Let me propose a radical notion: The weblog's greatest strength — its uncensored, unmediated, uncontrolled voice — is also its greatest weakness.Wow, that's deep. It's like that with the Hulk—his unslaked thirst for retribution gives him great power, including the power to SMASH!!!—but it also gets him into trouble.
You can talk, you can talkposted by wendell at 11:15 AM on June 30, 2008 [3 favorites]
You can bicker, you can talk
You can bicker, bicker, bicker
You can talk, you can talk
You can talk, talk, talk, talk,
Bicker, bicker, bicker
You can talk all you want
But it's different then it was
No it ain't, no it ain't
But you gotta know the territory
I can't help but think this every time I read Ms. Blue's articles: for a sex writer she is such a prude. It's like they hired Tipper Gore to write a sex column. The only thing about this writer that's "edgy" is the picture of herself that she attaches to the columns.posted by small_ruminant at 11:58 AM on June 30, 2008
ooa eoa i a oe eeie."consonant-removal is ____ more eerie"?
Last year, boingboing wrote about the Society of American Archivists decision to delete their old listserv archives. They generated enough attention that the decision was reversed and the archives were preserved. If they're erasing parts of their own archive for any reason, it's an act of shocking hypocrisy. If they're deliberately scrubbing specific people from their archives, it's a disgusting reversal of all their publicly stated principles.posted by WCityMike at 1:06 PM on June 30, 2008 [10 favorites]
There are a multitude of problems with the rationale behind your argument, Patrick, assuming it's what most people are interpreting it as, regarding Boing Boing's removal of Violet Blue's posts:posted by WCityMike at 1:29 PM on June 30, 2008 [31 favorites]
Persons who are against political censorship and corporate malfeasance are not for that reason obliged to live their entire personal and professional lives in a goldfish bowl.
The vast majority of commenters on this article not speaking about obligation, i.e., most everyone recognizes that Boing Boing has no obligational requirement foisted upon it. They are speaking about hypocritism as it relates to morality. In short, if you consistently advocate against censorship and for openness and transparency, to engage in clandestine editing of your past (especially when you have specifically argued for the maintenance of archives, i.e. last year's archivsts listserv story) is hypocritical and as such is morally wrong. I do not need to know the intimate secrets of Cory, Mark, Xeni, David, or Teresa. I do expect that if they stand up and say, "An organization should be run in such-and-such a way," that they run their organization in accordance with those same principles.
Believing that public utilities ought to be accountable to the public does not make one into a public utility, no matter how hard anyone tries to spin it that way.
Boing Boing has consistently advocated for private agencies and companies to be accountable to certain things it felt to be morally good, i.e., transparency, openness, and not disappearing things in the middle of the night. As said above, few are saying that BoingBoing is a public utility that is legally required and obligated to keep its archives untouched. If that's all you're arguing, you're merely saying a statement most people already agree with. What the vast majority of the extant criticism is about is that the action of "disappearing" Violet Blue's posts from the archive with no transparency, notice, or openness is an action directly contrary to several principles BoingBoing has routinely advocated and epsoused over the years, and as such is a highly hypocritical action that deserves scorn.
Advocating “transparency” for government proceedings, or for the beneficiaries of chartered monopolies and public largesse, doesn’t oblige the advocate to be “transparent” in every personal or artistic decision they themselves make.
Again, a substitution of a straw man for the real argument. Boing Boing has not, over its past, solely attacked governments, "chartered monopolies," and "beneficiaries of ... public largesse". They've criticized authors, leaders of professional organizations (SFWA, etc.), non-monopoly companies (Apple and MS are big but each is not a monopoly, especially given Apple's relatively small market share), and many others.
Boing Boing has, over the years, earned a great deal of respect, supportive cheers, and agreement for its actions of criticizing all — not a strictly limited subset of individuals legally obligated not to practice censorship, but all — of those who would be opaque and censorious and practice actions that alter records in the dead of night. Yet they themselves are, when it is convenient for them, being opaque and censorious and altering records in the dead of night.
They may not have any legal requirement that they not do what they're doing, but to suggest that what they're doing is not laughably hypocritical nor morally wrong is a highly difficult argument to make, and you've made nowhere near a convincing case here.
Even weirder is the idea that companies shouldn't be criticized because in a market, you should just take your business elsewhere. Free markets thrive on good information. For a market to function, customers need to have good information about which goods are worth buying and which ones should be avoided -- that's why we complain in public, to help companies make better decisions.This is from the clip that he posted to Boing Boing. At the very least, they're lying in a bed they've made themselves.
"I’ve been racking my brain thinking of what issues I might’ve come down on the wrong side of," Blue told me on the phone. "There’s been no argument, there's been no disagreement, no flame war, none of the usual things."I think she rejected Cory's advances one too many times.
