how it is in pretty poor taste to complain [as seems to be underlying the complaint on VB's side] that something you were getting for free has ceased to be) but then the focus seems to have rather shifted to a discussion of the bad form of removing one’s own work from one’s own blog. Well, that and moderation, which I care about even less because this is the only thread I have read the comments in. (There have been good thought provoking comments scattered throughout, to be sure, but… I don’t think I’ll be frequenting the comment pages any more than before).

I don’t really care one way or another whether the content reappears – to me the internet was always meant to be ephemeral anyways, and VB is pretty yawn inducing – but I do have a suggestion.

More creative 404 pages, as found here: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/08/17/404-error-pages-reloaded/

There is even one that begs you to think of the kittens.

GregLondon

the jackhammering logo of BB as a true symbol of strength as we continue to make this world wonderful by destroying and erasing away those who refuse to conform with our wonderful goals

he said on BB’s very own blog, the words of which haven’t been erased.

Yeah, you’re a real rebel, you are. Fighting a blog that lets you point out how it “destroys and erases” anything that doesn’t conform on it’s very own blog that for some strange reason doesn’t destroy or erase your comments

Take the tinfoil hat off, put the gasoline away, and go take a nap. Come back tomorrow. You’re post will still be here.

Which reminds me, I heard once that the reason that people generally throw red paint on people who wear fur, is because they know if they throw red paint on people who wear leather that the odds of getting the crap beat out of them goes up astronomically.

You just threw red paint on someone wearing fake fur, the absolute dumbest and the aboslutely easiest fight anyone could take on.

Will Shetterly

I’m disappointed with boingboing. This isn’t the same as getting the “BB + VB 4evah!” tattoo changed. This is going through the photos and taking out Trotsky. You did like the posts when you first put them up, right?

yuutamichael

@Teresa (Moderator), I’ve got to say that I find your tone to be consistently condescending. It’s bothered me for a long time now and kept me from ever really jumping in to the comments section. Your responses in this discussion have displayed the same dismissive attitude is particularly antithetical to the tone that draws most people to this website. People have legitimate concerns about how large, respected institutions that they are emotionally invested in behave.
Also your comments about Violet Blue seem to the opposite of classy. You can’t say some of things you’ve said about Violet Blue in this thread and then pretend that Boing Boing is too demure to state the reasoning behind wanted to be disassociated from her.

@Xeni You said, “This is also why we remove hateful, ad hominem attack comments from public view, too…” This seems to be disingenuous. You remove terrible comments that users post but I don’t think you ban them and retroactively delete everything they ever wrote. Also, these were things that you wrote and obviously felt okay with the content of for a period of time. None of the posts were hateful, contained ad hominem attacks or anything on that level. I think that people are upset because Boing Boing is essentially denying any relation to Violet Blue instead of coming out and saying that someone they used to associate no longer has their support.

If Violet Blue is such a person that all of this is worthwhile then it seems like others who read this blog would like to know why. If it was solely a personal thing then it seems against the professionalism of Boing Boing to delete the posts and the should be restored. If it was bad enough to warrant the deletion then it seems worthy enough to mention why as we would probably like to know huge truths like that anyways. I don’t want to support someone who is killing kittens and would appreciate it if that’s the level of things going on here.

I think as a semi-confession I’ll admit that maybe more than a few people, myself included, are looking for a reason to give up on Boing Boing or at least ween ourselves. Which is a terrible reason to get all riled up about this, I agree. Nevertheless, for some, this may be the steampunk straw that broke the papercraft camels back. For me it’s the tone deaf self promotion and condescending moderation, things that I could navigate around before, but now I’ll take my eyeballs elsewhere. I realize that I’ll probably get a few snarky replies saying “who the hell cares?” but if that’s the attitude around here then that’s just another reason to move on.

Glenn Fleishman

@205: “Has anyone here ever read a book that wasn’t written by George Orwell? You know there are other books, right?”

There are no other books. We have always been reading George Orwell.

banjology

I think the best move for Boingboing to do would be to unpublish their unpublishment.

Wait, what?

hagbard

#638 mullingitover

Sorry no yourself.

I’ve seen enough PR disasters to know that there is a point where positions are committed and it’s all over but the stoning.

1. The lynch mob can always be pointed to as evidence that something should have been done differently earlier on, but it doesn’t actually prove that the other thing would have prevented the lynch mob.

Specifically, how do you actually know when responding quickly trumps sitting tight and hoping something will blow over?

2. Ujamaa Incident at Stanford. People were upset, but when the two perps came forward at a meeting to apologize, that was when the real hysterics began. Why? The given reason was that they didn’t apologize right, so it was viewed as a slap in the face.

3. Not all problems can be fixed. It’s true that what’s going on is damaging their reputations, and it’s true that hi-visibility figures are vulnerable to this sort of attack, but that doesn’t prove that this sort of attack can always be avoided.

Even if there was a PR approach that might have defused the situation, I don’t personally agree that famous people owe me or you good PR. But that’s just me.

4. This goes back to my previous posts. There is an honest debate in this very thread about whether or not they actually did something wrong in the first place. You can see which side I come down on. So if I don’t agree that they did wrong, perhaps they don’t agree either. And if they don’t feel they did wrong, it would be unprincipled to apologize.

5. Telling some bloggers they need to hire PR consultants is corporate-speak, in my book.

I think 5 is evidence in favor of one of my earlier comments as well. When they were giving no information, they were guilty of that. When they gave X bits of information, they were guilty of withholding. You claim that there is some number of bits of information where they would stop being guilty (to say it a different way, “where people would stop posting angry comments in this thread”). I argue that the guilt is in the minds of the “loyal fans”, so that everything they say at this point can and will be used against them.

Your post-5 thing is another good example. Guilty of hiding behind poor Teresa — that’s a good one. Except that a number of them have peppered the comments with their responses.

Were mistakes made? Of course mistakes were made. If they hadn’t made them, would the outcome have been different? I’m not so sure.

hagbard

This thread is post-constructive. Maybe the moderators should announce that it will be shut down at 1100 comments or some such figure, so people can get their last points in. That will give us some time to claim that shutting down the thread means you hate freedom.

OTOH, maybe closing this door might just cause the zombies to stick all their arms through your windows. And then who will sweep up all the broken glass?

OTOOH, if you leave the thread open, we can claim, like Satan did yesterday, that you have just created this thread to dismiss us by letting us speak.

Whatever you do, it sure is evidence of your shocking evilness.

Righteous Bubba

I can see maybe still linking to something that’s a week or maybe even month old but definately not something from a year ago, That’s downright pre-cambrian in web years!

Speaking as a pre-Cambrian, this is simply the way we creaky bastards do things; in another of the running themes of the site, it turns out the fancy tools we think are for one purpose are being used perfectly well by others for a different purpose.

AGF

Hey Nina – Yes. Beautifully put.

Damon_TFB

I’ve almost commented several times before, but Mr. Brust’s very rational post was the trigger I needed.

The particular details of this brouhaha have been alternately compelling, painful, tawdry, philosophical, and insightful.

Like Mr. Brust, I have faith in the BoingBoingers. I believe they will rise from this shitstorm stronger and more principled than before. The community that has grown around BoingBoing will be more invested and more explicitly considered part of BoingBoing. I am willing to be patient while this egg hatches.

I do have a few suggestions for future comment management on BB:

1. Don’t go to a threaded structure. That fractures discussion.

2. Have each comment’s number fixed. I have seen many references by other commenters broken.

3. It’s fine to ignore comments that never made it onto the page, but if a comment is removed after being served to even one pageview, leave a simple “This comment was deleted.”

4. Some way to distinguish between different anonymous posters should be used. I have several ideas, but that could be hashed out in another thread.

5. Any post that is edited after being served to even one pageview needs to be marked with a note and timestamp. Description of the edit is optional, but recommended.

6. If a user wants to have their account deleted, that’s fine, but don’t delete their comments. Just change the username to “De-Registered User #42″

At times, I’ve been worried about the moderation in this thread, but the moderators have proven to me that while they may not be perfect, they are willing to listen and are trying to do the Right Thing.

I’m very proud to witness such a dynamic and beautiful evolution of BoingBoing.

David Pescovitz

@Teresa (#22), I think that Geekpdx (#15) was asking whether it was a group decision to unpublish the posts. @Geekpdx, the BB bloggers act autonomously with regard to editorial decisions.

Fnarf

This is disgusting. Yes, you have the right to put up whatever you want, and delete it later. But I’m really unhappy to see Boing Boing fall back on “it’s ours, we can do whatever we want” excuse. It’s an EXTREMELY un-BoingBoing way to resolve a conflict.

Also, remember you’re having a CONVERSATION here. We as users provide your content too. When it comes to “rights” we should have some interest in what goes on here as well, even if we are just lowly commenters.

To me it looks like you invited the Violet Blue person onto your website, and then, after some mysterious falling-out, decided to scrub her presence. That’s sick and wrong. You’re rewriting history.

That’s the thing; you’re not just “unpublishing” your property, as you so disingenuously claim. You are only rewriting one small portion of that property, in order to remove contributions that you were once happy to accept.

That’s not all right with me.

The irony is you are drawing attention to the very thing you’re trying to hide. How Nixonian.

GregLondon

Skully and Mulder looked into this whole “BB deleted it’s own posts about VB” thing.

They didn’t find anything.

Random832

@965, srsly, it’s clear that that clause only applies to the “Privacy Policy” section, not the whole policy page. It even says “this privacy statement”.

Zinjanthropus

I hope moderators get an avatar of a cute fluffy rabbit and a LOLcaption that says “Just look at the bones!”

genericvox

I like pie. Mmm, pie.

acb

@34: would it really have been better if they paid service to transparency posted an article saying “We’ve removed all references to Violet Blue for personal reasons”? That sounds a little too much like the passive-aggressive “I’m unfriending some people who are not true friends, they know who they are” LiveJournal drama posts.

In social situations, transparency is not always the best solution.

Fuzzy

To #160 #167 and #180 and others who want to know what “Violet behaved in a way that made us reconsider whether we wanted to lend her any credibility or associate with her.” means I think you’re going to have to remain unsatisfied, because I can’t see that BB going into detail about what that behavior was, and why it caused them to reconsider their collective relationship with Ms. Blue, would do anyone any good. To many who are already convinced that the unpublishing was a mistake, whatever the reason is not going to be enough for them. And to the rest of the world, it’s simply going to be gossip. I think BB is (and, perhaps slightly clumsily, has been all along) trying to exercise a degree of decorum here. Hell, I’m as curious as anyone else — that’s why I’m here in the gapers block, but I have the self-awareness that my curiosity doesn’t trump other people’s private affairs.

Burnchao

Imagine (for 10 seconds) BB as a print magazine – BB will not provide THAT PARTICULAR back issue to you. You may find it elsewhere and BB tells you where that is and wishes you luck in your quest.

BB is providing back issues, but redacting certain pages. And the manner of redaction is very dishonest. When some entity, like the government, hands me some documents containing redactions, I can at least tell they’ve done it because the black lines are still there, letting me know something was covered up. BB completely altered the back issues and covered up the altering of them.

Archeaopteryx

GGOLAN, what parts do you want cited? Be very specific? Most of this is a matter of public record.

Xopher

Buttseks, it missed you too.

Doctor Pickles

“Violet behaved in a way that made us reconsider whether we wanted to lend her any credibility or associate with her.”

Can someone explain what this means? What exactly did Violet do that was so wrong?

I think it would help a lot of people in their understanding of why this action was taken if we knew what she did.

Brian Carnell

“#656: “boingboing altered their archives to make it look like they never performed action X.”

That’s not why they did it though. They did it so that the links wouldn’t be supporting someone they no longer choose to endorse. The goal wasn’t secrecy it was removal of support. Kind of like Obama leaving his church (to use a really outrageously extreme example that might get me into hot water).”

And that explanation makes absolutely no sense. Suppose Larry Lessig gets hit on the head tomorrow and suddenly decides oops…an infinite copyright term is a wonderful idea. Presumably BB would no longer want to support Lessig. Would they then unpublish every post referring to him in order to avoid “supporting” him?

Suppose Larry Lessig goes crazy and kills someone and goes to jail for it. Would it make sense to remove everything he’d written in the past to avoid “supporting” him?

Now, it would make sense if they now have information that, say, Violet Blue plagiarized the things that were linked to. But even then, as others have pointed out, a simple “Update: as of xxx we learned this material was plagarized,” etc.

But removing past posts by someone who *today* is not someone they’re supportive of? Yeah, and Larry Craig was just looking for extra toilet paper in the stall next to him.

permafrost

Nobody beyond the West Coast gives a shit. Super drama. Blah blah. Sometimes it’s just better to put stuff offline.

mdhatter

Repost the stuff, but make all the links point to this thread.

Bwahahah.

p00pyhead

OK. Anyone post something here after #1337 that’s already been mentioned before is a flying monkey. And those still holding their pitchforks should tar and feather them. Or better yet look at #1260 and #1264 and go over to tinynibbles and enforce the policing of hypocrisy over there.

Random832

@1566 I understood the phrase “trying real hard to do the right thing.” in context to mean the perennial claim that the reason for not stating the reason was due to “the Boingers not wantng to trash Violet Blue”, which in light of the failure to PRIVATELY disclose the reason does tend to ring false.

Archeaopteryx

Somebody else who “gets it;”

http://blog.gism.net/2008/07/01/violet-blue-sucks/

joshmillard

But the loss on the BB server did not destroy the BB works. A real “unpublishing” of something with a strong cultural/historical influence that is available online is nigh impossible.

Absolutely; I’m not one of the folks who has been invoking 1984 (and along with Anil Dash I defended the CMSian, not Orwellian, heritage of “unpublished” over in the mefi thread) and my concern her isn’t that Xeni razed cultural artifacts from the very face of the Internet or anything as dramatically stated as that.

But there’s a huge continuum between being some Orwellian demon and being the best custodian of content you can be, and I think Xeni’s handling of this fell somewhere on that continuum, not happily on the endpoint of the angels. I think it was bad execution, whatever the motivations may have been, and I’m a little surprised that this is the first time it’s apparently even been something the BB principles considered.

hokano

You are probably realizing that posting this was a mistake. The problem is that this article itself references a non-person and as long as it exists it will generate curiosity about the non-person.

Your only remedy is to delete this post and never mention the name of the non-person again in any context.

Yours sincerely,
Winston Smith
Ministry of Truth

Anonymous

Araaaaagh! This action doesn’t change my view of boingboing in the least (I still like BB). I just wish I knew what the dang controversy was! I googled “Violet Blue Controversy” and the best I got was her asking steve jobs for a photo.
And I just read through all 166 comments (okay skimmed most) hoping to find some answers. This is doubly driving me nuts, because I don’t actually care that much about her, but now there is a mystery surrounding her. If anything, thier choice to remove and adress their decision to do so has resulted in more publicity for her.

ErosBacchus

Xeni, thank you. I do exactly the same thing sometimes, think of a slight expansion I ought to make on a post or comment right after I make it. With my tiny levels of traffic and low controversy, I get away with it and it doesn’t matter.

Unfortunately this was at least the second time in this comment thread that you’ve done the “silent edit of your own comments” thing, and the first time was the removal of the now notorious “piles of shit” comment that was widely seen as inflammatory and was getting quoted all over the web. When you removed that — and it was a good edit if you didn’t mean the really ugly comparison that people, including me, took you to mean — and left no indication in the comment that the comment ever read differently, you set yourself up (I think) for hypersensitivity on this topic.

