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Boing Boing Finds 21st Century Trotsky?
June 30, 2008 9:58 AM Subscribe

Without explanation, all of Violet Blue's posts have been removed from Boing Boing, raising serious questions about ethics and revisionism that run contra to the thoughtful declarations of blogging pioneers. Is this hypocritical in light of BB's own public bouts with censorship? Or does this reflect an altogether different loss of control?
posted by ed (2556 comments total) 81 users marked this as a favorite

"Violet Blue loses control" is a two year old post. Not sure how relevant it is to what's going on now.
posted by ardgedee at 10:02 AM on June 30

What about sensationalism regarding trivial blogoswamp issues?
posted by cellphone at 10:07 AM on June 30 [6 favorites]

Well if only she had written a few 'steampunk dildo' articles she wouldn't have been made an unperson.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 10:09 AM on June 30 [44 favorites]

Without explanation, all of Violet Blue's posts have been removed from Boing Boing

Uh, no. All of the posts referencing her have been removed.

Anyway, they hired comment fascist Teresa Nielsen Hayden to run their comment site so we know they're wankers.
posted by delmoi at 10:10 AM on June 30 [6 favorites]

I hate to be one of those Metafilter commenters who poo-poos everything, but who are these people and why should I care about them?

Boing Boing can do whatever they want to their site. It's a private entity. Would you want someone telling you how to run your own site?
posted by MegoSteve at 10:11 AM on June 30 [10 favorites]

Well if only she had written a few 'steampunk dildo' articles she wouldn't have been made an unperson.

Yeah, that's no way to talk about a nice guy like Cory Doctorow.
posted by spiderwire at 10:11 AM on June 30 [18 favorites]

BlogIDon'tReadAndPeopleIDon'tCareAboutFilter.
posted by jeffamaphone at 10:11 AM on June 30 [2 favorites]

Since I'm a child of the post-Alanis era, I no longer quite know what is and is not irony. Is the guy who wrote Little Brother unpersoning someone from his archives ironic or merely hypocritical?
posted by adipocere at 10:11 AM on June 30 [10 favorites]

Maybe Xeni and Violet had a falling out over whose Flick feed had the most self portraits.
posted by bondcliff at 10:12 AM on June 30 [41 favorites]

See also, e.g.
posted by boo_radley at 10:12 AM on June 30

Punching Deck

Remember when Violet Blue was "disappeared" from Boing Boing? The same thing recently happened to William Gibson.

FTFY.
posted by Smart Dalek at 10:13 AM on June 30 [1 favorite]

Maybe Xeni and Violet had a falling out over whose Flick feed had the most self portraits.
posted by bondcliff at 1:12 PM on June 30

They're different people?
posted by Pastabagel at 10:13 AM on June 30 [3 favorites]

I wonder if her opinion about Xenisucks has changed?
posted by drezdn at 10:15 AM on June 30

2nd link declares it uncategorically as sexism while simultaneously stating that no one will ever know what happened. Hm.

Curious to see if this post stays or goes; I can never predict it, and in fact I'm usually dead wrong.

"blogoswamp"... heh

has anyone asked Violet Blue what's up?
posted by sidereal at 10:15 AM on June 30

There are few things on earth that enrage me more than boingboing. I almost just punched a co-worker when I saw the site mentioned here.

....OMG! an opensource steampunk twitter stream of papercraft!!!1111
posted by lattiboy at 10:15 AM on June 30 [7 favorites]

nywy, thy hrd cmmnt fscst Trs Nilsn Hydn t run thr cmmnt st s w knw thy'r wnkrs.
FTFY
posted by bonaldi at 10:16 AM on June 30 [12 favorites]

OMG CRISIS IN BLOGLAND!
posted by Artw at 10:16 AM on June 30 [1 favorite]

....OMG! an opensource steampunk twitter stream of papercraft!!!1111

Runs under creative commons as a second life mashup!
posted by Artw at 10:18 AM on June 30 [10 favorites]

Oh noes, no Violent Blew on BB! It's not as if you can't read her columns on sfgate.com.
posted by porn in the woods at 10:19 AM on June 30

This just in: Boing Boing takes itself really, seriously, way too fucking seriously.

In real news: For some reason, other people take it way too fucking seriously, too.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 10:20 AM on June 30

Boing Boing can do whatever they want to their site. It's a private entity. Would you want someone telling you how to run your own site?

I don't think anyone's saying BB has an obligation to do anything other than walk the walk. Their posts decrying censorship, user-unfriendliness, and just about anything that deviates from their own rather utopian vision for the Web would seem to indicate that they wouldn't let someone else get away with what they're allegedly doing here, so there's no reason we shouldn't hold them to their own standard.
posted by hifiparasol at 10:20 AM on June 30 [22 favorites]

...Violet Blue is merely taken frequently
posted by kittens for breakfast at 10:21 AM on June 30 [1 favorite]

Thankfully, former Major League pitcher Vida Blue is still allowed to post there.
posted by MegoSteve at 10:21 AM on June 30 [10 favorites]

....OMG! an opensource steampunk twitter stream of papercraft!!!1111

Runs under creative commons as a second life mashup!

Too bad it can only be used on an OLPC while sitting on somy shitty bool (translated under a CC license no less!) covered with a "remixed" subway map of duesseldorf......2.0!
posted by lattiboy at 10:22 AM on June 30

Is the internet really big enough to contain the egos involved in this dispute???

Boing Boing has become an incestuous pit of repetitive masturbatory circle jerks.... I say meh

Now, can we delete this from the blue, please, please....
posted by HuronBob at 10:22 AM on June 30 [3 favorites]

book
posted by lattiboy at 10:22 AM on June 30

This just in: Boing Boing takes itself really, seriously, way too fucking seriously.

Giving up on reading it in the vein hope that they’d start being interesting again has been one of my few victories against my internet OCD tendencies.
posted by Artw at 10:22 AM on June 30 [5 favorites]

HAI PLZD TO B MAKED SUBWAY MAPZ.

(suck a muffler, bb)
posted by basicchannel at 10:23 AM on June 30 [1 favorite]

Thankfully, former Major League pitcher Vida Blue is still allowed to post there.