David Bilek@51: "Xopher: okay, how about when BB criticized Digg for pulling down the AACS key in response to DMCA notices? Digg was "disappearing" any post referencing the AACS key in much the same way that BB has "disappeared" any posts referencing V.B."BB never ever criticized Digg for doing this. You're making stuff up.
Oh Cory...posted by mullingitover at 10:00 PM on June 30, 2008
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/05/02/digg-users-revolt-ov.html
Wait, how is that horrid? I was be hyperbolic that Cory writes too many posts about every little L.B. reading event or trivial news item.Metafilter: in 2008 it reads like someone's fantasy of 2002.
But they have engaged in an act that a significant amount of their readership reads as hypocritical and a violation of the spirit of transparency that they have espoused for quite a while. This story is tearing through the interwebs. It strikes me as a collossal tactical bluder to not address it publicly
Someone is censoring incoming forum posts in real time, and went back and removed the rainbow post once they got the joke. That goes beyond "we need to have a conference call before we respond to this". -- LeonNooo!! that was awesome!
Wow. There is no way in hell I'm going to wade through all the comments here, but I just would like to note that 425 comments is pretty close to the number of comments left on the 9/11 thread. I find it fascinating.And we only have like 5 times the users now!
I can think of a lot of reasons I might decide to delete a bunch of old posts having to do with a person I was previously friendly with, and who has since behaved in a manner that made me want to have nothing to do with them. I can even imagine being in situations where I was somewhat enjoined, by legal advice, common sense, or even my own emotional limitations, from wanting to talk about it.That's a pretty early comment so you've probably all read it already. But it would not be incorrect to say that this reads more easily as a description of an interpersonal problem than of a legal or corporate problem. His continued arguments down the line of "this is a personal blog" corroborate this interpretation. Extrapolating from this, the two comments in ML, and what I know of BB, I think that their silence on the matter is the result of a disagreement between two or more of the BB editors. I would further guess that the Violet Blue thing is more of a symptom than a cause. The fact that they're still posting means nothing, of course -- blogs can have arbitrary numbers of posts enqueued to be posted later.
If there be a means to RSS-feed BB while excluding all theHere you go:
self-congratulatory crap/steampunk'ry/bad art on the theme of dewy-eyed girls/bugs/animals/unicorns... I'd like to find it.
tail -f /dev/nullplagiarist!mttn s th sncrst frm f flttr.
Metafilter: my beloved blue swarm of snark.Perhaps I should add it to my profile or something?
I hear BoingBoing is trying to clean up its act to sweeten up a buyout deal with Disney. Think of it... BoingBoing buying Disney. Yeah.See, if you put it in quotes it's like somebody else said it first! (I learned that technique from Drudge.)
As it stands, Boing Boing's editors come off looking foolish. They want to retain the authenticity of a "personal" blog, with all its quirkiness, to attract an audience discontented with impersonal big media, while claiming that it's too "personal" to explain an editorial decision to that audience. If Boing Boing's readers expect better of it, its editors only have themselves to blame.And hey, they link to this very thread!
* Either as an editorial decision, or because of some inflexible requirement (a legal dispute, something like a DMCA claim, advertiser objections), content was clearly taken down.These turned out to be right because they encompassed everything anyone thought was possible.
* When the kinds of disputes arise that require this kind of takedown, it's almost always something that's either a legal requirement or an interpersonal issue that makes it impossible to talk about or extremely difficult to talk about without abusing someone's reputation or trust.
* Not everybody on the BoingBoing team is up to date on what's going on or why.This is very unlikely given that the "unpublishing" happened a year ago, according to the Boingers.
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.I will vouch that it did not say that before.
It appears to have been unsaid. Wow.They're really digging themselves into a hole. The way out is clear, though:
If it were me, and I'd said something that in retrospect sounded really cruel and insulting, I'd want to edit it even more simply because that wouldn't have been what I meant. But I would have put in a little "edited 5:20pm EST by shmegegge sorry folks, one sentence in that came off differently than I meant it. restated it properly now." or I simply would have clarified in a later comment.I'm guessing that you're
//Creates and initializes a DateTimeFormatInfo associated with the en-US culture.
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//Date variable declared
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(600 lines of uncommented PICK-DB strings jammed into an unmanaged COM object)
That's a child's way of thinking, to assume one's actions only have the effects one intends. When you're a legally competent adult, it's not enough to mean well. You have to study the situation and make plans that you can reasonably expect will succeed in getting the results you want without doing damage along the way. If I'm messing around with bottle rockets, I may not intend to burn down your house, but I'm still responsible for doing it.... Notice how those apologies don't relocate responsibility for the actions to someone else?posted by spiderwire at 4:52 PM on July 1, 2008 [1 favorite]
[Mistakes are] unacceptable. If you only have time to check ten of your requests, you only submit ten.... Let's stop talking about this in terms of a few small clerical errors.... If you want to say that's trivial, no one will drop an anvil on your head; but I'll think poorly of your judgement.... That was an example of the inadequacy of mere apology.... An offhand apology isn't enough.And:
Is that an ad hominem argument? It is. When an ad hominem argument is relevant to the issues at hand, it's valid to use it.