The analogy between the silent edits of your comments and the silent edits of your archives is, I think, obvious. I know you feel justified in doing what you did, but justified or not, making the links go 404 without explanation is not cool for all the same reasons that making me feel like I need to screenshot your comments is not cool. It’s about trust, and whether you want it.

Talia

#965

I’m sure you’ll find somewhere else to rant and rave. There’s no shortage of places on the internet to blather on in blindingly ignorant, self-righteous, “i’m so much more moral than you” outrage, I’m sure.

#972

The entire point was they didn’t want to turn it into some sort of public blogwar. Unfortunately what occurred got blown ridiculously out of proportion (its not helping that a large percentage of commenters appear to be gigantic self-righteous basement dwelling douchebags, either).

Ambrose

If Xeni, or David or any of the BoingBoing crew are actually going to come here and read and reply to posts, I think that’s great.

Please reply to this one.

1) A lot of people are simply REALLY SHOCKED you did this.

2) A lot of people think it’s REALLY HYPOCRITICAL for you to do this.

3) A lot of people think you’re suffering a COMPLETE DISASTER in terms of your public image and credibility.

4) A lot of people think that your actions since this got noticed have made the original PR disaster MUCH WORSE.

Please comment.

transmothra

i laugh at the horror of your hair-splitting, pedantic word-buffoonery, histrionic commentors!

Xeni Jardin

Hi folks,

Hope everyone in the US is having a mellow holiday, and that everyone else is having a good day, too, even if they are deprived of the fireworks and the BBQs.

A few things.

Many people in this nearly-1500-post comment thread have weighed in with very thoughtful observations and questions. Thank you. I know there are still some misunderstandings floating around, and we (BB, not me as the “royal we”) need to address them. We’re planning to do that.

Please be patient with us. Today is a holiday, and I’m spending it with my family and friends, mostly offline.

Cory and Mark happened to both be on personal vacations, mostly offline (in Mark’s case, entirely offline) all week while this stuff blew up.

When something happens that affects all of us individually and collectively, we try to really think through things together, and process it together, and do the right thing together. In this case, we were delayed by a number of factors, but we will swing back and address some of the unresolved issues, soonest.

One asteroid I’d like to blast apart right now with a truth-laser: um, contrary to what like 5 people complained to me today, in person, on the phone, and over email, um… how do i put this… well, this comment thread is not shut down. And we’re not planning to shut it down.

We considered doing so the other day because we were dealing with a short-term crisis, but as you can see this is not the case, and plans are to keep it open indefinitely. That could change I guess, so please don’t crucify me if one day we have to for some unsual set of reasons, but I don’t think we’ll close it any time soon.

Anyway, thank you so much for being engaged with this discussion, and please stand by, we’ll be back soon.

XJ

Tarmle

The day I pay BB’s wages is the day I get to tell them what can and cannot be posted on or removed from this blog. It’s only censorship if VB forces BB to remove posts about her.

it is as if one day you can proclaim the world to be flat, and then when irrefutable evidence that the world is round is made, you can go back, un-publish the post and say “we never said the world was flat” – #17 tylersweeney

Is this a suggestion that BB should not be allowed to make changes to their own opinions and their own work that remains under their control on a server that they pay for?

What was that about threats to free speech?

When BB goes out and tells other bloggers to remove quotes from the posts they removed, then we’ll talk.

Geoff

HAHAHAHAHA!

The internet is serious business.

Go back to your LOLcats everyone. That’s why the internet was invented.

Tubman

@#524, David Thomsen: To be fair, ‘unpublish’ isn’t some Orwellian euphemism dreamt up by BoingBoing, it’s just a standard Content Management System term for the button that puts content off-line. However, I do find Teresa’s insistence on the “clear” difference between unpublishing and censoring quite amusing. I suspect it’s the result of a reasoning process that starts with the conclusion “we don’t do censorship” and adjusts the premises to fit.

QPNBesty

@#786 Wouldn’t it be kinda interesting if all this 21st century gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands was about the eternal triangle? The more things change, the more they stay the same eh? It’s just a blog people, try getting as wound up about Zimbabwe or Tibet….

Righteous Bubba

Repost the stuff, but make all the links point to this thread.

Heh. Needs more dildo.

GregLondon

but poopyhead, I was hoping for ice cream.

Oh, wait, it’s ice cream after a stoning.

never mind.

GregLondon

Dear BoingBoing,

I understand that comparing your actions to Stalin’s Revolution was a bit over the top. I understand now that as more comes out about VB that you had good reason to want to withdraw support of VB. I understand now given what other victims of VB have said that you had some valid concerns that would make you want to withdraw support without getting into a public fight with VB.

I understand that the only reason I found out about you deleting this content about VB ultimately funnels back to the fact that VB complained about it in various public venues such as her blog in in an LA Times puff piece interview that may as well have been written by VB herself. I understand now that I never actually suffered any damage myself by you deleting this content over a year ago, but allowed myself to be whipped up into a frenzy by VB and friends into forming a flying monkey squad that attacked you.

But pride refuses to allow me to be wrong about literally everything thta happened around this mess. And therefore, I vow to devote myself to fight to the last breath to prove to you just how morally wrong you are to use the word “unpublish” when you clearly should be using the term “delete”. Not “unpublish”, DELETE! DELETE!

And so to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator

Buttseks! I was just this afternoon feeing wistful about having a thread this long with you not here to see it.

If I weren’t obliged under the Geneva Conventions on Violet Blue to love all the comments in this thread equally, I’d praise Ross’s description.

Caroline

If this is the same as 1984, then anyone who’s ever gone back and friends-locked their old livejournal entries is Big Brother.

Get a sense of perspective. You can argue about whether this might’ve been the best way to handle whatever dispute it was, sure. But you can’t seriously argue that this is “censorship” or “against free speech.”

In fact, I’ve come to believe that it’s a law of nature: whenever anyone on a comments thread starts complaining that the blog owners suppress free speech, they’ve lost the argument. So long as you can get your own blog, your free speech is assured. No one else is obliged to give you their microphone.

And Alephnul, don’t let the door hit you in the ass.

Antinous

Bad password,

Using the pretext of an animated argument to spew vile misogyny? I don’t think so.

Talia

OK, lost my temper. Sorry, feel free to disemvowel previous post. I just feel bad you guys have to put up with this complete and utter crap. I should probably just move right along. :)

hagbard

#1399 a random John
#1402 emdub

#1385

Really, my feelings are hurt. Didn’t you read my comment? Didn’t you anticipate the firestorm of rage I felt when I read your comments? And yet you posted them anyway!

I admit, I used made up sentences.

OK OK, all of the words are made up. Every one of them!

I feel much better now. Confessing to you was so cathartic.

willibro

Well, don’t see that any issues got settled here, although all sorts got raised. The Boingers can do as they wish with their blog? Xeni’s human and isn’t keen to admit or explain her private business? Wow. Quelle suprise.

One thing’s sure true for me, though: BB just got a lot less interesting. It’s just some kids with a magazine, trying to get famous and make a buck. They have this Letters to the Editor column and an interesting blend of stuff, but not fundamentally different from lots of other media — unlike, say, Daily Kos, where there really is a conversation going on.

Too bad. But then they didn’t pretend to be something special, right?

Random832

And if in fact the motive in not sharing it with US was some reason other than (as the BBers still maintain) protecting VB from being “trashed”, that is very relevant to THIS community, in so far as it would mean that we were being lied to about the motive and that the motive itself may be something rather less noble than protecting VB from herself.

yannish

Another victim of the Streisand Effect.

For a blog that prides itself on fighting censorship and championing internet freedoms, you could have done a heck of a lot better, especially the clandestine “editing”.

I respect your right to manage your “hosting” any way you see fit, but you should have been more upfront about it, from the beginning.

Sister Y

From UCLA Information Studies assistant prof Jean-FranÃ§ois Blanchette’s brief explanation of his project promoting forgetting and exclusion in information design:

Commentators have typically portrayed the protection of forgetfulness as a matter of balancing individual privacy against such social goods as law enforcement, government efficiency, or national security. But in this form of analysis such social needs almost inevitably overpower the need of individuals. In an attempt to redress this imbalance, this project will proceed within a framework where collective needs for forgetting are explicitly balanced against collective needs for accountability.

Hiram in the Netherlands

@ Eustace, 768: what would, in your view, constitute a violent act, on-line, if not, for instance, the stealthy removal of every mention of someone’s name from a widely read web publication? Do you consider the retouching of photographs by dictatorships as violent acts, or as mere unpleasantries?

Or is it perhaps impossible for you to conceive of any other kind of violence than the fists, bullets and bombs kind?

Remember primary school? The cabal of ten year olds deciding that Jimmy was now persona non grata, and that no-one could say his name out loud anymore? Is that not violence?

Antinous

And a friendly reminder – this thread is the forum for this discussion. Off-topic comments in other threads will be subject to the same moderation policies as always. Comments about moderation in general can go in the Moderation Policy thread. There’s a link in gray just above Recent Comments. And, yes, we read it even though it’s an old thread. Thanks.

Joel Johnson

Heh, I guess I may not know how to lock the thread.

Takuan

obviously nothing. I’m going back into the water.
Later.

tillwe

@PooPYHEAD: good idea, will do so (i.e. stop posting after leet), if and only if the BB team promises a follow up post.

GregLondon

How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market.”

Archeaopteryx

VB absolutely KNOWS what went on. She is being dishonest.

mdhatter

When the fuck did I ever “demand” or even ask to know the reason for myself?

in your comment above #1289 – recreated in full

Even though you don’t want to reveal actual details, I think it would help get the discussion on solid ground if you would go on record as characterizing the reason as one of the following: Personal, Legal, Ideological, or Money (advertisers etc).

Can you see that is exactly “the fuck”* when you did so? A one word summary of the reason isn’t any more our business than the full details.

ok?

All I asked for is why VB wasn’t told the reason.

Is even THAT your business? NO.

*please please please let me have this one.

chriscook

#207 – No, I just figure she’d tell the reason where BB won’t. And damn I’m curious!

Satan

BB just made Miss Blue an extremely famous personality. Way to go guys. Talk about achieving the exact opposite effect from the stated goal! Bravo!

I had no idea who Violet Blue was until today. Now I’m all curious. I want to know everything there is about her.

Another thing I learned today: BB handles problems like an immature girl in Jr. High.

Satan

#529 – that is a good post. I agree with your assessment. BB is caught in a flurry of self contradictions and I don’t see it taking the path to solving those problems. It wants to keep growing and establish its credibility yet refuses to admit the responsibilities that come with the territory. It wants transparency to be a standard yet fails to follow its own preachings.

deken

So compelled by this story that i was forced to change my status from avid lurker to first time poster…. even registered, something i tend not to do on the interwebs.

this is censorship.

it’s also a defiant act of ‘trust breaking’ with the BB community.

Worse still: Teresa. Who you kidding honey?

“Thank you all for caring what happens on Boing Boing. And if you think there’s more to say, by all means, let’s talk. We’re listening.”

Yeah right….

Antinous

We’re listening.” Yeah right….

If you don’t think that we’re listening, how do you explain this response? We’re all ears.

GregLondon

will: for a simple example, I can no longer trust BB’s archives. Suppose I wanted to find the Top 10 Sex Memes from 2006 that VB wrote and Xeni posted

But you didn’t. Apparently no one did. It was a year, after all.

it’s gone. What else is missing? Should I even bother to look for things here, since they can go without warning or explanation?

OK. So, first of all, you realize that’s a slippery slope argument, right? If they delete these specific posts, the whole archive is forever tainted and suspect, is basically what you’re arguing. It doesn’t prove BB’s entire archive is tainted, but it argues it.

And what you’re arguing for is “trust”, and there’s no objective way that anyone can guarantee that they are trustworthy. So, if you’re looking for some rock solid proof that you’ll always be able to trust any site or any person, I don’t know what to tell you.

I think the one thing that is clear to me about this whole mess is that it doesn’t seem to be done out of malice, no harm was intended. Hindsight may say it could have been done better/differently, but at the time, I don’t think malice was the goal. I don’t think the goal was to increase advertising dollars, either. And I don’t think any harm was meant to VB. And I dont’ think this was intended to thwart the battle against dead links. And I don’t think this was intended to rewrite history, start a totalitarian 1984 state, or begin some Stalinistic revolution.

So, I think you can still trust BB to have the right intention. I do.

If you want to be able to trust them to execute it properly for all eternity, well, I can’t help you, and good luck on finding anyone who can.

minTphresh

please, somebody tell me how i can blame this thread on either bush or cheney. or both. xeni, u rock! you have eggs of steele to come on this shitstorm and be gentle honest and patient. definately changed the tone of this uncleen thread! takuan, oh High costello, you missed the moderator smack-down, balls out,fisticuff, down-and-dirty-in-the-mud! teresa was actually taken off in a black ‘copter for ‘retraining’. not really, but almost 1240 comments! holy shit! err, i mean OW shit!

holtt

But who ever gets post #1337 better not blow it like #1000 did. What a moran!

ZippySpincycle

Nina @1435 gave us the best metaphor for the discussion at this point:

what was once an exciting and pep-filled hockey game of skill and play, is now just ‘night of the living dead’ on ice.

And just in case any entertainment impresarios are listening, I, for one, would pay good money to see a production of Night of the Living Dead On Ice.

hagbard

#1594 Random832

I think we’re down to an intractable problem: you believe VB and you don’t believe BB, nor do you believe various people who have tried to demonstrate that no perfidy was committed.

But how much of a problem is that? How hard should anyone try to overcome your prejudice?

I use the word prejudice advisedly. Unless you have some source of information outside of the various blogs and forums, all you have is what we have: the printed claims of parties involved. You take VB at her word, and you distrust the words of Boingers.

You may have over-played your hand. If someone can’t possibly get back in your good graces, then perhaps it makes sense for them to cut their losses.

I personally don’t think they can get back in your good graces (honestly, I don’t see any evidence that they ever were in them).

Michael

AARRGGHGHGH. This whole thing has been raising my blood pressure all weekend. The world is full of crap and all you trolls can worry about is whether Boing fricking Boing is on the side of censorship evil? Hypocritical?

Jesus Mary God save us from you morons. I know calling a spade a spade is throwing gasoline on this fire, and Teresa, feel free to disemvowel or delete if I’m being too harsh here, but this has gone just too far. Arrogant know-nothings hate BoingBoing for being more successful than they are, then they spill over onto Making Light, and they probably even vote. Or worse! They probably don’t vote! And are holier-than-thou about being above that system!

I really don’t suffer fools gladly — so please! Shut the fuck up! All of you!

Jeez Louise, I just hate these people, and it’s not easy to provoke me to that kind of antipathy. I even try to understand Donald Rumsfeld. (I do draw the line at Cheney.)

Why don’t you all take all that righteous outrage energy and do something with it that won’t make the world worse? Go, I dunno, dance energetically with Matt Harding or something. And get the fuck off BoingBoing’s back! They owe you nothing — they give you endless entertainment for free and you repay them with enough hatred — not just on this issue, but on every little fricking thing that comes down the pike — that it has to make them wonder why in hell they do it. Seriously. Grow the fuck up.

Stephen

Saying it’s you’re blog and you can do what you want is a bit of a straw-man fallacy. I haven’t seen anyone suggest legal penalties for your behavior. It’s you’re blog, you can do what you want.

People are saying they don’t like it.

People have made the claim that you are stifling free speak, which appears to support your straw-man. But free speak is both a legal concept and also vernacular english. You have clearly stifled free speak in the vernacular sense and clearly have not in the legal sense.

tillwe

@Tubman: it’s the same difference as the difference between “painting words black” and “censoring”. Or, for all consequences, between “removing content from public view” and “deleting content”.

