Entry tags:

authorwank, baleeted, censorship, metafilter, mods (not ours), publishing

Violet Blue: Not so wonderful anymore, apparently
It's already on clairvoyantwank, but with 1000+ BoingBoing comments and half the blogosphere a-titter, this wank has matured.

San Francisco sex blogger Violet Blue used to be chummy with the folks at Boing Boing, and naturally, they linked her a lot. However, she recently discovered that they "unpublished" all posts that mentioned her, effectively excising her from the internet's most popular purveyor of wonderful things. Last week, VB wondered what happened (and note that all links to her blog are NSFW). Valleywag, "Silicon Valley's tech gossip rag" (must be thrilling) picked up the story, and promptly started sensationalizing the shit out of it: Did the Internet's free speech guardian try to hush up a girl-on-girl love affair?, they wondered, and speculated on How [Boing Boing editor] Xeni and Violet's Boing Boing affair went sour." It gets Dugg, of course, and pretty soon we're hearing about censorship, Trotsky and "strangely unethical" goings on. Violet posts a tiny-violin follow-up and people start pestering the Boing Boing editors in comments to unrelated posts.

So finally, Boing Boing responds. They say they did the "unpublishing" a year ago. They say they notified Blue. And then, in (*checks bottom of page*) 1100 comments and counting, the shit hits the fan. People accuse Boing Boing of hypocrisy, 1984 allusions fly all over the place, and the Boing Boing comment moderater completely fails to hold the moral high ground as she dances around explaining what Blue did that was so "evil." It's a huge game of they-said, she-said at this point, and figuring out what the hell is going on is frankly less interesting than tracking the endless comparisons to Stalinism. Nothing is like the gulags, people. Nothing.

Now with highlights!

Metafilter commenter sends BB a note from Winston Smith
Scalzi gets his teal deer on, defending Cory Doctorow from the mean metafilterians
Boing Boing's haters are worse than Donald Rumsfeld!
Whether it is redaction, bowdlerization, expurgation, or censorship I see no place for it here."
Boing Boing hates your freedom, just like the Republicans. :(
The OED doesn't deserve this kind of abuse.
BB Moderator Teresa COULD say something mean about that evil, lying attention-whore ... but she won't.

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photosinensis
2008-07-03 06:12 pm UTC (link)

From what I can discern, this is what happened: two friends and occasional fuck buddies have a falling out as people do. However, as these two are Internet celebrities, the catfight involves their websites. Unfortunately, at least one party seems to have forgotten how the Internet works in the fit of irrational butthurt.

<speculation>Given VB's stalker comments, it could be possible that Xeni may have expressed a desire for more than just "occasional fuck buddy" status and been rebuffed. At least, that's what "stalker" usually means where I'm from. I still don't know how Cory Doctorow fits in to all of this, though.</speculation>

So, this is basically defriending wank on a "serious" blog, I take it. At least, that's what it sounds like. Perfect reading for my LJ flist. "OMG U HORBITCH HOW CUD U DO THIS 2 MEEEEE?" and all that stuff, it's just funny.

(Reply to this)(Thread)

	lottelita 2008-07-03 06:15 pm UTC (link)
	The next time I defriend someone, I am going to tell them that their behavior no longer allows me to lend them credibility. (Reply to this)(Parent)

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