As you may remember, I have sort of a love/hate relationship with BoingBoing, that’s currently more on the “hate” end of the spectrum since they booted me off for saying negative things about the Muslim treatment of women in regards to the “beautiful cultural ritual” of forcing them to cover up. Anyway, there’s a funny conversation going on about Rob Cockerham’s Costco prank to see who’s got a bigger stick up their butt, the staff of BoingBoing or the forum commentors thereof. You may be surprised to hear that today it’s the commentors that seem to be winning.
Anyway, it’s been my observation that BoingBoing is far more guilty of disturbing Big Brother-esque editing and deleting comments in order to push their agenda, abusing their power (and the trust that the public still has for them, even if it declines daily) to manipulate perceived reality (which is ironic given their claimed plotics) — and that ignores the whole issue of “publicly shaming” those they disagree with by “disemvowelling” their posts — than the various organizations that they accuse of committing similar Internet Age sins. Holy glass houses! Anyway, as I pressed reload on this page to look at new comments, I was also watching comments appear and disappear as the moderators abused their power. This has happened too many times to mention, which is not just a sad comment on my Internet addiction, but also on Catholic-clergy-style falls from grace. Some day I really need to get around to writing a bot that monitors BoingBoing for this sort of thing and put together an animation of said abuse… it really would be quite a hilarious way of showing their betrayal of their readers.
Update: The entry ended up having its comment form removed, blocking further free conversation from happening, so in this case they decided to quash conversation completely.
8 Comments
Wow.. Kinda sounds Like an online modification zine That myself and about a dozen other close real life friends deleted our accounts on..
Hrrrmm.. is there no shame
Agreed. I’ve never been much of a commenter on BB, but have found myself checking the site less and less over the last months, if not years. I really hope that you do get around to writing that bot – it would be great to see the results (and I suspect quite useful on other sites as well).
Whoa, Dan you finally got out? Sweet. BoingBoing can be pretty cool, but mostly I find it to be super fucking pretentious. I also think the internet would be a better place if most sites took away the ability to comment.
Hmmmm makes me wonder, did Rachel ever work for them? She seems to have adopted their many practices as her own.
Just a thought ;)
It would be good if there was a “way back” machine for snapshots of the webpage before and during the moderator’s alterations. Maybe something better than the google’s “cached” page thing.
p.s. — that animated Shannon on the side– isn’t it sprouting some Floyd’s music? ;)
humans are such garbage so much of the time.
more often then not whatever comes out of them is lies, manipulation and double-speak to achieve thier agendas.
makes me so sick, i ALMOST want to stop trying to help.
Thought you might like this interesting TED vid which mentions the covering up of women:
https://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/sam_harris_science_can_show_what_s_right.html
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