Vanwall

A year ago and this is the result – where was all this bloviating then? A certain someone seems to have played the “I’m shocked, Ricky, shocked to find gambling going on in here!” card with the press. The abyss has already looked into that one’s soul.

ribonucleic

971, “more a matter of boneheadedness than evil” is par outside of government work. :-)

Tarasbulbasaur

@1224 Vanwall

I’m sure you could point to extreme examples that support your reading of the central issue, but to summarize “the salient point in all the criticism of Boing Boing’s actions regarding this subject” as “BB doesn’t own, manage, edit, etc. their own blog” strikes me as a severe misprision of the case at hand.

The general question I see being asked is whether it is preferable and in accord with BoingBoing’s own apparent ideological stance for a media outlet to “edit reality” in typical PR hack mode–i.e. stealth edits and silent unpublishing of meaningful things people thought they remembered reading–or else to leave a trail of thoughtful annotations so that no one needs resort to screenshots or independent archives to track how the content has been manipulated.

BoingBoing staff can obviously edit the content any way they like. Their audience is mostly just asking that they be good editors–not corporate publisher type editors with a sense for PR and a facility for making prose more readable, but more like good academic critical edition editors who leave the strikeouts visible and footnote textual variations.

We thought BoingBoing was already doing that to a reasonable degree. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen red strikeouts on the main page as a story breaks and requires some retractions. Updates marked as such are common. But stealth unpublishing is definitely a step in the opposite direction.

Content owners have every legal right to go that way if they like. Yet I have rarely seen BoingBoing shy away from telling content owners what they *should* do.

QuarterlyProphet

But I don’t read tinynibbles.

ROSSINDETROIT

2K or bust!

SLAPPstick

Is this still going on?

While all of you are still up in arms over unpublishing and moderation, Miss Blue has graduated on to issuing restraining orders on people who edit her wikipedia article in ways she doesn’t approve of.

http://valleywag.com/5027803/violet-blue-restrains-critic-with-court-

Like mentioned above policies on transparency are all well and good but sometimes there are extenuating circumstances that justify overriding them. It certainly sounds like that is the case here.

Satan

Calling yourself a “blog” as a defense for exercising lower standards of journalism than a news organization does not persuade me about this event being handled as a complete PR mess for BoingBoing.

No news organization, including Boing Boing due to its well established popular status, can avoid the label of hypocrisy by hiding the facts about what is now a newsworthy issue of interest to the public. Whatever private nature the initial issue was has now become a public interest. Therefore, everyone involved with Boing Boing better look hard and long into its soul as a journalist and make a choice about whether to serve the public’s desire to understand the facts and make their own judgments about this news or simply shutter its doors. Because the moment you hold back the news like this and hide behind platitudes, you can no longer credibly zealously demand the truth for the sources you go out and report on.

News is pain. If you can’t take it, don’t bother dishing it out.

Bob Doles Communist Doppelganger

@208

I read “removed their own work” to mean that they removed articles that they wrote about VB – not that they removed articles or posts written by VB.

How would this be a “spin job”? If I wrote an article about the nation of Spain, and then removed that article from my website, how could this be construed as anything but removing my own work?

gunnk

First off, I like the advice from Gracchus. Good policy.

It really disappoints me when blogs remove articles. I do a little blogging. I can be wrong, stupid, taken-in or misinformed at times. When that happens I can always remove the links to someone or something that has turned out to be something I don’t want to support. Removing the links will make sure I’m not contributing to their pagerank.

I can add a note along the lines of “Doh! What was I thinking? Feel free to read this article to glimpse a major screw-up on my part, but don’t bother otherwise.”

But delete it? No. I put it out there for better or worse and will live with that.

Does a blogger have the right to delete their articles if they want? Sure.

Do they lose credibility by doing so? Absolutely. The more trusted the blog, the more they lose.

I’d love to see you put the articles back up, remove the links, and add a note saying that the article does not represent any current support for the person in question.

I really hate that Boing Boing pulled those articles. It’s your right. I’m just very disappointed to find your standards aren’t what I thought. Boing Boing has a reputation for fighting fearlessly for Good Side. This kind of behavior tarnishes that reputation.

Please, guys, make it right and acknowledge this as a mistake and a lesson learned!

hagbard

What Satan is really saying is that as readers we have a right to expect that bloggers will do what we expect and will give us what we want. He’s saying that we have a right to put words into other people’s mouths and if they don’t correct us we’re right and if they do they’re feeding the conflict by responding.

He’s saying that as a matter of principle BoingBoing should be bound by a framework of norms and rules and laws that they violated even before Satan imagined them.

That’s what he’s really saying.

lolife

Yes, it’s your blog and you can do whatever the hell you want, but from the outside it looks spiteful and the spin doctor just made it worse.

Random832

@1570 I haven’t heard from a BBer that VB knows. I will continue assuming that VB does not know until a BBer unequivocally states that VB has been told (notably different from “ought to know” or “should have figured it out” or “really absolutely knows unless she’s a complete idiot or being deliberately obtuse”, since, you know, maybe VB is just really really dense) what she did.

You said in an earlier comment #690 “Well, I think it was likely the trademark suit and the FILING for the trademark over a year ago.” I can tell you that I know for a fact that it’s not that. Because if it were really as simple as “You know the bad thing that she did a year ago that you all already know about? Yeah it was that. Kthxbye” they’d have said it – there’s nothing private or personal about that and obviously there is something (even if we don’t know what) private or personal about the real reason.

So, yes, VB does know, obviously, that she sued someone over a b*llsh*t trademark. She knows that many people here have expressed disapproval of that action. But that’s not the same as her knowing that that is the reason, or indeed the same as that being the reason.

Random832

Can you explain to me just to what extent anonymous approval requires fact checking or URL checking? Why isn’t it just “it’s not spam, it’s not a stream of obscenities, we wouldn’t delete this if it got posted by a registered user, *click* done”? I think the more latitude you give yourselves to reject comments for different reasons, the more you’re going to end up (even subconsciously) rejecting them when the real reason is to some extent “is not showing a view favorable to the Boingers’ official position on this issue”. look at the anonymous comments in this thread – of the fourteen present, only two are in any way negative on the BBers’ actions, and those are the last two, from after I’d already complained about it twice.

I’ve asked before why my post from before I was registered, asking if in fact VB had been told the reason or not, was rejected. I would like to see an answer. Because, even with the best of intentions, there is a risk that the more you rely on your own judgement rather than a written policy in deciding what comments to accept, the more you’re going to tend to (without even meaning to) reject them based on your own biases.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator

Mikesum32 @1787: cute, plausible, not.

cointelprojoe

she’s silly, well done

Hiram in the Netherlands

Xeni Jardin said (#865):

So: yeah, the fact that the post didn’t point to the changed policy was a screwup. Honestly. There was no coordinated decision to hide or downplay that change, I swear.

I would like to believe you. But if that’s so, then why was my comment that pointed out, before Cavalier did, that the BB ‘unpublishing’ policy is less then a week old, deleted three times?

Why should any well-formed, relevant, and politely phrased comment ever be deleted?

Antinous

Hiram,

You’ve never commented on BB before. You’ve made eight comments on this subject. You’ve accused the Boingers of violence. You’ve begged to be allowed to ‘unread’ five years of BoingBoing. You can’t expect anyone to take your plaintive cries of repression seriously.

Mantari

Last post in an epic thread!

Nephilim

Must….get…..to……1337!

hagbard

TAKUAN

Well, I don’t see an editor “manning their post”, as it were, for as long as a thread is open; so I guess you mean that the editor would leave instructions to the moderator(s) about allowing anonymous posts? I’ve not been an editor or a moderator, so I don’t know the dynamic of their interaction.

I stand by my notion: if I were an editor, I would also allow anonymous posting very sparingly.

joshmillard

Principals, even. Death to homophones.

mdhatter

Unpublishing a web page THEN telling a potentially interested party where else you can find it is exactly what Orwell was warning us about.

This sort of food-fight is so much worse than publishing the name of a CIA operative or printing showing photographs of soldier’s caskets.

jim.cowling

Well, BB’ers, I don’t know this Violet Blue character from a hole in the ground, and I figure you might have a good reason for the big nuke, but here’s the thing: you have every right to be secretive about your withdrawal of support…

…but you wouldn’t quietly accept such behaviour from others if the situation was reversed. I don’t truck with hypocrisy. So you’ve just lost two eyeballs.

scottfree

haven’t commented on much of anything for a while, mostly because of a faulty keyboard, but i wanted to say, in hopes of adding another reasonable voice to the discussion, that when i first heard about this, my only real reaction was wonder over what the BB side of the story was. Literally a day later, BB came in with a post, which was good enough for me. I’m not a massive fan of people airing their dirt laundry in public, so i dont particularly care why VB was unpublished. Perhaps if the number of posts was as large as some sources suggest, it could have been mentioned at the time, but as it is, BB must have such a huge archive that posts are taken out for whatever reason, from time to time, and its just the name of the game. I think it lends BB a lot of credibility that the BBers are not only involved in the comments in this post, but willing to argue and listen.

I suppose the interest some people are taking in this demonstrates how in some cases people are not as apathetic as they appear, and when there are effective channels for expressing dissent, they are exercised to the point of excess. Now if all these people were equally willing to put an effort into stopping what tends to be called corporate censorship we will all possibly be in better shape. Just because it wouldn’t be one of my comments without a bit of marxist analysis thrown in.

Archeaopteryx

Still true; http://xkcd.com/428/

Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator

Anonymous @1746: That is indeed too odd to be true. As far as I know, Xeni didn’t unpublish anything that didn’t mention Ms. Blue or her weblog.

“Unpublishing” is what Movable Type calls the action. It’s different from deletion, which removes the text entirely. Unpublishing keeps it in the database, but doesn’t display it on the site. When you get used to using the term on an everyday basis, its faintly Orwellian overtones disappear. We regret losing track of those faint overtones. This has already been explained a few times.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator

Random832 @1794, what Johne Cook said. The Boingers are planning to do a wrap-up post on the subject last Friday.

erissian

I don’t mean to be inflammatory, but there are quite a few crybabies here. I’m not sure which meaning of “post” BB is using here, but we have two options:

#1 “Post” refers to the updates to the BB blog itself. They’ve written several endorsing snippets about Violet Blue as kind of a sexuality activist. If she crossed a line, and they no longer felt like they could endorse her, then it’s entirely reasonable that they would withdrawal that support.

#2 “Post” refers to user comments. If Violet Blue left comments that were inappropriate for the blog, then if they were deleted it would be no different than removing the posts of anybody else who spams, flames, or trolls. This is standard maintenance for any blog. I doubt they would “censor” her just for disagreeing, or being controversial (which is what they seemed to have loved her for in the first place).

And either way, they didn’t chisel her name off every corner of the blog; all references to her are still available in the archive, and if you don’t trust that then there’s an independent archive as well.

If you’re terribly curious about what caused the withdrawal of support, then go read VB’s blog; that’s my next stop.

tillwe

@ACB: No, as Joel Johnson said somewhere above, “unpublishing” refers to making the material private, not longer link-able from the public web (but not deleting it from the CMS database).

GregLondon

This is going through the photos and taking out Trotsky.

This is not a stalinistic purge. If you think it is, you obviously weren’t there, and you’re tinfoil hat is causing your vision of reality to blur.

eudaimoniac

Christ, who cares? It’s only another blog-ball fight. I’m just happy to see a post that isn’t about steampunk or Corey’s latest book/reading. Enuff already.

Dude, if you guys re-post the postings and change her name from “Violet Blue” to “Burnt Sienna” or better yet, simply “Flesh”, I’ll give you a dollar.

A. Whole. DOLLAR. That’s FOUR games of Pac-Man.

Burnchao

@Talia:

The goal wasn’t secrecy it was removal of support. Kind of like Obama leaving his church (to use a really outrageously extreme example that might get me into hot water).

Removing support is making statement like “I don’t support the actions of X” (like Obama did), and then no longer linking/attending/whatever. Obama didn’t hide all previous instances of attending the church.

@Antinous:

What’s the pretense? This happened a year ago.

Um, exactly? The last year that I’ve been reading BB it has silently altering previous publications to be completely opposite than when originally published.

Nobody gave a shit.

Nobody gave a shit because nobody knew it was going on. That lack of transparency is one of the basic roots of the problem. And the fact that this has been going on for a year makes it worse, not better.

Had anyone asked a year ago, it would have been answered.

It wasn’t asked then because no one saw it happen. We are asking now, and we aren’t getting answers. Instead, we get run-around responses (at best) or name-calling (from Teresa).

Antinous

Burnchao,

What are you still on about? Nobody noticed because nobody cared. Suddenly people are shitting hedgehogs because of something that they didn’t care enough about to even notice for a year. How perfectly dreary.

Lilith999

@#927:
I really, really hope this whole thing has nothing to do with VB writing about sex. BB is a directory of wonderful things, and sex is certainly a wonderful thing. That’s not all it has to be about, sure, but a little sexiness here and there is great. Besides, the worst tragedy I could think of for the site is fort BB to give in to the prudish censors that want to block their blog because one out of ever couple hundred posts mentions sex or shows a tit in a piece of art.

Archeaopteryx

Wendy Augenstein? Was THAT her original name? One search engine shows that…

Will Shetterly

Yo, Steve! Is that really you? If so, you left out the second matter of principle that people are arguing for: When You Delete Or Edit, Acknowledge It. You don’t need to say why. Just put something so future researchers will know that the record has been changed and who changed it.

Michael Brutsch

@970: If Antinous doesn’t have to answer my question, then Holtt doesn’t have to answer questions, either. In fact, since Holtt isn’t a so-called “moderator”, he has no responsibility to anyone here.

gabrielm

@Joel

Okay, everyone. Despite thinking we might be able to beat Metafilter’s own comment count on this subject, I don’t think we’re really moving forward anymore in this thread, so I’m going to lock it down.

This is the saddest part … it is obvious that you have learned nothing from the original mistake and our obvious (though possible misdirected)outrage.

hassan-i-sabbah

Greglondon et al.-Stop.go home see friends,family or significant other.Get yr panties out of the wad their twisted into.move on.Take a step back,look at how insignificant this is.
Yes yr all very clever and can exhaust an argument ad museum ,yer intellectual powers noe no bounds but there come a time to sheath yr inexhaustible mind and let it go…
c’mon its easy,Its nice outside…

tillwe

@Archeaopteryx: what exactly is the reason you know what VB knows?

sushispook

I am now going to be inevitably disappointed when the truth comes out that it’s all due to Violet mocking papercraft dildo cozies.

In all seriousness – I understand that you want to play rumor control and nip the whispering hysteria in the bud (“principle skinner says we have no backbone, purple monkey dishwasher!”), but without being transparent as to the underlying disagreement, rampant speculation is going to flourish in that void, at the very least. More than likely, negative opinion is going to take root as well, and I’d honestly hate to see that, as I really like boingboing, and have since i picked up those weird little zines at the local bookstore, back in the day.

benschomatic

buh-bye!

chunkeesoop

wow, this is a crazy thread. I only got to about #50 before I got fed up with the misplaced sense of entitlement people have.

It seems to me that people are getting all worked up about something that they don’t have the right to exert any claim to. To me, Boing Boing writers/editors have given me a glimpse into their perspective on the world by sharing with me things they find fun, interesting and at times very weird. In return, they get…absolutely nothing from me. Huh. What a concept.