As are my dog and any and all Hooloovoos.
posted by wemayfreeze at 10:23 AM on June 30

(full disclosure: I still read bb)
posted by basicchannel at 10:23 AM on June 30

I already didn't read about this on Boing Boing.
posted by yhbc at 10:24 AM on June 30 [17 favorites]

That this topic comes off as inside baseball for the blogosphere is interesting because seven or eight years ago this would have been a gimme of a front page post on mefi. But six years ago, Cory was active on the site, too. The world has moved on, etc.

It's not clear to me here whether anybody has any idea what happened. This just went down? BoingBoing hasn't commented? It could be anything from epic technical fail to outright vengence deletions, but I'm curious to hear what actually went down and I'm wondering if I missed something in my skim of the links.

It's also kind of interesting to see what feels like a shift toward more negative public opinion toward Teresa's moderation position from what I was seeing when she first came onboard. I don't follow BB carefully, so that could just be chance + a small sample size in what I've read, and I would expect to see a ramp up of negative commentary over time anyway—the longer you're on the job, the more people you're going to piss off—but I have to admit that the disemvoweling thing in particular has come to strike me as just utterly obnoxious and passive-aggressive. Cute idea, miserable in practice.
posted by cortex at 10:25 AM on June 30 [9 favorites]

MetaFiltre: somy shitty bool
posted by Skot at 10:26 AM on June 30 [3 favorites]

I don't care about BoingBoing or Violet Blue either, but: Boing Boing can do whatever they want to their site. It's a private entity. Would you want someone telling you how to run your own site?

This is a complete fallacy. Privacy does not exempt one from ethics.
posted by DU at 10:27 AM on June 30 [19 favorites]

The people crying "Tempest in a teapot" are being a little disingenuous. No, this is not critically important in any big scheme of things, but if you spend a lot of time on the internet, it does qualify as "of passing interest". BB is an extremely prominent blog, and its prime movers are famously vocal about just this kind of bullshit.
posted by everichon at 10:29 AM on June 30 [2 favorites]

(full disclosure: I still read bb)

Burn the heretic!
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 10:29 AM on June 30 [1 favorite]

(I'll admit a certain professional fascination with the topic.)
posted by cortex at 10:30 AM on June 30

If this were boing-boing, we'd now be protesting their action with *MASHUPS*.
posted by seanyboy at 10:30 AM on June 30 [1 favorite]

Are people making up these names?

Cory Doctorow? (Doctor "Ow")
posted by Zambrano at 10:30 AM on June 30 [2 favorites]

the longer you're on the job, the more people you're going to piss off

That reminds me, I've been meaning to send you a "package" for your anniversary.
posted by tkolar at 10:31 AM on June 30

(my fascination with this topic is completely amateurish.)
posted by basicchannel at 10:31 AM on June 30 [1 favorite]

....OMG! an opensource steampunk twitter stream of papercraft!!!1111

Runs under creative commons as a second life mashup!

Here are some DIY instructions to make it disney themed!

HALP I AM LOST
SUBWAY MAP NOT GEOGRAPHICALLY ACCURATE
SEND RESCUE TEAM TO "VADER & MINNIE'S FURRY GNU HAREM" PLZ
posted by spiderwire at 10:32 AM on June 30 [2 favorites]

They've gotten rid of two of my favorite colors of the rainbow - the b and the v from the roygbiv. I'm now boycotting their site. It's colorist.

(I never read boingboing anyway but if I did I would boycott it because now there are only 5 colors left)
posted by iconomy at 10:32 AM on June 30

I have to admit that the disemvoweling thing in particular has come to strike me as just utterly obnoxious and passive-aggressive.

I don't follow Boing Boing - what is the vowel-removal?
posted by serazin at 10:34 AM on June 30 [1 favorite]

For god knows what reason I decided to subscribe to Boing Boing's RSS feed a while back and whenever one of Cory Doctorow masturbatory posts comes up on Google Reader I just groan. So yesterday I went to Yahoo Pipes to try to create my own Boing Boing feed without Doctorow posts, and someone else had already done it.
posted by bertrandom at 10:35 AM on June 30 [8 favorites]

For those who follow this sort of thing more closely than I: has Boing Boing addressed this at all? Provided a rationale? Anything?
posted by Justinian at 10:35 AM on June 30

I’m guessing it’s a way of making comments they don’t approve of look silly without deleting them.

STMPNK SCKS!
posted by Artw at 10:36 AM on June 30 [1 favorite]

From the "ethics and revisionism" link: There’s going to be a website that will do what Boing Boing does now, but better. Whomever develops it, is likely watching this event closely and vowing never to make this kind of mistake.

That whole paragraph made no sense, but these two sentences seem clear...and clearly wrong. By this logic, BoingBoing should have been watching Slashdot make this same mistake and vowed never to do the same. (Or maybe they vowed but then unvowed, which I guess is the charge here.)
posted by DU at 10:37 AM on June 30 [1 favorite]

Guys, guys, calm down. If I know Boing Boing, they'll make a post about this in two weeks or so, and give full credit to whoever sent the story to them.
posted by interrobang at 10:37 AM on June 30 [12 favorites]

It's also kind of interesting to see what feels like a shift toward more negative public opinion toward Teresa's moderation position from what I was seeing when she first came onboard.

I've never posted on BB, and I've probably only read a handful of posts on the site, but I've had a pretty negative opinion of her moderation style for a long time.

A while ago in some Metafilter thread, a user told a story about a 'fantastic' thread where lots of authors had posted about their experience getting published, or getting started, something like that. Apparently there were lots of great anecdotes, but when the user came back to the thread month later, she said that almost every post that disagreed with Nielsen Hayden had been 'disemvowled'. Plus, any time you read her comments about her 'theory' of moderation it comes across as extremely arrogant.
posted by delmoi at 10:37 AM on June 30 [6 favorites]

I don't follow Boing Boing - what is the vowel-removal?

TNH removes the vowels from any post she doesn't like... oops, sorry, I meant "breaks the guidelines".