If [Orwellianism is] your worry, then be of good cheer: it's not going to happen. Electronic media have greatly enabled the preservation and dissemination of older and variant texts.And:
Printing isn't publishing. To publish is, at its core, to make public.... Traditionally, the answer is that everyone who was in a position to know it was happening, but didn't try to stop it, is reponsible to a greater or lesser degree.... A publisher is reponsible for his text, whether or not he's read it.posted by spiderwire at 4:58 PM on July 1, 2008 [1 favorite]
And as for all this "Orwellian editing" crap -- christ, do you take two seconds to think before you post it? You know the Boingers have a major commitment to transparency and open communication. Taking a stand on those issues, and writing and publishing a weblog that's run on those principles, doesn't mean the authors of that weblog are obliged to tell you about every little thing they think and do and decide.NONPERSON HAS BEEN WONDEREMPTIED BY THE MINISTRY OF TRANSPARENCY
The online world has a badly depressed baseline notion of what constitutes civil conversation. It's a leftover from usenet days, when the only thing you could do about trolls, creeps, crazies, and thugs, if you didn't want to fight them, was to keep your head down and add their names to your killfile. Differences of opinion tended to get sorted out via the verbal equivalent of cricket bats and nunchuks. It was an environment that heavily favored participants who had thick skins and loud voices....Good advice. I wonder if "I'm having real difficulty believing in the depth and resilience of your own moral judgement" counts as civil, or loutish?
Here's how you can tell that everyday civility is a basic social value, rather than a luxury: when you lose it, you start to lose other things as well. I've seen far more free speech get stifled or shut down by loutishness than by governments or other authorities.
This has zero to do with candor, or with freedom of speech. It has a great deal to do with the Boingers not wanting to trash Violet Blue, who has no such compunctions where they are concerned."
Additionally, it is quite a disingenuous rhetorical technique to say "I could talk about what a liar this person is, and I could trash them, but I won't.""And she has no such reservations about trashing us."
it can make a lot more sense to close ranks around the folks you work with and all swallow your prideOooh! Just like cops!
It appears Jardin now understands this: "Some of the things that were natural to do when it was four people just doing it as a hobby," she began when we spoke on the phone, then finished on a different track: "We rearrange things as we go along and realize the volume of any small actions you take will be a lot louder. We’d never handle it the same way again."When was it just four people doing it as a hobby? Five years ago? Back when it was a 'zine? Yesterday? Cause her answer, framed against her actions, is only sensible if it was yesterday.
"Boing Boing decided to remove all posts related to one Violet Blue.posted by ericb at 8:42 AM on July 2, 2008 [1 favorite]
... This sudden excising attracted the attention of many, including those on the Metafilter group blog, another very enjoyable site whose remit overlaps that of Boing Boing but which is lower profile and driven by a much broader group of contributors. Many of those, it transpires, find Boing Boing extremely annoying – the Metafilter thread on the Violet Blue affair is now longer than that provoked by 9/11. The schadenfreude they feel at such a high-profile defender of online cultural freedom behaving in such an unusual fashion has been described as that inspired by finding the leader of an animal rights campaign being found in a restaurant tucking into a large and bloody steak.
This reaction has only been heightened by Boing Boing's extreme reluctance to explain why the removal happened. Such official response as has been forthcoming has been defensive, lacking in detail or explanation and managing only to further inflame the meltdown. Third party comments have been quietly deleted on Boing Boing and on other, related blogs – and those quiet deletions have led to further rooftop shouting elsewhere. Violet Blue herself affects a naïve bemusement.
There are, of course, any number of theories. Is it a lovers' tiff? A case of wrongdoing, badly handled through a wish to avoid too much worldwideweb mudslinging? A massive egofight? Or are legal machinations at work behind the scenes, of the sort precipitated by expensive lawyers slapping on injunctions?
... Certainly, there's a lot at stake – Boing Boing's extremely popular and at the heart of a considerable commercial empire, and as such seen as a leading example of new-wave Web publishing done right. Just as certainly, there's a lot of passion involved. I find it rather heartening; the legacy media is no stranger to similar secret battles played out in public, but in a code only discernible to the cognoscenti – and the readers of Private Eye. It's to the credit of the blogosphere that such peculiar and distortive happenings are far harder to hide from readers."