If they decide to no longer share something they don’t want to share with me, I’m fine with that. They’ve invited me into their home and I am their guest. If someone invited you into their house for dinner, would you fault them for not displaying photos of their ex-wife? They were there before. Now they’re not. Is that ok?

It’s really just a simple matter of manners you ungrateful bastards.

It seems to me the people who are giving BB grief are the same kind of people who would sit and listen to a street musician play his entire set and at the end not only leave without making a donation but also yell at him for ommitting a verse from your favourite song.

I wish we could unpublish the idiocy from people themselves. Good grief.

demoman

Boingboing is great. Long live boingboing. But it’s a dark day when I read that the reason this issue has been handled so poorly is due to the boingers’ attempts not to trash VB.

That’s cool, they have Theresa to do it. But why did VB need to be trashed to begin with?

Theresa, and I presume the rest of the crew avoiding this discussion, doesn’t seem to realize that the readership cares a great deal about the health of this site. That Theresa suggests that our criticisms should be dismissed because we think of the boingers as ‘evil’….is frankly insulting.

It’s because I have so much respect for this project, and each of the principal writers, that I have been reading it daily since 2000.

For me, it has nothing to do with VB, or what she did, or whether she lied, or is ‘trouble’. It has everything to do with boingboing’s actions.

I agree with several above who have said it more eloquently–the posts should stay, and the personal fighting should pretty much never come in to play. People fight, but to draw attention to it on one of the most heavily trafficked sites is just classless.

The ‘pile of shit’ comment floored me.

I’m sure you will survive and continue to prosper. But in my eyes, you screwed this one up, and every time Theresa condescends to type up another unhelpful and incendiary comment, things get worse.

Good luck getting through this. It does appear that boingboing is being held to a higher standard than other blogs, but then, there’s a reason for your success.

Gar the Pitiless

“I am boing boing’s irritable bowel syndrome.”

hagbard

#1239 Tarasbulbasaur

Given all we know about BB from reading their writing, isn’t it just possible that what they did in this case was because of some extraordinary circumstance? Isn’t it possible that there is some circumstance where doing it all openly might make a situation worse? Isn’t it possible to give them the benefit of the doubt? (that’s rhetorical, because clearly a lot of us did).

I had to fire an employee once for cause. For a full year afterwards, his regular customers demanded an explanation from me. They really liked him, and didn’t see why I didn’t bring him back. But it would have been highly inappropriate for me to air the company’s grievances with him before our customers. I never even told them he was fired. I simply told them he didn’t work there anymore, and he would not be coming back.

So I know from experience that there are real-world situations where laying it all out is not appropriate at all, as unsatisfying as that may be to people who feel they deserve an explanation.

And if this were an analogous sort of situation, can you not imagine that it might be really really hard, if not impossible, to craft a public statement, or a redirect page, or anything, that would make EVERYONE who came across it go, “Oh, OK,” rather than, “Tell me more!”?

Maybe just maybe this is a special case where conflicting values could not be reconciled, and a difficult choice had to be made. Isn’t that possible?

tillwe

@holtt: which fo the four do you mean?

mdhatter

@1393 Lizzle – This is not wikipedia – nor the NYT – nor is it Google. And that is exactly the point of the whole thread as far as I can tell.

Other commenters have indicated that VB’s legions of doom apparently rule her wikipedia page – I was just wondering aloud if several of them might not also be making trouble here for kicks.

If we’re going to improve the quality of dialogue, we would do well to give each other (those of us who clearly care and are not just angry little trolls) a little more benefit of the doubt. Maybe?

fiendishthingy

It’s ok, he’s just blazing up a straw man for the Fourth.

Burnchao

@ Teresa

Although I don’t like the disemvowelling of anybody, I’m really impressed that you did it to yourself. That’s the strongest, most sincere apology I’ve seen in a long time. I’ve gained A LOT of respect for you.

JohnLayman

While at first, my obvious standard internet reaction was “OMG FIRST AMENDMENT CENSORSHIP! WHERE’S MY GUY FAWKES MASK?!?obligatory1insteadofexclamationpoint,” but then I thought, BoingBoing isn’t about posting everything that’s out there, it’s about posting what the editors want on their site. People are free to post anywhere on the net, or say what they want, just not in the front yards of people who disagree with them.

I can respect if it’s personal, and I’m sure if it’s something either side wants to reveal, they will. I think saying you guys are “unpublishing her” brings about Fahrenheit 451-like images in posters minds and encourages generic rabble-rousing. Either way, I have to appreciate the maturity of the posters here at BoingBoing. If this were any of the other newspost blogs out there (coughrhymeswithBiggcough) people would be more rampant with the internet-napalm than Bill Kilgore.

dallyingdahlia

“Violet behaved in a way that made us reconsider whether we wanted to lend her any credibility or associate with her.”

Hmmm I don’t think this was a good marketing move because at this point I think Violet could be replaced with Boing Boing.

This doesn’t feel transparent. This doesn’t feel open. This doesn’t feel good in anyway.

As much as you think you did the right thing it doesn’t feel right.

As much as you think it’s not a big deal – we are talking about it away from Boing Boing and the key word being “away”.

Sometimes we create our own drama hope this isn’t the vibration/vision/intention Boing Boing is moving towards. As we can all see it wouldn’t be a healthy choice since well it already backfired.

Tubman

@#534, Tillwe: It’s not quite that clear cut. If BoingBoing had unpublished a page, say, because the HTML in a table was a mess, no-one (well, hardly anyone) would be crying censorship. Here it’s because they don’t like someone any more, and that certainly is censorship, regardless of who wrote it, and whether you, I or anyone else would it consider it a reasonable thing to do if we were privy to the justification for it.

misterfricative

I’m glad I checked before posting because Jackdavinci (#602) already said everything I wanted to say — and more.

Meanwhile, Evilgenius (#30) gets my vote for best Orwellian comment.

kashmir kong

Well I’m finally done. I came back once for the Canadian copyright nonsense, but I can get that info straight from Geist’s blog. I’m not making the same mistake twice.

I honestly think there would have been less controversy if BB has just flat out said what the deal was.

THN has created more drama with her antagonistic behavior than whatever the reason for this whole mess could have possibly generated.

All that was missing was accusations that some of the commenters that disagreed with her were suspected sockpuppets or corporate droogs sent to undermine the website, like I’ve seen way too many times in the past.

The best thing BB could do is “unpublish” her role from this website along with her Making Light assistants, and hire some professionals who can do the job properly; without the snark, insults and similar nonsense.

Cheers.

GregLondon

Hey Blue, guess what? Comparing the deletion of some blog posts with Stalin? Drama queen. Comparing the deletion of some blog posts with the torture going on right now in China? Drama queen. Comparing the “disappearing” blog posts with “disappearing” dissidents in China? Drama queen.

Hypocrisy seems to have become the theme de rigeur for BB. Nice.

Interesting you can use fancy phrases like “de rigeur” but simple concepts like “torture” != “deleting blog post” slip so easily from your grasp.

As for actual hypocrites, people who publicly condemn an action they themselves have done, see post 1130. I await your non-hypocritical outrage in condemning that hypocricy.

Something tells me I’ll be waiting a while.

Takuan

sooner or later, we all get wistful for Buttseks

remmelt

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/webscout/2008/06/violet-blue-scr.html

I love how in that picture she looks about to purge.

FredB

As at least two other commentators have pointed out, I’d also be interested in reading an explanation of the @Teresa’s claim in #99 that “Violet Blue never posted anything on Boing Boing. and the article posted on Friday, Dec. 29, 2006.

I suppose we could split hairs and say that the article was actually posted by Xeni Jardin, but as it reads “by Violet Blue” and seems to be original content for Boing Boing that seems a little disingenuous.

As others have said – including the editors themselves – your blog, do want you want, imo. Interesting to watch the netorati participate in a train wreck that looks like it could have been orchestrated by the Nixon administration.

tillwe

@Hagbard: No. Re-read “Social Networking and Blogging 101″.

Eric Burns

Faustus — I disagree. I think they should acknowledge the screwup and apologize — not so much for what they’ve done but for how they’ve done it. I don’t think anyone meant to cause a firestorm or even give overt crap to Violet Blue, but pretty much every chance they had to mitigate the reaction was blown along the way:

* First, they went in and pulled down a bunch of posts without telling anyone they were doing it or why. Stipulating for the moment they had a good reason for doing so, putting up a boilerplate post in the place of the missing ones saying “this post contained material we’re no longer comfortable having on our site, for various personal reasons. The material is still available on archive.org for the curious. Thanks, all” wouldn’t completely quell the response but it would take a lot of its bite out. Actually leaving the post up but removing the active links with an edited “we no longer feel comfortable linking to this” at the bottom would be significantly better. Or even putting a single post up explaining that they felt they needed to remove Violet Blue related material from the site preemptively would have made this a curiosity instead of a firestorm.

* Secondly, when the absences were found, a full year later, they could have issued a short public comment immediately. Even if they felt they couldn’t explain, acknowledging the situation while they worked on their formal response would have given people some sense of connection. By keeping quiet as long as they did, they made the situation worse for themselves.

* Thirdly, the post this very thread is attached to could have had more information in it — and some sense that they recognize a good chunk of their audience was upset. As it was, the post did nothing to really ameliorate the situation.

* Fourthly, the official representatives of Boing Boing could have generally been nicer in the thread. In the situations where people were clearly going out of bounds, they could have elected not to engage at all, and when they did engage, it could have been with less vitriol. Some of the people involved are paid to do this — while they don’t need to suffer abuse, they also shouldn’t be promoting it.

This won’t kill Boing Boing, no matter what happens. But this has struck at enough people’s sense of what Boing Boing stands for that some kind of acknowledgment that this was handled badly can only help matters. Even if they just apologize for letting their fatigue with the storm carry their emotions, or apologize for not handling all this a little better or in a way that addressed some of the audience’s concerns, that would be a step forward.

Raj77

In that context, it’s childish emotional abuse at best. Violence would be if they all ganged up on Billy and beat him with chairs (maybe I went to a bad school)

BoingBoing doesn’t owe you anything. Time for a mass unbunching of panties, no?

Falcon_Seven

To quote Rodney Dangerfield; “That’s it. Show’s over. Now get the hell out.”

Vanwall

#1239 Tarasbulbasaur -

Your are proving my point – you are positing that many readers, among them yourself perhaps, want BB to follow the reader’s approved method of editing, which may or may not be BB’s best method in this case – is this not an implicit imposition of non-existing public “rights” over the blog owner’s right to “own, manage, edit, etc. their own blog”?

The manner of how it was done isn’t germane to this entire subject yet – as I said, it’s their blog, and we still don’t know the reasons why it was done in this manner, so readers shouldn’t make assumptions as to the extent of transparency required in this particular matter.

hagbard

#1621 just saying

sppk — you’re doing it wrong.

Damon_TFB

JOSHMILLARD, DAVID PESCOVITZ, RANDOM832, and ANTINOUS:
Thanks for your comments.

RANDOM832′s mention of the timestamps made me realize that each comment has a permalink! In light of this, I’d agree with getting rid of comment numbers altogether.

Antinous, since it was possible to develop a Disemvowelling button (I don’t know what it looks like, but I’d like to think it’s labelled “Dsmvwl”), couldn’t another button be created to replace all text in the comment with just “post deleted”?

Here’s one idea for distinguishing multiple anonymous posters that I’d like to share with the group (I’ll send others directly to Teresa):

When you submit anonymously, you are asked to select from a list of ten animal names. This creates a short-term userid (Anony-Mouse Anony-Tiger, Anony-Platapus, etc.) that is tied to the submitter’s IP address for this particular discussion only. There would be a catalog of a hundred or so animals to refresh the list of ten available to the next anonymous poster.

If this was used, you’d probably want to deny any ordinary user from begining their userid with “Anony” and describe the system in the Moderation Guidelines.

Napkins

Save the drama,for my pajamas!

cavalier

Holy crapdoodle. 520 comments in a post!

So many thoughts…

First — Wow, yeah, gonna have to go with the “eww” crowd on this one. BB is a pretty large blog, to be sure, and with this whole transparency — fight for what’s right — etc vibe that gets pushed around, it’s awfully weird to see you all pretty much use “their tactics” when it comes to your house.

It seems petty and spiteful to just wipe the pages.

You could have added a comment, or a link, or even kept the BB URL’s and just placed a note that the content was removed, etc. No, just a quiet “disappearance” that finally came around to bite you guys on the butt.

Weird stuff.

On the other hand you guys finally opened up a forum for it on your site, and David’s doing a nice run of encouraging discourse. I don’t “need” to know “WHAT” happeend, it’s certainly not my place if it’s a personal (POS) matter, but again.. the vibe, the transparency, the new media, yada yada.. you guys handled this like “Old Media”, so, it’s weird. Thanks for trying to patch it up.

Also thanks to the mod(s?) for being easy on the DEL key in this thread. And the dsmvwlr key.

Oh… and Unpublish? Yeah it’s a CMS term, but it really could have used a nicer alias in this regard. It didn’t cost anything to host it, bytes versus CPM wise, and while some of us nerds knew the term it has a really weird vibe to it when you combine it with the stuff above.

PeaceLove

I agree with Hiram in principle. Removing all references to a person on a well-known blog can be a kind of emotional and psychological violence. Whether the term is correctly applied in this situation I don’t know, since I don’t know the circumstances that led to the removal. Without any intended insult to Ms. Blue, I tend to trust the integrity and good intentions of the BoingBoing team.

This is, however, a huge screwup for BoingBoing. Many of your most passionate and loyal readers think you made a major Net transgression, whether you see it or not. I’d like to see Cory address this; among the editors I think he carries the most authority on matters of free speech, Net transparency, and the structure of the Web.

I look forward to the posts (not comments, posts) this will generate on BoingBoing going forward.

dculberson

Sigh. I think I liked BoingBoing better without comments. Fortunately it’s not impossible to go back to reading it that way, but it is very hard to resist the simple little [click].

Tavie

@1387 – DUCK -

——-woosh————–[}

SPLAT!

mdhatter

Hagbard, you could give PeaceLove a little more benefit of the doubt. I could read what you saw into PLs comments, but that’s a shortcoming of the language itself.

A lot of us started off pissed and are really hoping this string of productive comments continues.

GregLondon, might I be the Queequeeg to your Ahab? That was awesome, and a well eaten ‘it’.

Xeni Jardin

@burnchao and others, I am very proud to call Teresa Nielsen Hayden a colleague, she’s handled this with dignity and sincerity throughout.

All of us here at Boing Boing are human beings; but she’s that and more.

Again, stay tuned, more from all of us when the holiday’s over.

XJ

Will Shetterly

@1534, I’ve been trying very hard to keep reading without saying anything more about this issue, but I’m weak, and I admire your point, to this extent: blogging is a thing of the moment, but unlike performance art, it’s not inherently ephemeral. It’s only ephemeral if you choose to delete it. In its natural state, a blog post is information that, in theory, could last as long as the universe.

Which might be a fine argument for deleting a post, I’ll grant.

Fearing that’s not clear, a bit more: Blogs are a record of a performance, not the performance itself. Destroying the record is arguably a performance, but if you argue that, both “record” and “performance” become meaningless.

Which might be another argument for deleting a post, of course, but if we go that way we’ll quickly be in the land of Why a duck? I’d rather continue to think that a performance is a thing that a person does, and a record is what’s preserved of that thing. If you want your blogging to be performance art, invite a few people into the room and disconnect your keyboard.

jccalhoun

Is there anyone on the internet that Violet Blue hasn’t started a blog war with by complaining how mean people are to her?

