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 However, she recently discovered that they "unpublished" all posts that mentioned her, effectively excising her from the internet's most popular purveyor of wonderful things.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.

Via notsohip on LJ: The co-founder of GiveWell, a new charity-evaluating organization, tries to astroturf MetaFilter. I haven't gotten through all the comments, but my favorite so far is where he tries to buy them off:

holden00: I don't have a lot of money. I am not from the Cristal set. I spent 3 years at a hedge fund and gave enough to charity that I wanted to know more about what I was doing. So I can't offer a lot of money, but I can offer a donation to Metafilter from my pocket. I'm not offering this in return for your ceasing your criticism, I'm offering it to make up for abusing the rules. Would that be appropriate? Would anything else?

By the Grace of God: What would be appropriate is a public admission of what you did and a link to this thread on your blog. That would be better (for YOUR business, which is an analyst and trades on accountability) than if the NYT reporter [who wrote a puff piece on GiveWell] gets to it first.

And then the MeFi commenters start emailing the NYT reporter. Brought to his knees, Holden apologizes on the GiveWell blog, where the dogpile continues.


ETA from nam_jai: Effective January 3, 2008, Holden Karnofsky has been removed from his position as Executive Director of GiveWell and from his position as Board Secretary (entry date: January 6).