Th psts r stll srprsngl rdbl thgh. Th rdndnc f th nglsh lngg s fscntng.
posted by Justinian at 10:37 AM on June 30 [5 favorites]

Boinboing has been languishing in my RSS reader for a long long time. I went back recently to see if anything interesting had popped up and noticed that in addition to the usual crap half the posts were now posts to "boingboing gadgets", which were just links to boingboing a second time. What a load of crap.
posted by furtive at 10:38 AM on June 30

Anyway - I'm waiting to hear from Boing Boing. I've a feeling this is explainable.
posted by seanyboy at 10:38 AM on June 30

I don't follow Boing Boing - what is the vowel-removal?

Their comment moderator uses a cute script that "disemvowels" any comment she doesn't like.

So, for example, if I wrote:

'You hoopy froods! This post sucks and I think you all suck!"

My comment wouldn't get deleted, you'd still see it, except it would say:

"Y hpy frds! Ths pst scks nd thnk y ll sck!"
posted by cavalier at 10:41 AM on June 30

Why has Metafilter removed all references to XtremeSEO.biz???? U R like hitler!!!!
posted by mattbucher at 10:41 AM on June 30 [8 favorites]

Plus, any time you read her comments about her 'theory' of moderation it comes across as extremely arrogant.

Yeah. Metafilter is a shining beacon on a hill in terms of moderation policy on the web. I hope it never changes because I'll lose all hope for web-based forums if it does.

Eternal September has a lot to answer for.
posted by Justinian at 10:42 AM on June 30 [3 favorites]

A touch of backstory on Hayden, moderation, and vowelguttery, from 2005.
posted by cortex at 10:43 AM on June 30

I haven't read bb in four years, as Cory's shrill and entitled opensourceDMCAomgdisney douchenozzlery became too much to take. Now that I think about it, was bb ever actually as great as its hype? Even in the early days of the blog it was just a linksite with nice design and thrice-daily fashion shoots of Xeni demonstrating how to burn your roots so badly you look like Londo Mollari.
posted by bunnytricks at 10:45 AM on June 30 [6 favorites]

Since I never read their comments, and I usually just go over there to see links that folks haven't yet posted here, do I need to care?
posted by konolia at 10:47 AM on June 30

I wish they'd deleted every post mentioning Little Brother. What a waste of my attention.
posted by yeti at 10:49 AM on June 30 [4 favorites]

Website based on multiple personality cults loses personality. Film at your mom's house.
posted by sciurus at 10:50 AM on June 30 [2 favorites]

now posts to "boingboing gadgets", which were just links to boingboing a second time. What a load of crap.

Which is as far as I can tell, just a way to cash in on the success of sites like engadget and gizmodo.
posted by delmoi at 10:50 AM on June 30

Why is everyone ragging on Cory and Xeni? Have we forgotten that Mark Frauenfelder is a knee-jerk libertarian? Come on, people. Fairness.
posted by hifiparasol at 10:52 AM on June 30

DAMN YOU DAVID PESCOVIIIIITZ!!!!
posted by basicchannel at 10:52 AM on June 30

I wish they'd deleted every post mentioning Little Brother. What a waste of my attention.

I got the audiobook version of that. I'm going to claim I was and am completely free of bias, since I'd never read anything by Doctorow before and never subscribed to Boing Boing.

It. Was. Crap.

I actually stopped listening after a chapter or so. The lead character was insufferable and all the references were technologically trendy rather than futuristic or interesting. It was like one of those "science fiction" books you can buy at the supermarket, full of glib references but utterly vacuous.

(Subsequently I listened to his short Craphound because he apparently liked it so much he made it a domain name. It was OK, but nothing to create a DNS record for.)
posted by DU at 10:54 AM on June 30 [2 favorites]

Heh.
posted by interrobang at 10:55 AM on June 30

TNH's blog, Making Light, consistently has more funny, wise, kind, and educational comments than any other blog I read. But what works on a blog like ML isn't necessarily going to work on a blog like BoingBoing; it's just a completely different community environment.
posted by Jeanne at 10:56 AM on June 30

TNH was one of the most interesting posters in the RASF hierarchy back when she was active on usenet. As was PNH, actually. But power corrupts, and they are example primus for the superiority of a many-to-many "group of peers" communications forum where nobody has the power to delete or censor anyone else's posts over a one-to-many forum like a blog where all the power rests in one person's hand and they generally run it like a little tinpot dictator.

What's weird is that TNH 's style works perfectly well on Making Light, and the class of commentators on the blog or awesome and well written, and she doesn't really come across (tom me) as overreaching or arrogant on her site, and usually those who get disemvowelled pretty much have it coming.

But looking at how she sometimes comments or acts on Boing Boing, it's a total clash of styles.
posted by ShawnStruck at 10:58 AM on June 30

> was bb ever actually as great as its hype?

I wouldn't touch a question like that with a ten foot steampool punkcue. But I do occasionally see interesting things there. And since it's one of the most popular blogs in the English-speaking world, and gets more traffic than many A-list corporate websites, things I don't see there will eventually appear on some blog I do read, or in the mysteriously-never-attributed-cool-stuff emails coworkers and friends are fond of.

Unlike most news portals and suchlike, the BB crew are fighting what I consider the good fight, whether or not the details of their positions or the actions they endorse are things I endorse. Points for that.

It doesn't matter whether you like it or read it. Enough other people like it and use it as a primary information source for geek fashion and politics that a half-dozen editors hold massive sway over online discourse. So for them to perform what looks like raw censorship without a public announcement is a bad faith act, and they should be held to practicing what they preach.
posted by ardgedee at 10:58 AM on June 30 [5 favorites]

You couldn't even listen to it? That's pretty bad.
posted by Mister_A at 11:00 AM on June 30

The people crying "Tempest in a teapot" are being a little disingenuous.

Agreed, it's more of a chipped teacup with a broken handle that folks just can't bring themselves to toss out.

No, this is not critically important in any big scheme of things, but if you spend a lot of time on the internet, it does qualify as "of passing interest".

The internet's gotten a tad bigger since BoingBoing and OG bloggers mattered.
And by mattered I mean "Were the only game in town."
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 11:01 AM on June 30 [2 favorites]

basicchannel: "DAMN YOU DAVID PESCOVIIIIITZ!!!!"

Heh. Every time I see a post on Cryptozoology, I think "Are you just having fun, or are you an idiot?"
posted by Science! at 11:04 AM on June 30 [1 favorite]

Cory Doctorow, that's the guy who "publishes" his "novels" for what they're worth, right?
posted by orthogonality at 11:05 AM on June 30 [6 favorites]

Is the guy who wrote Little Brother unpersoning someone from his archives ironic or merely hypocritical?