Geoff Sebesta

Save the drama for Obama!

shelleyp

It is your space, and you have a right to add or remove any material, barring copyright laws. But you wrote, “Violet behaved in a way that made us reconsider whether we wanted to lend her any credibility or associate with her.”

To write that statement, without any background on what was supposedly so heinous to lead to such an action, is unethical. You should have just said, the stuff is gone, the reasons are private. Now, you’ve just added to the speculation. Not particularly noble behavior.

Brad S.

You guys have a great blog. It deservedly has gotten huge over the last few years. All organizations go through growing pains, and all large groups have their insane fringe disruptors. Just keep on truckin’, you guys. People come here for a reason.

That being said, I can’t agree with your choice of head moderator. Teresa may have expertise, but she seems to have to work too hard to control her emotions. I’m mostly a lurker, but just from the few comment threads I’ve taken to reading, she tends to be domineering, condescending, and paranoid that everyone’s out to disrupt her discussion threads. Unlike Joel, she hasn’t done much to adopt the general “Boinger” attitude since joining your group. Sorry to say it, but if I had to offer one point of criticism it would be the slow pot of dissension she has been brewing amongst your regulars since arriving.

It’s worth considering that maybe some of this controversy sprouted there.

dros

i understand your position, boingboing. just wanted to add my support. there is a wise welsh saying: “there’s no point lifting your petticoat after you’ve pissed”. a clarification would have eased crazy-traffic to the site, but hey, hindsight’s a ‘wonderful thing’.

for those who don’t understand how linking (even in archived posts) to a certain website is Endorsement, and that you have to pay to keep up that endorsement through your hosting, yes, throw up your arms and walk off muttering ‘RIP’.

The blog has explored the many nuances of transparency, freedom of speech in a way that has engaged well with the public (hell, we’re talking about it now, those who aren’t shouting).

It has shown that these issues are *not* black and white. They emphasise the human faces of these debates – actual *people* who are affected by stupid legislation, editorial decisions and aggressive litigation.

This isn’t a debate of ‘Principles’, but of human activity-that’s what boingboing have always been about.

There are some unhappy mutants somewhere in this kerfuffle, and it is boingboing’s right to protect them.

Doesn’t it seem obvious that this is something *very* personal? The blog is open and frank, the fact that this unpublishing (look it up, saddoes) has happened quietly means that something was really wrong.

As an aside, i found violet blue to be one of the most inane contributors on this blog, and fleshbot. When she gets a break from blowing her own, i hope she’ll see that notoriety comes at a cost. It’s up to her integrity as a person whether she wants to offload it on someone else’s site, and someone else’s time.

Al Billings

Cute, I seem my comments concerning the moderator here and problems caused by her actions (like her snide behavior) have all mysteriously been removed.

My respect for Boing Boing goes down another notch.

Antinous

Al Billings,

No comment that you have ever made to BoingBoing has been unpublished, deleted or otherwise molested. I have your comment history at my fingertips. Nice try.

holtt

Funny how there’s only a handful of letters difference between “Stirring the pot” and “Stirring the thought”

markfrei

In retrospect this whole thing is more interesting that I first thought.

I think the questions being asked about what policies should be followed in terms of “unpublishing” actually start to hit upon the weirdness of how new technologies have allowed people to tinker with public/private boundaries in ways that are unfamiliar – and in experimenting people are making mistakes and finding it’s harder to “take it back.” There aren’t social conventions in place for a lot of this stuff and in this void things that seem natural (e.g. I don’t believe in something I wrote so I want to use the unpublish feature of my publishing software).

It’s kind of a weird thing to become a public figure and to lose your “right” to privacy as a result. When Pamela Anderson Lee’s sex tape came out against the wishes of her and Tommy, the courts ruled that as a public figure she had given up the expectation of privacy – a ruling that is bizarre, but is also telling about how we view people that we see as famous.

Things like Boing Boing have created a whole slew of new celebrities, but this is a different kind of celebrity as well. So the public/private issues are only getting weirder…

kalbos

#324: “…Also, who really actually cares about this? I mean, seriously? Deep in your heart? …”

Apparently, you do, since you posted seriously :)

DeWynken

I don’t care about VB one way or the other..

but..

I sorta miss BoingBoing 1.0

scarabic

Dear BoingBoing,

Please do as you see fit and don’t feel compelled to excuse yourselves. Really. No editorial call you could make with this site would register on my radar as a “free speech abuse.” I hardly think that being an uncensored public tablet is any kind of mission at play here. It’s an editorial publication, not the public commons. And nothing can take away the many wonderful things I’ve found and learned here. Shit happens. Sometimes a minor edit to the archives can make a real difference for someone’s present and future. We’re human.

Having seen enough attention-whoring trolls wage their attention-grabbing campaigns against good sites, I can safely say I am not at all curious about the details of what happened here. Don’t need to know ‘em. Not even a little. Plenty of tawdry internet drama out there. Seen it, done that.

You are far, far too good to us, your audience, for even making mention of this.

scarabic

Xeni Jardin

Hiram in the Netherlands, I’m honestly not sure what happened there, I’m sorry. Maybe one of the mods can elaborate. Maybe one of us made a mistake. This was a pretty active thread yesterday, and there was a lot of not-in-good-faith junk being posted to deal with, just drive-bys that weren’t adding value or posting ad hominem attacks. The moderators have worked really hard to try to keep this useful and civil, and I don’t envy their job.

Joel Johnson

I’m sorry that’s what you’re taking away from my comment, GabrielM. I feel like I’ve learned quite a bit.

Also, it looks like comments are still open!

Nora

How to deal with comments on sites that I’ve moderated when people ask me to take them down is something I’ve struggled with, too. It seems like it ought to be the same policy that ya’ll have– if you retroactively take down your own posts, commenters should be able to do so too.

Also, I think it should be noted that how this kind of thing is handled on a blog like this is, well, uncharted territory, and there are going to be a million blogs and communities like BoingBoing in the future who’ll be looking to you guys as a model for how to run a site like this smoothly. So, uh, no pressure, guys.

Church

Xeni, people got that impression because another boinger announced that was the case in this thread (although I can’t ‘find’ it now. It was before 8:00pm on the 2nd, assuming you and Twitter are on the same clock.)

Burnchao, the mods have disemvowelled themselves before, mostly because of intemperate comments. It’s weasley whether you do it to another or yourself. Disemvowelling is all about shirking responsibility. “I didn’t DELETE your/my post, you see…” It also encourages mods to be intemperate, since they can disemvowell it later. It’s the Taser of moderation.

John A Arkansawyer

So this guy goes to his psychiatrist and says, “Doctor! Doctor! I’m having those dreams again! They’re terrible! Necrophilia! Sadism! Bestiality! Can’t you help me?” And the doctor says, “I tell you and tell you, and you won’t listen. You’re just beating a dead horse.”

Or maybe not.

But I love that joke. And I do want to help get the thread to 1984…and beyond!

Xopher

Do you know that when you phrase it that way, you sound exactly like someone who’s insincerely proposing a policy change as a weaselly way to accuse the moderator of acting in bad faith? …However, you should be aware that to people who don’t know you, it makes you come off like a demi-troll.

As a person who does not know Will, I can confirm that this is so.

nilesgibbs

I agree, and honestly admit to having removed things from my own blogs in the past for personal reasons, though nothing I’ve made has reached Boing Boing tier.

In this whole “controversy”, I think it’s simplest to say that people were crying out with Big Brother concerns, when this is more Ceiling Cat caliber.

Less “double plus unpublish” and more “I can has retrakshun?”

Cragsavage

“Don’t take any guff from these swine…”

Satan

What was this awful thing that ms. Blue did to deserve banishment from the tribe?
If anything, the silence makes me suspect that it must have been a gigantic transgression. Blue must be the most evil person on earth to shake the BB leadership to not just shun her but erase her entire existence as part of BB. When will we start burning her in effigy and declare a jihad on her and add her to the list below “Salman Rushdie”?

If you love your country, or BB, then don’t question “why”, simply accept the wisdom of the leadership and trust that they are doing everything in your interest and not at all to cover their asses.

tillwe

@dros: funny thing is the end of your repeat-rant: “As an side, i found violet blue to be one of the most inane contributors on this blog [...]” (emphasis mine). One of the points of dissent is that BoingBoing is holding to the position that she never contributed, but that everything were article by the BBs themself. Which is technically true, but seems to be borderline in at least one case. So, why do you identify VB as a BoingBoing contributor?

Lizzle

@ #1084 – How would you know what’s “normal” for BB if this is the first thread you’ve ever posted on? Are you claiming to be a lurker for years and this is your first post?

I didn’t want to post here yesterday when this all blew up, because it seems fairly clear that it’s all about something unpleasantly personal. It’s been bothering me all day, though, and some of the things said by mods and extreme BB enthusiasts in the comments thread in particular are really disquieting.

Antinous, among others (is GregLondon a mod or just a TruFan? He seems very personally invested in the whole thing), have expressed the opinion that those who don’t comment here regularly can’t possibly be familiar with BB or have a sense of the ethical values that the site has espoused in the past. Teresa has just descended to ad hominem dismissal of people making comments as “nonsense”, “stupid” and “blockheads” – it’s a form of rhetoric she uses distressingly often when someone disagrees with the status quo, and in threads other than this one. I don’t comment here often; the moderation policy and the choice of someone with such an abrasive tone as chief moderator it has, in particular, made me feel uncomfortable. That said, I’ve been reading daily for long enough (I’d estimate six years or so – you’ve published some links I’ve sent in on occasion too) that the comment section still feels extremely new to me. (I also notice that among the mods, Takuan seems pretty much absent from this thread; and that among the contributors, Cory has also been very quiet.)

All this – the general comments policy, the mistake (you can’t deny, given the number of people who have felt moved to post negatively here, that it *was* a mistake) that sparked this discussion off, the sense that those who don’t comment aren’t welcome – simply makes me feel more and more disengaged from a site that I used to read daily. It also feels disingenuous to represent BB as a simple personal blog; you’re the third most popular blog on the Internet, you attract some big-money advertising and you’re looked to as a good example of how to manage a certain kind of really important, *good*, liberal content. Readers do have a stake in BB outside the free milkshake analogy, given that (more) advertisers are (more) willing to pay you (more) if they see you have a large readership. (My own blog recently grew a Google PageRank point, and I’ve watched the queries from advertisers and revenues grow as a direct result.) Some people here have been very dismissive of the notion that breaking backward links is against the whole sense of a wonderful networked, searchable Internet world that readers here like to imagine we inhabit, but I find the breaking of those links to be a really uncomfortable precedent, especially here at BB. We all have a sense of what this site stands for.

I think it’s absolutely delightful that BB has fans who are dedicated enough to post such impassioned defences of policy to those who have disagreed with what happened over the Violet Blue thing. I wish I could feel the same, but my own engagement with the site has been dribbling away in recent months, especially given some of the moderation decisions I’ve watched being taken. The Violet Blue disaster and the generalised snippiness about the value of discourse with people who aren’t regular commenters just alienates me a bit more (the mods’ opinion and attitude here is, for me, intimately associated with the opinion of those who write the blog and with my understanding of the blog as a whole – I can’t possibly be the only person who feels that way). I feel a bit like someone who is arranging to gradually see less and less of a friend she used to get on with but doesn’t really want to see much any more; it’s a shame. What happened to whuffie?

Tavie

Hi, I heard there was cake here…?

rushkoff

Or think of it this way. BB is much more a part of the GIFT economy than the business economy. Although the people doing it now hope to make a little something off all their work, the ethos is that of a culture, not a business. Posts are still personal, dictating more by social networks than any official or sponsored connection. So the removal of something is not a business decision or policy maneuver – but a personal reflection of what a writer does or doesn’t want his name associated with.

The whole discussion of censorship and transparency really is not germane here. This isn’t government. This isn’t the FDA removing a study that shows a drug had dangerous side effects. This is blog from a posse that quite randomly finds stuff they like or don’t like. This is not a case of institutional, commercial, or government trust; it’s a social situation. In social situations we are free to sulk, to change our minds, and to stay silent about why we are.

If that doesn’t meet the expectations you had when you came here, you are free to ask for your money back.

This is a blogger deciding she doesn’t really agree with what she posted earlier, but thought that calling attention to the removal would have actually created more harm than good.

I’ve tried really hard to wrap my head around the upset, and I think it’s more a matter of projection and web-polarity than substance.

A blogger on BB felt she no longer wanted to be directly associated with what she obviously felt was some negative energy. Some of you seem to feel she’s not allowed to do that with disclosing more, or announcing it. To me, making that demand is not consistent with the code of the happy mutant.

bubbleman

BB has been cheapened. Jealousy, spite, a love spat, whatever is no reason for censureship. Is Bush running this blog?

Ceronomus

I can’t believe the Blog community is up in arms and talking about how this goes against the “standards” for the blogosphere.

Standards? Anyone with a computer and a place to post can put up a blog, let’s stop pretending otherwise. Yes, Boing Boing is a giant among blogs, but that doesn’t change things. They removed articles that they no longer wished to host. End of story. They have the right to do so, and they did.

What part of, “They have the right to do so” are people not getting?

GregLondon

Satan@404: BB just made Miss Blue an extremely famous personality. Way to go guys. Talk about achieving the exact opposite effect from the stated goal! Bravo!

Yes, this is mature. And so relevant.

Frank_in_Virginia

Wow, being unpublished by boingboing is better than an Orbit in the NYT.

500+ comments about a topic that (1) Isn’t Canadian, (2) Isn’t Steampunk, (3) Isn’t one of Cory’s books, or (4) Isn’t about the TSA baby killers is a site to behold.

the_boy

so, umm, I love this about Boing Boing. This whole ugly thread. It is the heart of the internet, and not it’s dark festering heart (that’s 4chan). This is the living breathing functioning of community, and while the debate has sunk to /b/tard depths at points, that’s because there is really anger and pain here. Which is relevant, and always will be, but isn’t the best voicing of opinions to foster constructive change. And there is really, genuine though put into this, thoughts about what Boing Boing is, because people treat it as more than just a personal blog, and because it espouses ideals and voices “good web citizens” discontent, and because it is always difficult to reconcile espoused principles with real life behaviors.

With as much sincerity as I can muster, thanks for the discussion. Because if there is anything that dispels fears of an Orwellian reality, it’s discussion like this.

Argon

I appreciate that yesterday, after the fact, I got an apologizing reply from Xeni to my original mail. Including another thinly-veiled yet vague remark about “someone’s” offline behavior in an attempt to explain without explaining, and feeling the need to clear up allusions of hypocrisy and censorship when I didn’t bring them up myself. At least it’s something. But honestly, I never would have gotten any reply or explanation if public pressure hadn’t forced BB to make a statement and if everything had quietly died down instead, would I?

Boing Boing has learned from this, no doubt, and it must continue fighting the good fight. I sincerely wish that you will rebuild your credibility with a changing community. I for one would simply find it hard getting too deeply involved again without constantly being reminded that Boing Boing, for whatever noble reasons, was using the same deluded anti-information control methods on its members that it condemns in many of its posts.

Will Shetterly

Burnchao @496, Teresa is a person of enormous integrity. I’m just sorry there aren’t more moderators who are willing to live by the rules they enforce. (I once banned myself for a day from the SFWA livejournal because I was being a jerk and really needed a timeout. I’m sure that in making that decision, at some level, I asked myself WWTNHD?)

hagbard

#1558 Random832

Regarding the policy discussions:

Xeni addressed concerns about changes to the policy statement in #854

David addressed them in #858

Xeni addressed them again in #864

David addressed them again in #870, and yet again in #1151

Now, Random832, would you like to reconcile your statements in 974 and 1525?