"A Superior Court judge on Tuesday dismissed a defamation-of-character lawsuit brought by a Matawan literary agent against the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, ruling that federal law immunizes interactive Internet services from liability for publishing material generated by others.posted by ericb at 9:21 AM on July 2, 2008
Judge Jamie S. Perri dismissed complaints by Barbara Bauer and her company, Barbara Bauer Literary Agency Inc., against Wikimedia Foundation, the owner and operator of online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
... Complaints remain against 19 individuals and an organization known as Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, which also were named as defendants in Bauer's suit. Wikimedia was the only defendant to challenge the suit in court on Tuesday."
As for the remarks about the unpublishing, Christ people, 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, we should go ahead and have a stated policy. We added this, linked to it in the post.I'm pretty confident that one of her previous comments explicitly pointed to the policy page in defense of the "unpublishing".
I'm pretty confident that one of [Xeni's] previous comments explicitly pointed to the policy page in defense of the "unpublishing".That's the real and lasting damage this fiasco has done to BB. Beyond charges of hypocrisy, favoritism, non-transparency, and bad PR, they've undermined faith in their primary offering: their words. You no longer know that what you're reading was what was there earlier. You don't know if what you once read on BB will be there later. Most damning, you don't know if what one of the boingers said in a comment thread will silently change while you aren't looking. There is no conversational record that you can trust.
I'm not going to go back and look for it, though, and even if it's not there, it may, of course, have just been unpublished, to get the past into line with the current way that things always have been.
"Hey, if I take my instant messenger logs, do a search-and-replace on the names, drop in a few made up words like 'whoofie', and add some pointless and desultory interstitial matter cribbed from the in-flight magazine in the seat-back in front of me, I'll have a new 'novel' I can release under a Creative Commons license before the plane lands! Wow-wee-woo, it's so fun and easy to be a Real Author™! (Cory sighs, then adds:) "If only it were so easy to be a Real Boy™ just like Pinocchio! (Regaining his composure, Cory continues:) "See, there's a reason I hate Disney, damn it!""posted by orthogonality at 10:39 AM on July 2, 2008 [3 favorites]
It's become obvious to the entire team here at Boing Boing that our actions to date have the potential of making the current firestorm go on indefinitely. We've met and decided to take a few steps.Work of genius? No. Obviously advocating an opinion counter to their current one? Yes. Chances of them actually posting something resembling this? About as much as the chances of Dubya being outed as a crossdresser.
First, we have altered the commenting system and our commenting policy. Disemvoweling is a tactic that although seeming quite cute has in practice appeared petty and been a block to the free exchange we hope to foster on this site. In the interests of preserving the record, if we delete a post (excepting bonafide spam), we will reflect same by keeping the metadata (post number, user, date, time) and merely replacing the text with "[Comment deleted for cause.]" Should a moderator edit their comment, much like you would see with forum software, the comment will have "[Comment edited by Name on Date, Time.]" In this way there should be no further questions or concerns about "unpublished" comments or "stealth-edit" comments.
Second, we apologize for the cute wordplay we engaged in regarding unpublishing and deletion. Unpublishing is the actual name of the feature present in the Movable Type blogging software for removing an entry from view without deleting it in the database. However, we acknowledge that it makes no difference from our readers' point of view. The comments we made about not deleting comments, but unpublishing them, were poorly chosen inciteful banter, and we apologize for them.
Third, we have fired our moderators, for gross incompetence. We think very highly of Teresa as a person, an author, an editor, and for her professional reputation. But moderators are by very definition suppose to moderate, "to lessen the intensity or extremeness of." Both our moderators did precisely the reverse course of action, in that the discussions became even more intense and extreme thanks to much of their commentary. It was obvious from same that neither evidently has the temperment to keep an even keel to our community in times of sturm und drang. We wish them both well in their personal and professional lives.
Fourth, we are not going to discuss why we deleted Violet Blue's posts from our weblog. We will neither confirm nor deny what others have speculated in blog entries. However, we acknowledge now that we are not a personal weblog. We are, and have behaved as, a for-profit producer of online media and commentary for years now. As such, it was not ethical for us to silently remove posts from our weblog under the circumstances, neither under the concept of journalistic ethics or under the commonly agreed-upon community understanding about blog archives. While still refusing to discuss the causative factors, we nonetheless apologize for this. We have restored all posts and comments that were initially deleted.
Fifth, along the same train of thought, we hereby pledge that we will not retroactively remove entries from our archives without notifying our reading public of the general removal. We reserve the right to do so only in such circumstances that we are required to by law.
Sixth, we plan to abstain from posts criticizing corporations and governments for a lack of transparency for a period of time, concentrating instead on other parts of our usual subject matter. We do this in recognition of the fact that our reputation has been tarnished in this area and that it would be a healing gesture to allow time to pass before resuming coverage of such subjects.
Frankly, this has caused so much mishegas that we all need a break. As such, Matthew Haughey will be guest-blogging for us for the next week while we all take a little bit of a mental vacation.
posted by ardgedee at 10:02 AM on June 30, 2008