Ironicritysterical!
posted by rusty at 11:06 AM on June 30 [3 favorites]

Have we forgotten that Mark Frauenfelder is a knee-jerk libertarian?

He'd be the one that was into sub-Colbert Wiki spoofing.
posted by Artw at 11:07 AM on June 30

Check this out from the "Rebecca's Pocket" link:

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.

I am going to add rebeccablood.net to the long list of blogs I will not read. It seems like almost any numbskull can write a blog these days–have they done away with the licensing exam or something?
posted by Mister_A at 11:08 AM on June 30 [2 favorites]

Has anyone built an un-disemvoweller? That would be a neat greasemonkey script. Sure there are some irreducible ambiguities in the text once it's been disemvowelled (unless you have some very powerful sentence-level logic, like in th hmn brn), but with a dictionary of common words you could probably re-vowel comments to a high level of readability.

That'd be a pretty neat project, actually. I could present a best guess and maybe even annotate particularly troublesome matches.

And it's the sort of thing that could end up getting posted on BoingBoing. Perhaps with a slightly critical writeup, which would then lead to the creator posting a critical counter-response, which would then get disemvoweled in vain. Heh.

Another brainstorm, along those ideas: construct a comment that looks on the face of it like an innocuous (if, for these purposes, necessarily vacuous) statement, but which when disemvoweled looks like something altogether different according to plausible parsings of the remain consonants.
posted by cortex at 11:09 AM on June 30 [15 favorites]

I care so little about this, I won't even post in this thread.

How's that for meta.
posted by Dr-Baa at 11:09 AM on June 30 [1 favorite]

orthogonality: "Cory Doctorow, that's the guy who "publishes" his "novels" for what they're worth, right?"

Yeah. I've tried to read a couple and they are entirely unreadable. Well you could read them, but you'll get angry and scream "why does that school let my kid write such crappy stories!?!!" Then you'll realize that the story was actually written by an educated adult and not your seven year old daughter.

Then you get really angry.
posted by Science! at 11:09 AM on June 30 [9 favorites]

The may not be the only game in town any more, but they still hold some suasion on the way the community behaves, and any wierdness on their part is going to be duly noted by all those non-BB readers who still read BB. Don't we all still have an opinion about Mr. Rogers even though he's long gone?

Personally, I peruse it at the end of the day after MeFi and Deadspin have long since been hitting the bottle. And I truly do find Xeni to be absolutely annoying and unwatchable.
posted by jsavimbi at 11:10 AM on June 30

Cory Doctorow, that's the guy who "publishes" his "novels" for what they're worth, right?

I must be missing the humor here; Doctorow may not be my cup of steampunk but he gets his real, actual novels published by a real, actual major publisher. That being TOR books.
posted by Justinian at 11:10 AM on June 30

(unless you have some very powerful sentence-level logic, like in th hmn brn)

I don't see what the hymen barn has to do with anything.
posted by nanojath at 11:11 AM on June 30 [24 favorites]

I did actually think that After the Siege was good, possibly even excellent, and deserved the award it won. Doctrows short stuff usually contains a few gems, his novels, after Down and Out, haven't really impressed me nearly so much.
posted by Artw at 11:11 AM on June 30

YOU KNOW WHO ELSE HAD A REAL MAJOR ACTUAL PUBLISHER????!!!?!

Shatner.
posted by Mister_A at 11:12 AM on June 30 [16 favorites]

Wow, that's deep.

Unless I'm missing something, she wrote that in or before 2002. I agree that it's not really radical, and I have no idea how much that description was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, but again: six years is a whole lot of time in terms of how blogs are thought about. There's a degree of manifest self-analysis and popular consumption of good blog meta-criticism today that wasn't necessarily extant at the time.
posted by cortex at 11:12 AM on June 30

Mister_A: i know for me, really bad audiobooks are much more annoying than really bad print media. it's much harder to skim thru audiobooks. with print, you can sort of skip ahead till there's an exclamation point and then see what's happened.
posted by rmd1023 at 11:13 AM on June 30 [3 favorites]

construct a comment that looks on the face of it like an innocuous (if, for these purposes, necessarily vacuous) statement, but which when disemvoweled looks like something altogether different according to plausible parsings of the remain consonants.

Or write comments that when disemvoweled stand alone as a scathing comment, though it would have to be in a language other than English.
posted by drezdn at 11:13 AM on June 30

Sometimes you just gotta quote "The Music Man":

You can talk, you can talk
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

posted by wendell at 11:15 AM on June 30 [3 favorites]

Another brainstorm, along those ideas: construct a comment that looks on the face of it like an innocuous (if, for these purposes, necessarily vacuous) statement, but which when disemvoweled looks like something altogether different according to plausible parsings of the remain consonants.

This is a hilarious idea, but in the BB context the work would go unnoticed: when (if) the comment was disemvoweled, it would look genuinely offensive, and readers would assume it was disemvoweled for that reason.

BUT flip it around: an offensive (if incoherent) comment that, when disemvoweled, reads like a perfectly innocuous remark. This would break the disemvowelment tool by making the mods look capricious and unfair.
posted by grobstein at 11:16 AM on June 30 [8 favorites]

*Hulk-smashes cortex*
posted by Mister_A at 11:16 AM on June 30

...really bad audiobooks are much more annoying than really bad print media...

Agreed and in this case the reader really threw himself behind the inherent insufferability of the character. Every line was spoken in this lazy disdain for other people.

Or maybe that was the villain? I didn't get far enough into it that I could have hit this great plot twist.
posted by DU at 11:17 AM on June 30

The may not be the only game in town any more, but they still hold some suasion on the way the community behaves

I've never heard of the word "suasion" before! In a thread about Boingboing, I was expecting to not see anything new, but I was mistaken! This is great!
posted by Greg Nog at 11:18 AM on June 30 [1 favorite]

Man, I miss the zine.
posted by Astro Zombie at 11:20 AM on June 30 [1 favorite]

FIRST!
posted by Debaser626 at 11:24 AM on June 30 [1 favorite]

The zine was good.
posted by Mister_A at 11:24 AM on June 30

ohnevermind
posted by Debaser626 at 11:24 AM on June 30

Apparently Warren Ellis hasn’t mentioned Second Life for months, so I *might* be able to start reading his blog again.
posted by Artw at 11:28 AM on June 30 [1 favorite]

The comment about violet and blue lighthouses wasn't even disemvowel quality, as it's been removed.
posted by avocet at 11:30 AM on June 30

I care so little about this, I won't even post in this thread.