John A Arkansawyer

Violet Blue killed Nina Reiser. It’s the only explanation that fits.

Random832

Eschew comment numbers. … It may present a headache in threads with a large proportion of anonymous commenters,

I just use the timestamp when I need to make a distinction on other blogs.

DanaLynn

OH NOEZ….

NOT….

*~TEH BEEZE~*

emayoh

Editorial decisions are usually about changing the future, or at least the present. Trying to change history is something different. History shouldn’t be subject to editorializing, should it? Saying you’ll not “lend her any credibility or associate with her” going forward? That’s defensible. Trying to make it seem like you never did in the past? That’s not very Boing Boing-y. Or, maybe it is and I was just projecting my hopes and dreams on to you. :-)

If you’re in favor of transparency, you can add notes/updates to posts in the past clarifying your lack of endorsement.

“Unpublishing” is now a creepy euphemism.

Just my two cents.

see

@399 â€”

The very nature of unpublishingâ€”removing something from the public viewâ€”is a public act. I understand that it might not have been intended that way, and it did fly under the radar for a while, but it still was always a public act.

mmbb

Sheesh. I guess it’s too late to suggest a group hug, huh?

I happen to agree that this incident isn’t the Boingers’ finest hour and, in fact, this whole thing seems to contradict some of what they claim to stand for, but I’m not going to lose my cool over it.

BenBurch

Tavie, more like pie, and VB has it ALL over her face now!

(And no, that was not an attempt at W-A-M kinkiness there. I’ll let you know when I’m being kinky. ‘k?)

rushkoff

-withOUT disclosing more-

geekpdx

Will Shetterly

Are we going to make 1000?

The redundancy in this thread is important: it’s how commenters vote on what matters.

hagbard

#1540 Archeaopteryx

I’m more partial to this one — as you might well imagine:

http://xkcd.com/386/

HT Bruce Arthurs for mentioning it earlier

Blue

Greg @ #1616

You’ve taken the reference to ‘drama queens’ out of the context in which Xeni used it.

Hey Blue, guess what? Comparing the deletion of some blog posts with Stalin? Drama queen. Comparing the deletion of some blog posts with the torture going on right now in China? Drama queen. Comparing the “disappearing” blog posts with “disappearing” dissidents in China? Drama queen.

Nobody reasonable could argue with that, if it were the case, but it’s not. Xeni didn’t say that the people who compared the abuses of Chinese totalitarianism to the abuses of moderation/ethics going on here at good ol’ BoingBoing were a bunch of drama queens, she said that it was wrong to compare totalitarian Chinese abuse with drama queens having fits about post deletions:

Xeni – [...] torture, forced detention, extra judicial execution, denial of due process, imprisonment without trial, beatings — yeah, that’s *exactly* like a blog editor taking down some posts she made herself about Hello Kitty dildos, and a bunch of drama queens having a fit about it a year later.

Random832

Incidentally, you’ve missed a third approach: re-dating comments when they are approved. I know I expect new (not-previously-seen) comments to show up at the bottom, and it was surprising to hear they don’t.

minTphresh

yes, but now it’s called “rice”.

GregLondon

Dear BoingBoing,

Regarding your recent deletion of content about VB, I know you deleted this content over a year ago, but since I just found out about it now, I am simply incensed of the damage you’ve been causing this whole year, quietly, without any fuss, and without my knowing of the damage.

Some might wonder HOW could the damage from these deletions be so terrible, if the deletions took place over a year ago, and I just realized it now, and only because someone told me.

But I am not some people. I do not wonder. I am a pyro looking for something to burn, and by gosh, you look mighty toasty to me.

Thank you for providing some year old spark for me to pour my gasoline on.

Sincerely,
Tin Pyro Man

cycle23

Gd frkng lrd ht TNH mr thn ht stmpnk.

ls, jst bcs ‘m flng snrky, ds nyn ls hr Strngsd’s vc whn lstnng t Cry’s rdngs?

Timefishblue

@#958

The Nazis did other things than the holocaust. They were Nazi’s before the holocaust.

People calling the mods here Nazis are pretty much doing the same thing as calling someone who can’t spell “nuclear” George W. Bush. And you’re saying “NO THEY’RE NOT GEORGE W BUSH!!!!! THEY DIDN’T START AN ILLEGAL WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST!!! WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT???????????????? I KNOW SOMEONE WHO DIED IN IRAQ!!! SHAME ON YOU FOR COMPARING SOMETHING SOMEONE DID TO SOMETHING GEORGE W BUSH ALSO DID!!!”

Hopefully responses to this post will help the comments reach 1000!

fennel

I remember when the comment function was reinstated a while ago that there was reference to what happened “last time” there had been a comment function on boingboing, leading to hesitancy on the part of bb editors to have such a function… I think bb should go back to its commentless form. Commenting is entertaining, but I want boingboing to survive, and people are being ingrates, and I’d prefer a boingboing with no comments to a boingboing that dies because the internet public finally draws enough blood.

Boingboing was great without comments. It can be that again.

Gary61

L33T … neat …. meat …. beat …..seat …. J33T …. wheat ….greet …..
are we there yet?

AGF

AGF – out. have a good 4th y’all.

wylkyn

I, for one, am outraged….OUTRAGED…that BoingBoing apparently advocates dead horse beating. Wait…what was this article about?

I couldn’t remember what Violet Blue’s content was, and I was afraid that Xeni had somehow unpublished my memories. Thankfully my tinfoil hat is still firmly in place. So I googled, found Violet Blue’s blog, and managed to mumble “Oh…yeah…” as I scrolled through the pictur…er, informative blog entries. I would try to muster some outrage at her unpublication, but I’m a little tired at the moment. Maybe later.

David Pescovitz

@Anonymous (#1737), I *love* that link. Thanks.

ROSSINDETROIT

It was a week long trainwreck with more rolling stock piling in hourly. The Trolls made a feast of the carnage.

There was useful discussion going on, but also a great deal of hyperventilating from readers taking the unaccountably proprietary position that having once read something posted on Boing Boing for their entertainment they’re entitled to read it here perpetually, whether they actually want to or not, or they’ll by gum have an explanation of where it went while they were unaware of its existence.

I think that about covers it.

Gainclone

“There are no other books. We have always been reading George Orwell.”

If you go to Z’ha’dum, you will die.

Zandr

I’ve now read the entirety of this thread.

I’m one of those who is disappointed in BB’s handling of this simply because of the double-standard it creates. BB has repeatedly railed against this kind of behavior everywhere from the mainstream media to the *potential* for it happening with a book you ‘bought’ for your Kindle.

But I’m truly appalled by the behavior of TNH and Antonius in this thread. Insulting your readers and discounting their opinions based on their post count is the very antithesis of moderation.

Post count? Really? I’ve been reading BB long enough that comments are a new thing. (Though, not long enough to remember comments the first time round.)

The self-inflicted loss of credibility saddens me, but the alleged moderation really disgusts me.

And I do moderate a mailing list myself. I think my style is about as far from TNH as possible…and guess what, it works.

There are people calling for TNH’s head. I’ll simply point out that her job performance in this case was exceptionally poor.

Secret_Life_of_Plants

This thread reminds me of the catalogue example from (Bertrand) “Russell’s paradox”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_paradox

Does the posting that claims “all the postings mentioning Violet Blue have been removed” count itself as a posting mentioning Violet Blue?

Suppose that every public blog site has to compile a blog entry of all its Violet Blue references. The blog entry is itself one of the blog site’s violet blue references, but while some bloggers include it in the blog entry for completeness, others leave it out, as being self-evident.

Now imagine that all these blog entries are sent to the national blog site. Some of them include themselves in their listings, others do not. The national librarian compiles two master blog entries – one of all the blog entries that list Violet Blue, and one of all those which don’t.

The question is now, should these blog entries list themselves? The ‘Blog entry of all blog entries that list Violet Blue is no problem. If the bloggers donâ€™t include it in its own listing, it is still a true blog entry of those blog entries that do include Violet Blue. If he does include it, it remains a true blog entry of those that list themselves.

However, just as the librarian cannot go wrong with the first master blog entry, he is doomed to fail with the second. When it comes to the ‘Blog entry of all blog entries that don’t list Violet Blue, the blogger cannot include it in its own listing, because then it would belong in the other blog entry, that of blog entries that do include Violet Blue. However, if the blogger leaves it out, the blog entry is incomplete. Either way, it can never be a true blog entry of blog entrys that do not list Violet Blue.

David Pescovitz

@Joel (#1108), Let’s just let the conversation continue and maybe some new insights and observations will emerge. Or the thread will implode and catapult us all into another dimension where Yetis reign supreme.

Seriosuly though, this is a lot to parse and we’re just trying to keep up. As I said earlier, the comments here have had a big impact on me and also how I think about Boing Boing and its place in the world. The voices we’ve been hearing, both critics and supporters, have raised a lot of questions that all of us at BB have to think about very seriously. I personally don’t have answers yet. But I promise that as soon as we make sense of this whole thing, we’ll share what we’ve learned. Thanks.

mdhatter

After spending hours here over the last 2 days (something I haven’t done with a troll laden meta-thread in ~years~), and then reading the LA Times pieces Xeni added to the post, well, I’m really glad I spent the time.

Now, back to wonderful things!

For instance, do you have any pics of unicorns chasing unicorns? We could all use a double.

outlawpoet

I support your ability to do whatever you like on your blog, but I feel like noting that however justified, the manner in which you did this was passive-aggressive and opaque, and “unpublishing” is a stupid and useless weasel word.

You deleted a bunch of posts. That’s fine. It’s your server, you’re allowed to delete whatever you like. You decided you weren’t friends anymore, and everything she did was poison, and not newsworthy or at least worth being in a “directory of wonderful things”. Just, try to avoid the ‘ban everyone who embarasses me’ approach in comment moderation and response. It’s kind of embarrassing.

Secret_Life_of_Plants

Wow, just in sheer procrastination from doing what I should actually be doing, I just looked up Teresa Nielsen Hayden on the Wikipedia.

I grew up in Mesa, Arizona too! Not only that but from 4th grade to 12th grade I was Mormon! And now I could not be more not-Mormon!

Mesa was so small in those days that I really must have, at some point in my life, actually *seen* to corporeal Teresa Nielsen Hayden – at Tri-City Mall or Smitty’s or TG&Y or the U’Totem, or Starship Fantasy, or Revco, or A.J. Bayless, or, later Fiesta Mall — not that I only hung out in stores and video game places (although they *were* air-conditioned), just that those are things with public names; and not like “Leslie’s House” or “DeWitt Stables”.

Weird.

hagbard

One of the main arguments here goes something like “yes they have the right to do what they like on their blog, but they were wrong to do it, because it goes against the values they supposedly stand for, and that makes them hypocrites.”

Perhaps I’ve been reading too much GrokLaw and Lawrence Lessig and Cory Doctorow, but I thought that the point of the whole CopyLeft movement was to allow creators of content full control over how their content is used under copyright law. For example, a person who writes some cool code should not be prevented from sharing their code if they want to.

Where in that do we see anything that means that BoingBoing has been hypocritical by editing its own content? Aren’t they in fact champions of creator’s rights to do as they see fit with their own work?

Archeaopteryx

I think Hiram needs to go out and see some fresh air and sunlight and think about what is really important in life; Like wether successful authors ought to be allowed to ruin the lives of poor single moms with a trademark and then still claim to be “Open Source.”suit

ROSSINDETROIT

Passed another milestone. Time for some ducklings and puppies!

joshmillard

Antinous, since it was possible to develop a Disemvowelling button (I don’t know what it looks like, but I’d like to think it’s labelled “Dsmvwl”), couldn’t another button be created to replace all text in the comment with just “post deleted”?

To be clear, I think there’s two different things here:

1. Actually replacing the stored content of a comment in the DB — overwriting the commenter’s text with “[comment deleted]“, thereby destroying the record of the content.

2. Toggling a flag in the db that tells the display script to show the “[comment deleted]” marker instead of the still-in-the-db original content of the comment.

I don’t know if you’re suggesting (1) or (2), but I very much agree with the notion put forth by both staff and readers (here and elsewhere) that (2) is the much better, if slightly more complex, solution. When this came up over a Mefi a few days ago, I talked about some of our reasons for going down the hide-rather-than-delete road — between moderator fallibility and recurring user issues, there’s a lot of value in keeping a record.

Also, an idle question for the mod folk here: I’m presuming that the disemvoweler does in fact just remove vowels permanently from the disemvoweled (portions of) a comment, but is that the case or those comments actually marked up with some sort of Display-As-Deemv’d metatag that allows you to retain the original comment intact while sieving out vowels at display time? Have you considered such a system?

Antinous

josh,

I believe that the key concept is that disemvowelling alters a comment, whereas the other suggestions call for keeping alternate databases for the same comment stream. One’s a small add-on; the other’s a big system change.

prelude

Wow, you know, I kind of really don’t care.

Carry on.

Nephilim

In all seriousness, and after reading this for the past 2(!) days (thanks for the workday time sink!)….

I am personally fine with the way BB handled this. I do not see them as hypocritical or otherwise ‘shady’ for doing things the way they did.

BB are champions of transparency and openness, but that is only for things that should be for public consumption. I feel pretty certain that they are NOT for transparency and openness in private matters of a personal nature, because they are just that, private and personal.

What happened here was private and personal to the BB team and they handled it in the best and most discreet way they knew. Remember, it was VB who decided to shed the crocodile tears to the public to generate an outcry. Well congratulations, you fell for it, her mission was accomplished!

I have read VB’s stuff before, and I gotta say, she has never rubbed me the right way (no pun in…aww who am I kidding, how could I resist THAT pun?). The whole Steve Jobs thing, remember that? He was calling a duck a duck, and she went shedding the crocodile tears to anyone who’d listen. People fell for that shit too.

Boing Boing: I appreciate what you guys do here. It’s unfortunate that you may have tried to be discreet when dealing with this issue, but it seems the discreetness (is that even a word?) was wasted on the wrong person.

If anything, this incident has made me respect you guys (and gal!) more. You are people, mistakes (and shit) happens. You learn and move on.

As for the mods: I say good on them. I prefer mods to NOT to handle things with the kid gloves. If someone comes bringing a fight, they should expect a fight back.

ME

I really do hope this issue is addressed because, as the situation now appears to this outsider observer, it reflects horribly on Miss Jardin, and by extension to the other BoingBoingers. It would be a shame if BoingBoingâ€™s integrity were to be seriously damaged by this scandal. BoingBoing is a strong voice for openness and transparency in our electronic society. It would be a shame if the greater cause of freedom in our modern world were damaged by these disreputable actions.

Let us consider the facts -

BoingBoing has been disingenuous in itâ€™s own official pronouncements. When the official Boing Boing moderator, Miss Hayden, posted the official BoingBoing post on the matter, she dismissed the severity of the deletions by claiming media reports of over a hundred posting deleted were too high. It has been documented that at least seventy postings related to Violet Blue were deleted. Not quite a hundred, but a massive enough purging of the public record.

Insinuations by Miss Hayden and Miss Jardin that Miss Blue is somehow responsible for the deletions through bad behaviour are vile, especially as they fail to disclose or deny Miss Blueâ€™s assertion that Miss Jardin and her were â€œcasualâ€ lovers for a brief time. Miss Blue claims ignorance of any misbehaiour, and Jardin and Hayden have darkly hinted that a failure to disclose is to protect the parties from embarassment.