Doing it wrong.
posted by waraw at 11:31 AM on June 30

The comment about violet and blue lighthouses wasn't even disemvowel quality, as it's been removed.

Holy crap, it has. I'm almost sorry I never read BB because now I can't cancel my subscription.
posted by DU at 11:36 AM on June 30

Anyone else feel like partially disemvoweling a comment (leaving only the praising parts) crosses a line?
posted by grobstein at 11:37 AM on June 30 [11 favorites]

Re grobstein: Man, BoingBoing sucks more than I thought. That isn't troll-squashing; it's marginalizing legitimate comments. What a bunch of crap.
posted by hifiparasol at 11:40 AM on June 30 [3 favorites]

At least nothing like this ever happens on MetaFilter, thanks to fair and well-considered moderation. Of course, that doesn't change that fact that Mtt's psts lwys sck ss, but what can you do?

Holly crap! what the fuck? I watched the vowels disappear even as I typed that!
posted by Astro Zombie at 11:42 AM on June 30 [3 favorites]

The comment about violet and blue lighthouses wasn't even disemvowel quality, as it's been removed.

Double-plus good!
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 11:47 AM on June 30

From one of the linked threads:

When they deleted every post mentioning Ursula Le G[u]in, they told everyone.

Anybody know what the hell that was about?

/hasn't read bb in years
posted by languagehat at 11:49 AM on June 30

That isn't troll-squashing; it's marginalizing legitimate comments. What a bunch of crap.

If you look at it from the business side, BB being an ongoing business concern, any respectable self-promoter isn't about to let a bunch of trolls ruin his good time as he oversells those books. It's just not the way things are done and there's only so much a person can take before they feel the need to stamp out dissent.

I've never heard of the word "suasion" before!

Yeah, I'm still working on a way to monetize my smartnesses. Stay tuned.
posted by jsavimbi at 11:49 AM on June 30 [1 favorite]

Apparently Warren Ellis hasn’t mentioned Second Life for months, so I *might* be able to start reading his blog again.

Amen. That made my heart break a little too. Next he'll be discovering LOLcats.
posted by rokusan at 11:50 AM on June 30

Anyone else feel like partially disemvoweling a comment (leaving only the praising parts) crosses a line?

Oof. Yuck.
posted by cortex at 11:53 AM on June 30

I worked on something like a blog many many years ago, where a corpus grew online and became a tentacled mess. When we had to fix a tiny error (a typo) in one two year old piece... all hell broke loose because until then everyone assumed it was a fixed and permanent record type thing... it was a very minor correction, but the fact of change was jarring to folks, and not unreasonably so. This "delete all posts containing ________" is about 3 orders of magnitude more drastic.

Ethics aside, I don't envy the confusion this must cause. What about all the Google and other caches?
posted by rokusan at 11:53 AM on June 30

Ms. Le Guin felt Boing Boing had crossed a line in posting her words without proper consideration of accreditation.
posted by batmonkey at 11:56 AM on June 30

If there be a means to RSS-feed BB while excluding all the
self-congratulatory crap/steampunk'ry/bad art on the theme of dewy-eyed girls/bugs/animals/unicorns... I'd like to find it. That would be like the Jefferson Bible of teh interwebs. Then again, everything I've ever found interesting on BB also made it's way here, so... The Blue is a mighty grand thresher. At times.
posted by wowbobwow at 11:57 AM on June 30

I never heard the word disemvoweled OR suasion before. TWO new words- score!

As "piglet21" on sfgate.com said in one of the comments sections:

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

rokusan, we've seen that sort of thing here on metafilter, of course--someone makes a comment, someone else responds to that comment, comment #1 is deleted, comment #2 is now context-less.
posted by MrMoonPie at 11:59 AM on June 30 [2 favorites]

jsavimbi is old-school:

1. The act or fact of exhorting or urging; persuasion.

c1374 CHAUCER Boeth. II. pr. i. (1868) 30 Com nowe fure erfore e suasioun of swetnesse Rethoryen. 1432-50 tr. Higden (Rolls) VII. 93 Seynte Elphegus was made bischop of Wynchestre, thro the suasion off blissede Andrewe, apperynge to seynte Dunstan. 1528 MORE Dyaloge I. Wks. 157/1 Thei had ones at the subtill suasion of the deuill, broken the thirde comaundement. 1641 PRYNNE Antipathie 9 O perfidious, ungratefull counsell and swasion of this prelate. 1660 SOUTH Serm. (1727) IV. 34 It cannot be subdued by meer Suasion. 1720 WATTS in Reliq. Juv. (1789) 169 To address the ear With conquering suasion, or reproof severe. 1844 KINGLAKE Eothen xxviii, Men governed by reasons and suasion of speech. 1867 SMILES Huguenots Eng. v. (1880) 74 Conformity by force, if not by suasion.
posted by cortex at 11:59 AM on June 30

If there be a means to RSS-feed BB while excluding all the
self-congratulatory crap/steampunk'ry/bad art on the theme of dewy-eyed girls/bugs/animals/unicorns...

/dev/null
posted by spiderwire at 11:59 AM on June 30 [2 favorites]

Has anybody thought to ask what's up over at Making Light? They have open threads regularly, I believe.
posted by Justinian at 11:59 AM on June 30

I was linked on boingboing a couple years back, and I recall Xeni Jardin adding a couple of comments from Violet Blue to the post. I just checked the archives, and the post is gone entirely. So it seems they just excised anything with her name attached. THIS PASSIVE-AGGRESSION WILL NOT STAND, BLOGGERS
posted by Greg Nog at 12:00 PM on June 30 [1 favorite]

That isn't troll-squashing; it's marginalizing legitimate comments.

BB actually could mount a defense here. In the olden days, when Slashdot was the "blog" to troll, here's what people did: You start off being +1, Insightful or whatever and then quickly veer into whatever nonsense you had planned.

First of all, people click the rating before reading the whole thing anyway. But also, it's like the trick telemarketers pull. They want to get you in an agreeing frame of mind, so they ask you a question you can't disagree with. "Crazy weather lately, right?" "I bet you are a discerning customer, huh?" Etc. Then the next question is more likely to receive a positive response too.

(As an historical aside, depending on how convincing your opening was, what usually happened was that you'd get to +5 within a few minutes and then the less trigger-happy readers would come in and over the next 30-45 minutes it would be down to -5.)

That said, BB's action is still evil. However trollish a comment, you can't just extract some out-of-context part of it and claim it as praise.
posted by DU at 12:00 PM on June 30

vn ths pst's lnk t Vlt Bl sms t hv bn rmvd. Shnngns!!!
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 12:00 PM on June 30 [1 favorite]

Whoa -- what? Since when has BoingBoing allowed comments at all?
posted by Sys Rq at 12:03 PM on June 30 [1 favorite]

At the bottom of that thread the moderator talks about the disemvoweling.

Apparently criticism is now referred to as "egoboo". Despite that being a seriously dumb word, it seems to point out that the things linked to aren't necessarily linked to for their merit, but on how it will stoke someone's ego. And also that protecting someone's ego is so important that any criticism [even criticism that might result in improvement] must be eradicated.

They've become Big Brother in a way.
posted by sciurus at 12:03 PM on June 30 [4 favorites]

cortex: That this topic comes off as inside baseball for the blogosphere is interesting because seven or eight years ago this would have been a gimme of a front page post on mefi.

Well, if I remember my MetaFilter history correctly MeFi was originally conceived of as a links backchannel for blogs, which, while it still happens, is no longer its raison d'être.
posted by Kattullus at 12:03 PM on June 30

Google maps 37Signals with Flickr iPod

Uh, no, I didn't say anything ...
posted by outlier at 12:04 PM on June 30

ooa eoa i a oe eeie.
posted by The Bellman at 12:04 PM on June 30 [4 favorites]

MeFi was originally conceived of as a links backchannel for blogs

Ooooooh! That explains the completely non-functional comment system.
posted by DU at 12:05 PM on June 30

*sighs* BB used to be one of my favorite blogs...then the news about at&treason's warrantless wiretapping hit, and they started posting about it several times a day. privacy and civil rights issues are near and dear to me, so i followed it closely, changed my provider, called the congressmen, etc, etc (and by 'etc etc', i mean, "Dfcd bnch f t&t prprty, spry-pntd bnch f thr bllbrds, tr dwn s mny pstrs f thrs s cld rch" etc etc (on a side note, it was all undone within 6 HOURS!--these bitches have TOO MUCH MONEY)) Anyway, next day i check BB...AT&T banner ads everywhere! and on BB Gadgets a post about AT&T's COOL NEW AD! Am. Not. Kidding. (the ad did not even feature a single recognizable gadget)...so i got into a huge flame war with joel (and by 'flame war' i mean 'freaked out with the caps lock on like a total n00b') ...it ended up with me walking away from a place where all i could do was invoke godwin (i believe he used the 'just doing my job' defense), and i haven't been back to the gadgets page since. i only hit the front page weekly now, but with this fresh pile, i think i'll even give that a miss...goodbye BB!
posted by sexyrobot at 12:09 PM on June 30 [3 favorites]

jsavimbi is old-school ??

Hardly.
posted by jsavimbi at 12:09 PM on June 30

Anyone know any good Violet/Xeni/BB hacks?
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 12:10 PM on June 30 [3 favorites]

Wow. An all-pervasive odor of dirty diapers emanates from the moderation of that site.
posted by jamjam at 12:11 PM on June 30

115 comments in 2 hours, all from people who don't care. Man.
posted by fcummins at 12:15 PM on June 30 [6 favorites]

Ignorance is often mocked, but I have not heard of these people til now and having heard of them I do not care and/or give a hot damn.
posted by dawson at 12:15 PM on June 30 [1 favorite]

I'm loving the snark. Keep up the good work, Metazens.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:16 PM on June 30

"I have to admit that the disemvoweling thing in particular has come to strike me as just utterly obnoxious and passive-aggressive."

Amen! If you're going to have a discussion -- have a discussion. Otherwise, you're just hosting an echo chamber...
posted by LakesideOrion at 12:16 PM on June 30 [1 favorite]

but fcummins, I really don't and I wanted everyone to know, particularly 'these people' when they invariably read this post.
Plus it's fun to be part of a mob.
posted by dawson at 12:18 PM on June 30

man, I HATE boingboing, but even I can't bring myself to immediately assume this is some form of sexist censorship. for god's sake, people, out of all the possible reasons for this you think that random villainous spite is the most likely? I've seen cops with better intuition.
posted by shmegegge at 12:19 PM on June 30

>>"I have to admit that the disemvoweling thing in particular has come to strike me as just utterly obnoxious and passive-aggressive."

>Amen! If you're going to have a discussion -- have a discussion. Otherwise, you're just hosting an echo chamber...

You are so right!
posted by waraw at 12:20 PM on June 30 [6 favorites]

shmegegge, I pronounce your name in my head the same way that Popeye laughs.
posted by sciurus at 12:21 PM on June 30 [13 favorites]

That said, BB's action is still evil.

Hey now.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 12:22 PM on June 30 [5 favorites]

Hey, look guys, BB's tight-fisted editorial control and lack of feedback for counterpoints has been a problem with the website forever. One might assume that having a small number of editors take total control of FPPs would result in better posts over the musings of the masses, but that isn't true. Instead, the posts skew to the particular interests and points of view of the few instead of the varied topics of the many.

When BB reintroduced its comment system, there was a ray of hope that actual intellectual discussion on a given topic might be possible, but that dream died quickly. As I'm sure many of you have experienced, a great many posts (mostly negative about the point of view of the editor on the given subject) never see the light of day. Moreover, editors sometimes engage in flame wars with the posts that do make it onto the comments, and still other comments are flamed without even being posted (in particular, the complaints that Cory uses the blog too much to promote his own materials are rarely posted, but editorial defenses against such complaints are often present).