What is most likely is that Miss Jardin deleted the posts in the aftermath of her intimate relationship with Miss Blue. One can well imagine that the break of intimacy might have been more jarring to Miss Jardin than to the libertine Miss Blue. Perhaps some embarrassment over the nature of their relationship troubled Miss Jardin. She suggests as much to the LA Times in comparing her own actions to those of her own father in destroying some of his own erotically-themed work.

It is hard to believe that some public action of Miss Blue prompted the deletions, since then Jardin would need no coyness in explaining herself. It is also unlikely that Miss Blue was banished for acting as a groupie, as has been suggested by many partisans of Miss Jardin – Miss Blue is a successful blogger and columnist in her own right, and not dependent on BoingBoing for attention, nor are there any other reports of Miss Blue behaving badly to get publicity. She writes for Forbes magazine, for goodnessâ€™ sake!

So the likelihood is that Miss Jardinâ€™s actions are from personal animus towards Miss Blue, probably prompted by the breakup of their love affair. There is no evidence of any other behaviour by Miss Blue that would have bothered Miss Jardin enough to withdraw her own work from the public sphere.

Other reasons given by BoingBoing, such as the â€œexpenseâ€ of keeping these posts public are also fatuous. That this reason is officially cited by BoingBoing brings into question, again, their own truthfulness about this episode.

There is also considerable contradiction in the account of how the deletions were decided upon. At first, the action is depicted as one decided upon by mutual consensus, while later it has been asserted that the BoingBoing bloggers work independently and usually without consultation, and that the deletions were unilaterally done by Miss Jardin.

So the appearance is of Miss Jardin destroying her own work in petulant repudiation of a spurning lover, a depiction even more pathetic in that the spurning lover is oblivious to the original offense. One can well see why Miss Jardin has not been more forthcoming. Her actions were reckless and immature, and perhaps priggish. In the absence of any credible evidence otherwise, one must come to the sad conclusion that the evasiveness of Miss Jardin and BoingBoing is not in deference to Miss Blueâ€™s easily embarrassed sensibilities, but rather out of embarrassment for their own bad behaviour.

We hope that Miss Jardin will put this matter to rest by a full and honest accounting. The openness of the discussion that this comment is a part of gives one hope, but just in case, Iâ€™m posting them on my own blog. As this recent episode makes clear, BoingBoing doesnâ€™t have the best track record recently as an open and transparent public forum.

I am even sympathetic to Miss Jardin in her dilemma. No-one likes their intimately private life made public, particularly in such a unflattering way. I hope that she will consider the example of Lady Godiva. Sometimes riding naked through the townâ€™s square can be the best thing for oneâ€™s reputation, if the cause is noble.

Anonymous

At the bare minimum, it seems a redirect from past stories to their respective archives is in order.

But I think the decision to “unpublish” is fine. The whole value of blogs is that they are a filter, an active, human filter that sorts in real-time, not some archival history-keeping automaton.

gracchus

@134

Right back atcha, TillWe.

The Happy Mutants handled this business very poorly, but growing organisations (especially those that travel the road from amateur to professional) always make mistakes along the way. The ones that survive are the ones that learn from their cock-ups and build credibility.

As I understand it, Ms. Nielsen Hayden was brought in as an expert to help develop some solid community policies in concert with BB’s existing core values, and she (and the site’s owners) are open to listening and making improvements. As long as they follow through, that kind of responsiveness and humility puts the BBers far ahead of the media pack.

Then again…

@222: “In fact, almost all active websites remove material. I’m sorry to have to say this about anything having to do with Boing Boing, but it’s dead normal.”

Professional Web sites provide, at the very least, manual or automated re-directs from the “unpublished” URIs to a generic page explaining that the material is no longer available due to such-and-such a policy. At least, they do so if they want to maintain credibility as professionals. Pointing out the fact that other Webmasters are lazy about something isn’t exactly an excuse, especially when the volume of unpublished links was relatively small, and the resulting broken links were deliberate rather than the artifact of an over-priced CMS.

@172: “The crux of this problem is people seem to be confusing editorial work with fact-based journalism.”

This is really beside the point. You won’t find the NYT or any other credible newspaper purging op-eds and reviews that it regrets publishing (and I’m sure David Brooks alone has been the cause for many regrets at 42nd St) from its archives, either.

Editorial positions and the opinion of the audience do change over time, but only dishonest and insecure content publishers and authors use that as an excuse to quietly erase the past. There are better ways for a site, especially one like Boing Boing, to handle these things.

Will Shetterly

If this is about VB’s abuse of trademark law, why not just say so?

QuarterlyProphet

Obviously no one is going to change their mind at this point on how they feel, but after nearly 800 comments, it’s probably a bigger deal to your readers than you guys thought (and still think).

Antinous

Quarterly Prophet,

Coming from someone who’s never posted before his dozen posts in this thread, we’ll take that for all that it’s worth.

Theseus

I can exclusively reveal the crux of the issue that caused BB to dis-associate all dealings with Violet Blue.

Apparently she’s due to release a new line of Steam punk styled dildonics that use software with DRM restrictions. It also only works on Windows.

gabrielm

Also, it looks like comments are still open!

Hooray for that!

The “real lesson” that I was hoping the editors would come to was: Suppression is not an appropriate response to conflict.

hagbard

“Gosh, pretty damning stuff, eh?”

Yeah, when it’s followed by such classics as, “This is, however, a huge screwup for BoingBoing,” or “You have compounded your problems…”

Surrender and penance = #1136

- Respond immediately on your front page
- Display appropriate contrition and humility
- Your moderators’ heads are forfeit
- Your current responses are deemed unresponsive
- Give us a new official response in a new post

Sufficiently contrite, damned:

“David and Joel have both displayed appropriate contrition and humility in their comments, but the moderators are widely perceived (including by me) as unfriendly and snarky.”

The threat:

“Until such a response is forthcoming, expect the ongoing erosion of goodwill you’ve built up over the years to continue to slowly erode.”

And of course all of the references to the legions of hurt and angry fans you claim to represent is an implicit threat that the impact of the consequences of their continued intransigence will be huge.

Come out and play, Cory:
#793 You
#1433 You again

Perhaps it was wrong of me to claim that your intention was to save his soul.

“I didn’t mean to say it was suspicious, in a conspiracy way (you RAW fans!). I said it was interesting in a “the universe act in mysterious ways” way. Sorry if you misunderstood me.”

But you didn’t say it was suspicious. You asked me what I thought was suspicious. And the more serious emphasis in my mind is, “..strangely silent” as opposed to the first part, “It’s so interesting.”

Of course, I didn’t bring up RAW in terms of consipiracies, but in terms of communication. Do you agree with RAW about communication happening between equals? Because that’s the part of my comment most important to me.

“Please read peoples’ comments more carefully before throwing around such accusations in the future.”

Words to live by.

Will Shetterly

Greg, I don’t mind being called a drama queen. I’ll happily don a boa and pose for the group photo with everyone who’s still commenting on or about this thread.

I wish you would answer my last two questions at #1616. If you’d like to slip past the fourth, that’s cool. But the fifth is essential to this discussion.

As for what you say I said at #997, the comment’s actually at #996, and the explanation is at #1140. You can’t say I don’t have your back.

GregLondon

@210: If you can try to extrapolate from the larger point Orwell was making

Stuff it with this Orwell crap.

Anyone making claims or comparisons so BoingBoing taking down some of its own content to the world that existed in Orwell’s 1984 is clearly someone who is insane, or hasn’t read the book.

@186: we’re not dealing with a Stalinist purge here. But

There is no “but”. We are not dealing with Stalinistic purges here. At all. In any way, shape, or form.

Anyone who brings up stalinistic purges has never been through a stalinistic purge and isn’t dealing with reality.

The linguistic BULLSHIT in this thread is amazing, on the level with “terrorist fist jab” comments, on the level of “Obama’s middle name is Hussein”, on the level of “He went to a madras”.

ANYONE who makes an Orwellian “1984″ comment regarding BB taking down it’s own content is doing nothing different than openly pondering what that fist bump was.

And it’s all because what actually happened isn’t very flammable by itself. BB took down some of its content. That doesn’t burn very well. So certain nutjubs and pyros aren’t talking about what actually happened, they’re talking about stalinistic purges and Orwell’s 1984.

Because that can actually keep the bonfire going.

What actually happened was a fist bump, fairly common among younger people. What some morons want to turn it into is a “terrorist fist jab”, which gets a certain segment of the easily excitable population into a tizzy.

danegeld

Maybe if this kind of situation arises again, you could put a disclaimer or an editorial / click through note around the old article, to the effect that you think the original post was wrong, rather than just deleting it? eg.

“We now think this article is inappropriate, because of this fact [explanation] [link to old article for historic interest], BB editors 2008″

I’m pretty sure (say) science journals do that, even when they discover that a given article was seriously flawed because of made-up data, plagarism, etc. they preserve the record but highlight the fact it isn’t to be trusted.

GregLondon

if we hit 1337, the singularity starts.

If you’re not uploaded by then, it’s too late for you.

Digilante

Good move, now I won’t even have to see her godawful English.

“And this. And that. And I was naked. And I did this. And it was amazing. And wow. And hoo. And haa.”

Gives me a headache. Would someone tell her what a conjunction is please.

Freddy de la Cruz

1.- make a “DonÂ´t unpublish me BBro!” T-shirt
2.- make Violet and blue versions
3.- PROFIT!

unpublish -> the new Truthiness

GregLondon

The content was deleted a year ago.

It was so irrelevant, that all you whiners didn’t even know about the deletions until now, and only because someone told you.

So, whatever “damage” you think these deletions caused, the actual damage was zero. The only “damage” is in the hyped up sense of injustice you keep heaping on the fire.

Tomy

I have been a reader and supporter of Boing Boing for many years. I bought Cory’s books regardless of reviews because I liked him and agreed with his views on copyright. I bought a copy of his latest for my son, and screwed up and missed a reading at the Ballard Library in Seattle by two hours, but my son and I came to support him. I’ve always like Mark’s eclectic tastes which closely match my own. My current eternal subscription to Make Magazine is largely based on Mark’s association.

Right now I am feeling like I never want to associate or let my kids associate with the members of Boing Boing again, and this includes my subscription to Make. A post about how “we decided to unpublish/erase our relationship with this person” demands some “transparency” or you have reduced yourself to many of the vices you denounce.

I honestly feel betrayed. I suddenly feel like Boing Boing is now a “Directory of Ways to Benefit Our Careers” with an associate link to Amazon for every post you make.

I feel like Boing Boing has betrayed me that same way Disney betrayed me, going from a company that wanted to enrich and entertain, to a company that will do whatever it takes for a buck.

Nelson.C

I wish people would stop using the continuous present tense for this one act of whatever-it-is that took place a year ago.

The air of discomfort radiating from the boingers’ comments on the subject is almost palpable; I think we can take it as read that if such a situation arose today, they’d find some other way of dealing with it.

Al Billings

Nice try? Excuse me? This is how you treat people who have been readers since this blog started and who have contributed items for the blog (See the post linking to my blog for Stephenson’s Anathem last week)?

I had multiple comments on this thread, including at least one critical of Teresa. I have one comment now showing on this entire page. So, whether you “deleted” them or simply hid them from the public (however we phrase it here in doublespeak), my comments have been removed.

Antinous

Al,

I too would like to see some screenshots.

Nelson.C

Michael @981: Your comment at #920 isn’t a question.

GregLondon

is GregLondon a mod or just a TruFan? He seems very personally invested in the whole thing

Not a mod. sorry. I got in after the umpteenth post taking the deletion of some blog posts and comparing it to 1984, stalin, and other absurdities. My personal investment is a dislike for people using language to misdescribe violence. Normally, it’s people trying to play down the cost of war and such, but in this case the absurdities of file management being compared to stalin’s revolutions just got to be too much for me to let it pass.

And with that, it was down the rabbit hole chasing one handwave after another.

Nephilim

Damn, it didn’t make 1337!

Brad_King

I’ve been thinking about this situation for the past few days, trying to figure out what the actual problem is. It’s been wonderful to read the thoughts — hostile and not — from others here.

It has helped me clarify my own thoughts. That’s tricky for me for a few reasons (caution, name dropping ahead):

My first exposure to tech culture was through Mondo2000 and Boing Boing way back in the days of paper.

@David and I worked for the same editor in Cincinnati many years ago. In some respects, I stalked his career, even following in his footsteps out to Berkeley.

@Xeni and I met when I worked at Wired and have stayed friends over the years.

@Cori and I used to have spirited conversations about copyright, intellectual property and digital culture outside the EFF offices.

Even @John and I have traded thoughts — sporadically — over the years.

I have a great deal of respect for them. I love Boing Boing. And I believe them to be honorable, passionate people who care as much about BB as the community does.

The decision to unpublish doesn’t bother me. Their blog, their right. We may disagree on whether they should have done that — but I don’t think it’s hard to understand it’s their right to do that.

I’m not even overly concerned about whether they should have or not. That is an internal decision that probably can’t be used as a “template” for other sites. Every decision to do this is individual. What you learn here is likely not applicable somewhere else.

The problem is the decision to hold back the explanation. Again, it’s the rights of the BB folks to do that, but it’s the right of the community — which is equally invested (with the link submission, with the comments, with the 2-way communication) — to demand that. In one swoop, the idea and dynamic of the BB community has been defined specifically in a new way.

It’s less 2-way now (and maybe it always was) at least in definition.

This is a perfectly legitimate way to run the community — but for those invested, it’s a radical notion. If you invite people in and they get invested, this is a shock.

Of course, the irony is this: the decision to do something which (inadvertently) changed the community dynamic also caused the community to engage and discuss the act and itself.

Which is indeed a wonderful thing.

Archeaopteryx

#1542 Hagbard – I have that one posted up on the wall here. :-)

Gainclone

“Save the drama for Obama!”

Save pajama for malambo!

(Dali Lama Yokohama!)

(Razor comma mocha grande)

proto

I, for one, refuse to get involved in this, because any additional posts just perpetuate. . . oh, damn.

Archeaopteryx

Well, I think it was likely the trademark suit and the FILING for the trademark over a year ago.

Wendi Sullivan Blue was not named Violet Blue, you see, until she had her name changed about two years ago. She kept that fact a secret even from her friends.

Then she filed for a trademark with the intention of suing the porn actress who had been using that name since 1999, a porn star, moreover, she had been aware of the whole time, and who had invited her to be on her (the actresses) KSEX radio show, in fact.

At any time prior, Violet Blue, the porn actress could herself have sued Wendi Blue for the use of the name, but she didn’t.

In fact they have totally different businesses which makes this sort of suit especially wrong.

Now Violet Blue the porn actress had semi-retired from the business and is a single mom trying to get a non-porn career for herself, and at the time of the lawsuit her whole income was the very small porn site she ran to sell videos and stuff to her fans.

She could not afford to defend herself against the suit.

Adult Video News even issued a call for a lawyer to defend her pro bono but it didn’t happen, and the lawyer she was able to get wasn’t able to actually do more for her than file motions.

So, here we have successful writer suing single mom ex porn star and winning in court over a name when nobody ever confused the two.

Seems to me BB did the right thing here, because this was simply slimy.

tillwe

@GregLondon: As I said — I don’t think it is understandable if you don’t view a lowered trust as something harmful. (And to make this point clear: I do not say BB intended to harm anyone — they just did something with consequences they have to live with, and a somewhat bad handling of this consequences, further decreasing trust). I’m quite sure Apple, to take only that example, doesn’t want to be unhelpful, but has other good reasons for unpublishing critical comments about products. Intention and consequences are two things.