I, for one, think BB has gone severly down hill and don't pay it much attention. The more the editors narrow their focus of interests and edit out reader responses, the more the website goes from BoingBoing to BoringBoring.
posted by Muddler at 12:23 PM on June 30

Anyone know any good Violet/Xeni/BB hacks?

Click!
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 12:23 PM on June 30

I like BB. It's odd that it should indulge in this kind of behaviour, especially given its laudable/sanctimonious* "visible editing" of errors in posts.

* delete as applicable
posted by WPW at 12:24 PM on June 30

You are so right!

Amen!
posted by cortex at 12:25 PM on June 30 [2 favorites]

Amen!

Preach on, brother!
posted by cortex at 12:25 PM on June 30 [4 favorites]

The comment about violet and blue lighthouses wasn't even disemvowel quality, as it's been removed.

That was me who made the comment. I also commented on the "perils of auto-replace without explanation" post with a comment along the lines of "Auto-deletion without explanation can be perilous as well, especially when Violet Blue references all disappear without warning or a note or explanation" but that wasn't disemvowelled, just disappeared.
posted by ShawnStruck at 12:27 PM on June 30 [4 favorites]

I like how any mention of Cory all brings on the two-minute hate (not that I'm not screaming along with the rest). He's not has bad as people think he is, esp as a writer (though he's not as good as he thinks he is... the lord God almighty is not as good as Cory thinks he is)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:27 PM on June 30 [1 favorite]

Hey now.

don't dream it's over.
posted by dawson at 12:28 PM on June 30 [1 favorite]

Has anyone built an un-disemvoweller? That would be a neat greasemonkey script.

Someone should make a disconsonantizer trojan that installs itself on the browser of anyone who reads BB. Fght cnsrshp wth mr cnsrshp.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:28 PM on June 30

Next time I dislike a Boing Boing post, I'll simply comment, "Zzzzzzzzzzzz." They can go ahead and disemvowel that.
posted by yeti at 12:29 PM on June 30 [11 favorites]

I'm not buying "sexist", but I am buying "petulant and a stupid way to run their particular blog".
posted by everichon at 12:30 PM on June 30

Fght cnsrshp wth mr cnsrshp.

I read that as: Fight censorship with mr censorship

Mr Censorship! The cuddly blue pencil who tells kids what, how and when to think!
posted by WPW at 12:31 PM on June 30 [19 favorites]

The comment about violet and blue lighthouses wasn't even disemvowel quality, as it's been removed.

yeah...tried it myself....nothings getting through...feel free to call them all hypocrites, though...its fun!
posted by sexyrobot at 12:38 PM on June 30

Thanks, batmonkey!
posted by languagehat at 12:38 PM on June 30

I used to read Boing Boing. To be fair, it was partly out of nostalgia for the 'zine. And, for a while, they did a good job of providing cheerful or interesting stuff to click on during breaks.

And I was interested when they began to seem more civic-minded, warning us of encroachments on our rights and such things.

But then the main contributors got fascinated by various things that turned Boing Boing into a macro filter of everything that has ever annoyed me about the internet, and I quit checking it as frequently.

Then the AT&T hypocrisy happened ("don't use them, but we'll advertise them to you & collect their money because profiting off the crap we're complaining about is completely NOT ethically ambiguous!"), and now I don't even have the gadget on my homepage anymore.

There are better places to find the types of things they posted, anyway, without that whole "cult of personality" thing.

That said, I think Mark Frauenfelder's a nice guy and I'm into the whole "Make movement" thing. I'm just not going to be pursuing any of that info on Boing Boing or the various iterations unless it's unavoidable.
posted by batmonkey at 12:39 PM on June 30 [1 favorite]

Why BB stopped having comments. They became a cesspool.

Why they have comments again -- they've got someone cleaning out the dreck. *No* anonymous unmoderated forum lasts. There are too many assholes in the world. Look at the efforts to keep MeFi working.

As to censorship -- they could have easily just deleted the comments. Instead, they leave them up, flagged in such a way as to show you they they (the editors!) think they are inappropriate. They could have simply made them disappear. And, of course, because *any* reason is a reason to flame, they're getting flack for it.

As to the "fascist." Please.

As to free speech? GYOFB. You have no right to comment there -- or for that matter, here. There are *plenty* of deleted comments, and banned users, on MeFi. Why are you reading such a fascist website?

I have no problem with them deleting comments such as "This post sux." If the post sucks, don't comment on it. If all the posts suck, STOP READING THE SITE. But fuck if I'm going to argue against them deleting or disemvowling the sort of swill that BB used to get, and probably still does. Is it that hard? Hate the moderation? Don't comment. Don't like the posts? Don't read the site.

The Boing Boing teams run the blog in the way that they want to. If you don't like that, don't read it. If enough people don't read it, they'll either change it, or they'll shut it down. The real question is can they build a real discussion there. I don't know, but they're trying, and the first step in that is to smack down, hard, the people who aren't interested in discussing anything.

As to the subject? Not enough info. Maybe VB said "Please remove my content." There may be legal issues. Someone may have screwed up. Or, they may have decided, for whatever reason or none, that they no longer wanted any (or in this case, any but one) posts from Violet Blue on the site.

They get to make that call. They own the site.
posted by eriko at 12:39 PM on June 30 [3 favorites]

My new band name is The Disemvowel Movements
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:40 PM on June 30 [2 favorites]

BUT flip it around: an offensive (if incoherent) comment that, when disemvoweled, reads like a perfectly innocuous remark.

aa aa ua ia ia ia aie ai aie oo ooo oo ua AA EEE UUAAAAAAAA

*smokes cigarette*
posted by spiderwire at 12:41 PM on June 30 [1 favorite]

A while ago, they used a photo from a friend without crediting him. He called them on it in the comments, and I did to. My comment was almost immediately removed.

I moderate a forum, and know from firsthand experience that moderating with too heavy a hand can be terribly alienating. I will step in if I think things are getting out of control, and verym very rarely delete a comment if it is intentionally abusive or disruptive. This just seemed to be deleting a comment because they weren't interested in being called on a breach of web etiquette by more than one person. I have never partipated in their comments section again.
posted by Astro Zombie at 12:41 PM on June 30

AS they say over at BoingBoing,

D s sy!
posted by Mister_A at 12:41 PM on June 30 [5 favorites]

I have found it Always much better to scarf/steal, borrow,nod to this site for stuff for my cute little blog than at BB, a site I quickly dismissed of having little of interest for me.
I don't know the lady in question but somehow feel my life manages to go along without her and site. Question: sho uld I call my lawyer and ask for advice?
posted by Postroad at 12:41 PM on June 30

Woah!

Thanks, batmonkey!
posted by languagehat at 3:38 PM

"I used to read Boing Boing...."posted by batmonkey at 3:39 PM
posted by dawson at 12:43 PM on June 30

ooa eoa i a oe eeie.

"consonant-removal is ____ more eerie"?
posted by yz at 12:44 PM on June 30 [1 favorite]

Boing Boing is a great place to visit if you want to see what was popular on the internet a few days ago.
posted by mullingitover at 12:45 PM on June 30 [6 favorites]

WH4T D|S3MV0W3L1NG?
posted by zippy at 12:46 PM on June 30 [2 favorites]

yz: far?
posted by Leon at 12:47 PM on June 30 [1 favorite]

Don't care what any of you say, Little Brother is awesome.

What? Oh.
posted by grabbingsand at 12:47 PM on June 30 [1 favorite]

"consonant-removal is far more eerie"
posted by zippy at 12:48 PM on June 30 [1 favorite]

D s sy!

-- o a i o!
posted by spiderwire at 12:49 PM on June 30 [1 favorite]

ou ae eieed - a eo ai
posted by zippy at 12:49 PM on June 30

It's interesting reading the comments in BB's current top thread. People are trying to slip references to this in sideways. Right now, I'm seeing:

Those sure are some colourful off-colour gummies! Funny, a lot of things on Boing Boing seem to be off-colour today.

and

You know what's funny with this whole gummi phenomenon here, is basically seeing penises (penii?) in colors very differently than the normal human color. There's Red, Yellow, Violet, Blue, Orange, Green ... I mean, you're not going to see those colors in the wild.

It's like the stories you hear about Soviet poets and novelists trying to sneak criticisms of the regime into their work under the censors' noses...
posted by mr_roboto at 12:50 PM on June 30 [13 favorites]

They get to make that call. They own the site.

I refer you to DU's earlier post. Also my own. You seem to think the market alone is enough to shake the bugs out of BoingBoing -- I agree for the most part, but I believe that pointing out shitty ethics and poor overall quality is an important component of consumer interaction. And guess who agrees with me?

The real question is can they build a real discussion there. I don't know, but they're trying, and the first step in that is to smack down, hard, the people who aren't interested in discussing anything.

The problem is that those aren't the only people they're smacking down hard, as grobstein pointed out.

There are too many assholes in the world.

Yes. Yes there are.
posted by hifiparasol at 12:51 PM on June 30 [5 favorites]

As to the subject? Not enough info. Maybe VB said "Please remove my content." There may be legal issues. Someone may have screwed up. Or, they may have decided, for whatever reason or none, that they no longer wanted any (or in this case, any but one) posts from Violet Blue on the site.

They get to make that call. They own the site.

They could at the very least address why they did it.
posted by drezdn at 12:51 PM on June 30 [2 favorites]

It's interesting reading the comments in BB's current top thread. People are trying to slip references to this in sideways.

I'm going to go post some comments without vowels.

Speaking of which, how do y'all know that the partially-disemvoweled comment wasn't that way originally?
posted by spiderwire at 12:53 PM on June 30 [2 favorites]

Are people making up these names? Cory Doctorow? (Doctor "Ow")

Don't forget his distant cousin, the infamous luchador, El Doctor Ow!
posted by turaho at 12:54 PM on June 30 [5 favorites]

Well played, spiderwire.
posted by Mister_A at 12:54 PM on June 30

As to the subject? Not enough info. Maybe VB said "Please remove my content."

You're saying she might be lying when she expresses puzzlement here? Either she's lying or she doesn't know what's up either.

They get to make that call. They own the site.

And we get to call them little tinpot dictator hypocrites who prefer an echo chamber to actual communication. Win win!
posted by Justinian at 12:57 PM on June 30 [1 favorite]

how do y'all know that the partially-disemvoweled comment wasn't that way originally?

Mod says so: "I've just disemvowelled eight comments (actually seven-and-three-quarters)."
posted by grobstein at 12:57 PM on June 30

Just poking my head in to say that not all of Doctorow's stories suck. (A lot of them do, but not *all* of them.) The novella After The Siege is good, and Little Brother is interesting if overly didactic. You do need to give it more than the first chapter though; it turns much darker and more interesting.

Also: Boing Boing is much better if you treat it like YouTube: Ignore the comments and let people refer you to the good posts.
posted by JDHarper at 1:00 PM on June 30

I like how when you try to post "brng bck vlt bl" it says "Comment rejected. The text you entered is wrong."
posted by infinitewindow at 1:01 PM on June 30 [2 favorites]

Who knew that Winston Smith had taken a job at Boing Boing?
posted by caddis at 1:02 PM on June 30 [1 favorite]

How weird. They appear to have deleted every post I ever made as well.
posted by tkolar at 1:03 PM on June 30 [4 favorites]

Eriko: no one's saying they have no right to do this, we're all well aware that it's their own blog and they can turn it into a lghngstck as much as they like. But by the same token, it's within our right to criticize them for their choices, especially since they so eagerly assumed the mantle of internet celebrity, and directly profited from it.

They don't get to build their success and reputations on the goodwill of a supportive community, and then play the "it's OUR SITE to do as we please!" card whenever things don't go their way. Not without blowback and criticism.
posted by Riki tiki at 1:04 PM on June 30

languagehat: de nada!
posted by batmonkey at 1:04 PM on June 30

Patrick is obliquely addressing this at Making Light.

"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."

etc.

Here it is.

I think he's engaging in special pleading. I wonder if the moderation will be so heavy handed in that thread?
posted by Justinian at 1:04 PM on June 30

As Zota points out in the digg coverage:

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 [10 favorites]

Boing Boing Finds 21st Century Trotsky? June 30, 2008 9:58 AM Subscribe

Boing Boing Finds 21st Century Trotsky?
June 30, 2008 9:58 AM Subscribe