But maybe we should be good commenters and enforce Joels EOT voluntarily — at least those of us wanting to get some sleep on this side of the Earth.

GregLondon

crap, this thing keeps crashing my browser…

Steven Brust

Will @ 1682: If it isn’t me, I didn’t leave out the second matter of principle? :-)

Anyway, yes, that’s true. It is an issue. And I trust the Boingers to figure that one out and come up with a reasonable policy on the subject for the future. Perhaps I’m naive.

I do not, however, think it is a matter of principle, but rather something to which one applies one’s principles in each case.

Xopher

Teresa: I’m not.

Ross: Bravo!

Takuan: I know I do. But you misspelled that.

Wait! You meant…

*blush*

MinTPhresh: Yeah, I hope I come home and find some rice cooking.

Actually I hope I don’t, since I live alone.

entropy

***LAST!!!****

(sorry, I’ve been waiting awhile to do that though)

QuarterlyProphet

“If this is the same as 1984, then anyone who’s ever gone back and friends-locked their old livejournal entries is Big Brother.”

If you think BoingBoing is the same thing as an old livejournal, then yes, absolutely. I wouldn’t.

Antinous

Agent blogateur:
-noun

A blogger who manufactures a controversy in order to boost her sagging Google page rank.

epo

Gosh what fun! Do you think we’ll get up to 1984 comments?

Which bit of “freedom of expression” do people not understand? If BB want to withdraw their older posts then that is their prerogative, if that makes you feel violated then go elsewhere.

Or perhaps I missed the post where BB declared itself a journal of record. Was it unpublished perhaps?

elNico

hmpf…just woke up…800???

Joel Johnson

@1119: Well, there’s suppression and then there’s knowing when to take a breath. And in fact, I’m going to take that breath whether the comments are open or not. :)

Wirelizard

This post has no purpose except to add to the thread count, because it needs to reach #1337.

Don’t ask why, it just needs to.

Random832

in after 1500 – Anyway… This milestone is as good a time as any: I would appreciate if this thread were closed and a new one opened in its place – my browser is starting to groan under the stress of loading this page, and especially of searching it.

eustace

bzzzzzzzzzzzz

funny, I know the Johnsons down the block pretty well and would never have suspected a thing. A spork, eh? How unimaginative. Perhaps I should introduce them to more effective rituals…

emayoh

I’d never say that Boing Boing didn’t have the right to delete whatever they want. They also have to right to post glowing reviews of Exxon Mobil gas stations and tell us that Mike Huckabee is a visionary worthy of our support.

Clearly Boing Boing has the right do do wrong things. Just as we have the right to voice disagreement if they do.

“What part of, ‘They have the right to do so’ are people not getting?

I totally get that they have the right to do it. I just disagree with it and am saying why. Is that OK?

illmethinks

Oh…that explains everything.

I feel better now for caring. :/

g

ErosBacchus

FredB #410, I’ve been wondering about that post too. In Teresa’s defense, it was before her time here, but I remember the post from when it went up, and it was definitely Violet’s work and advertised as such.

In light of this, Xeni’s #117 is posing a real challenge for me, I’m having trouble understanding how it could have been said in good faith.

hagbard

#538 I’m sorry tillwe, which of my comments are you referring to?

Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator

Thrsdy @601:<> sw svrl nn-nsty qrs, jks, nd cmmnts bt VB gt “npblshd”.Y sw wht fw y hppnd t s. sw th cmplt st. S cld y pls cl t wth rmrks lk “bvs bllsht”? Y rlly dn’t hv tht cmng t y.

mllngtvr @576: f thr wr, s y ssrt, n trnsprncy t ll, ths thrd wldn’t xst, th ntry tht bgn t wldn’t xst, th Bngrs wldn’t hv frttd s lng nd hrd bt wht t sy, nd y wldn’t knw ngh t b tlkng bt ny f t.

rsBcchs @186:<>s svrl thr ppl hv pntd t, “npblshng” smthng (bcs y dn’t wnt t py t hst t ny mr) brks ll th nbnd lnks t tht cntnt. Dng s, nd dfndng th bhvr, rvls phlsphy f th ntrnt tht s shrply t dds wth Bng Bng’s pblc vls.Nnsns. Mst lrg, ctv blgs tk mtrl dwn, fr vrty f rsns. Sm d t mr thn thrs. My rfr y t th frst prgrph f BH’s cmmnt @594? H r sh dscrbs hw Vlt Bl tks stff dwn frm hr wn st.

Wht y’v flln fr hr s VB’s vrsn f n f Krl Rv’s fvrt trcks: prtndng tht prfctly nrml bhvr whch smn hs nggd n s nsl, lrmng, nd dscrdtbl. My gss s tht y mstly rd nw wblg ntrs. f y dn’t d th knd f nln rsrch tht lds t rdng ld ns, y wld nvr ntc tht smtms thy’r mssng.

rsBcchs gn, @557:Vlt Bl hs dmnstrbly ld mr thn nc bt ths mbrgl.<>Dmnstrbly? Whr?1. s mntnd rlr, by prtndng tht thr’s smthng xtrrdnry bt rmvng ld mtrl frm wblg whn th prctc sn’t nsl, nd VB hrslf ds slnt dts n hr wn st. 2. By mssn: nt mntnng tht th ntrs wr npblshd vr yr g, nd tht sh’d knwn bt t fr mnths bfr gng pblc. f t ws nws t ll, t ws ld nws tht n n ls hd ntcd. 3. vrsttng th nmbr f ntrs bt hr. cn’t gt n ccrt cnt wtht rdng ch n, n rdr t dstngsh ntrs tht r ctlly bt hr frm nstncs tht r jst hr wblg bng crdtd n pssng s th src f lnk — nt my tp prrty t th mmnt — bt thy’r nt n th thr dgts.

Tlk bt thngs tht rn’t nws: Vllywg stry trns t t b nrlbl; flm t lvn.

fylateri

so there’s a nice distributed attack on this policy. anyone with a link from bb can use a meta refresh or a server-side 302 redirect to point that link at a ‘forbidden’ site. voila, that post must now be removed.

i’ve done this with an inbound link from bb to a site i control.

gabrielm

Also, it looks like comments are still open!

Oh, and the other important lesson:
You need to set up RSS for the comments … So that I don’t have to keep hitting refresh!

And – I would really love to see the analytics for the past few days!

sammich

i can’t pretend to have read ~all~ of the previous 1694 comments, mostly vitriolic it seems to me… most comments seem to be screaming for transparancy and full disclosure of what’s been going on, citing boingboing’s commitment to such principles.

however, despite not having read the magna boingboing carta, i have developed the impression that boingboing also values / seeks to defend, personal privacy, certainly when such does not impinge on the rights of others…

just a teeny bit of googling revealed to me that there was/were a person or persons for whom further discussion of the disputes would certainly infringe their privacy, and i believe in such a way not justified by any public right-to-know. i think xeni / boingboing acted as honourably as she / they could in the circumstances, and even as the shit hit the fan they have held their tongues.

i believe that she/they have probably shown best judgement in very sticky circumstances, and as such, over and above their marvellous blogzine, they have maximum respect from me.

rAMPANTiDIOCY

BoingBoing, I am highly disappointed that you promote tyranny but choosing to publish only those things that you want on your own website.

Talia

Ugh. After reading through most of the comments, all I want to do is bang my head on the desk repeatedly.

Y’all crying “CENSORSHIP OH NOES” need to, for one, read up on the term so you understand what it means, and two, take a nice long break from the internet.

There is this thing called “outside” that can be a very pleasant experience. I recommend checking it out.

dunnright

Longest comment thread ever?

Can someone give me the cliff-notes version, as I don’t feeling like reading all 688 posts?

Antinous

Can someone give me the cliff-notes version

Blog meets girl.

GregLondon

peacelove@794: Removing all references to a person on a well-known blog can be a kind of emotional and psychological violence.

I have a little blog over at warhw.com. It’s called “War Handwavium”. It’s tag line is “A study in how language misdescribes violence, war, and the use of force.”

It’s my own little space where I wanted to be able to point out how people use language to downplay the real costs associated with violence, war, and the use of force.

I’m almost tempted to start another theme in that same blog where people misdescribe verbal arguments as “violence” just to make something sound far more dramatic than it really is. Because that also misdescribes violence, just in the other direction.

Saying “we will be welcomed as liberators” downplays the cost of an invasion. Saying “we will be out in 6 weeks or 6 months” is downplaying the cost of a war. Creating an incident where none existed such as the Gulf of Tonkin incident, or testimony by Nurse Nayirah about incubators, or stories in 2003 about human shredders, those are all using language to invent somethign that didn’t happen, in order to justify war.

All I see here is a bunch of people who are trying to use inflamatory words to describe the removal of some posts over a year ago as being something far worse than it really is. People have repeatedly compared this to Orwell’s 1984, or Stalin’s purges, or whatever. Calling this “violence” is no less a misdescription of what really happened. And it is used solely to over-dramatize what happened.

I’m surprised someone hasn’t come out and said the BB’ers have an industrial shredder in the back room and grind up human beings for their slurpies in the morning.

Post #711 has a nice, short narrative of what happened over the last year between VB and BB. What you’ll notice there is a decided lack of violence, a decided lack of damage inflicted by BoingBoing on VioletBlue.

There are quite a few hand-wringers on this thread who are quite certain that something illicit happened somewhere and must have been inflicted by someone, but when pushed to point out actual, specific, damage suffered by VB, they shake their heads and invoke Donald Rumsfeld, stating defiantly, “We know where they are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.”

Which is to say, they’ve got squat, and have to resort to linguistic propaganda that I normally see used by hawks looking to overinflate somthing to justify war. A sense of righteous indignation over some nonexistent harm inflicted on someone that people don’t even care about, just that the “harm” done, gives them reason to go to war on the “harmer”.

So, where are the WMD’s? What real, actual harm has been inflicted on VB?

Talking about the “integrity of the internet” will be shown to be equivalent to charges of yellow cake from Niger. Charges of “censorship” will be shown to be equivalent to “mobile biological labs”. All of them nothing more than handwaves attempting to invent something where nothing real exists.

I’m looking for specific damages that were inflicted on VB as a result of BoingBoing deleting it’s own posts over a year ago.

Random832

#986 Wow. Nice reframe. The only way to win, apparently, is to engage in the same make-wrong arguments that are being thrown around by the faux-wounded around here.

If you are going to engage in retribution, it’s only polite to specify what that retribution is for.

And it’s real classy of you to refer to people who genuinely feel their values – which they thought were also your values – have been betrayed as “faux-wounded”

Lizzle

@GregLondon – ah, I see. This sort of situation is what Godwin’s for. ;) (Oo – look. I seem to be engaging again.)

tarastar42

I know this is probably a minority opinion, but I have to say that I am actually encouraged by the dialog in this thread. I think it is a great thing that so many people feel passionately about open editorial policies in emerging mass media on one hand, and the right of authors and editors to exercise reasonable control over their work and endorsements on the other. It is an interesting discussion, and I would argue that it is also an important one.

BoingBoing is not the NYT, and it isnâ€™t a personal blog. BoingBoing is a Mass Media Blog, something so brand new in our society that we havenâ€™t even finished unwrapping it. There arenâ€™t any time-honored traditional Mass Media Blogging standards to measure BoingBoing against. Yet. We have the unique opportunity to influence and inspire those standards right now.

One of the things that I admire so much about Cory Doctorow is his ability to think through the far-reaching implications of modern-day choices. I know that he is someone who can envision a society where power is wielded by â€œad-hocâ€ groups and public respect is literally the only currency. What could the mass media of such a society look like? What should be the highest standard for openness in editorial decisions? What should be the highest standard for moderating community interactions? What values does BoingBoing want to model now for the mass media of the future? I sincerely hope that questions of this scope are being grappled with in the editorsâ€™ chatroom.

Personally, I feel that Xeni made a mistake in removing the content, but also that it was a completely understandable and well-meaning mistake. If she was still thinking of BoingBoing as a just personal blog, she did nothing out of the ordinary. She merely removed her own old posts for her own personal reasons, as bloggers do all the time. I donâ€™t think it was either sinister or intentionally hypocritical.

However, I do think it was short-sighted. It doesnâ€™t take into account the real influence of BoingBoing as one of the top five blogs on the planet. It doesnâ€™t take into consideration the fact that mass media blogging is an emerging power in the world, one that will only increase in reach and scope. And it doesnâ€™t take into account the high-esteem and reputation that BoingBoing has with an entire generation of bloggers/ activists/artists/readers who want radical openness in our societal institutions.

Like it or not, BoingBoing is a leading institution, just by virtue of its massive audience and influence. As such, I personally feel that old posts should not just disappear from public eye without a trace. I do have sympathy for Xeniâ€™s position of wanting the ability to withdraw her perceived public endorsement from a person she later found to be objectionable, but I think it needs to be handled another way.

My suggestion would be to replace the original posts with pages that read **This posting has been removed by the original contributor, in accordance with our editorial policy as listed _here_. To view an archive of this post, please visit _The Way Back Machine_. **

Make sure that those pages have the ability to leave comments. Also, I would suggest keeping of public log of all retroactive edits on a webpage or even a Twitter feed. This would give contributors the ability to step back from their past work without removing it from the public eye or trying to keep it a secret.

To the team at BB: I respect that you guys are taking some time to think all this through, as these are weighty issues with long-term ramifications. When the dust settles, if you do decide to stay with a closed model that borrows its standards from personal blogs, I will probably remain a reader, but I will lose some serious Whuffie for you. Whatever thatâ€™s worth.

Random832

(some reader-side option to divide the comments into multiple pages with, say, 50 or 100 comments each would be nice. Just sayin’)

Archeaopteryx

#ME #1543 – OK, now, why do you assume that having the real reason aired would improve ANYTHING?

Lovers (if that was actually true) fall out for lots of reasons.

Sometimes one has an STD and lies about it and the breakup happens when the other gets it, for example. Were that the case here, would that be appropriate to air under any circumstances?

Sometimes one tells another something in confidence and that confidence is immediately broke.

Sometimes one find that the other was only with them because of something that the other could do for them, in other words, using them.

There are a lot of reasons where the truth, if it came out, would be met my even more opprobrium than the present situation!

So; What you ask for might be really a bad idea, and most probably the present situation reflects upon Xeni better than the conditions of full disclosure you petulantly demand!

joshmillard

re-dating comments when they are approved.

True. Pros and cons—pulling the anony comments out of order make them more visible to folks following the thread as it develops. But it might also remove the comment from the context in which it was made; if the anony commenter didn’t quote well and the thread is moving fast, that could be an issue if the mods aren’t lightning-quick with the approvals.

buttseks

I only wish I had the time to read through the previous 1800 comments. I’m just going to assume that it’s something like:

“OMG CENSORSHIP BOINGBOING IS A BUNCH OF SELL-OUTS”

“YOU GUYS SHUT UP XENI IS THE BEST AND CORY’S BOOKS TAUGHT ME TO READ. VIOLET BLUE DID COPYRIGHT THINGS AND CORY SEZ COPYRIGHTS ARE BAD SO SHE SUCKS”

“FCK THT STPD CNT VLT BL”

“TERESA IS A NAZI FOR CENSORING PEOPLE. YOU’RE ALL NAZIS!!!”

R

That Violet Blue thing

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