This new is so fucking old I want to die.

*news

not old news to me.

"But does anyone even really care about this sort of thing? Is this an old-media concern awkwardly slapped onto a new-media paradigm?"

The article says that Ms. Blue, her readers, and Boing Boing readers are all up in arms about it, so I guess you answered your own question there, didn't ya, Sparky?

I was going to post something short, but after reading the NYT article I realized this is actually a huge and interesting discussion. Well, to me at least. But I won't bore ya'll with the commentary in my head, I'll just say:

@1 & @2 actually I like the phrase "this new is so old" it's funny.

@4 I think Paul was referring to the idea that you can go back and edit a post online and should you be able to do that without noting it as a correction.

To that, I will say it is sometimes strange to come late to a discussion on Slog, read the post, then read the comments where several people have corrected the post or commented in some way about something that is not longer in the post.

Down the memory hole she goes.

The bit that the NYT missed, which I think is more interesting, is that in their explanation of the removal, they pointed to their policies page, which said they reserve the right to remove anything at any time for any reason. But that policy wasn't in place the day before, according to the Google cache, and there was no indication that they'd recently changed their policies. I don't care about Violet Blue at all. But I did lose a lot of respect for Boing Boing and Teresa Nielsen Hayden over the way they handled that incident.

The most interesting part about this scandal is the speculation about what provoked Boing Boing to remove the posts. According to Valleywag it's because Xeni Jardin and Violet Blue's girl-on-girl love affair went sour. Other sources say it's because Cory "Anti Intellectual Property Terrorist" Doctorow objected to Violet Blue trademarking her name so that she could stop a porn star from using it.

Either way it's tastily salacious. Sex and hypocrisy all in one package!

I'm with Josh. The hypocrisy of Boing Boing is astounding; if any other website was doing this they'd be having fits. It's incredibly disingenuous of TNH and Xeni to say things like "blogs delete old material all the time" as if they were just clearing out some old stuff. They weren't; Xeni very carefully deleted all of the old posts that so much as mentioned Violet Blue's name, and no others. It was a depersonning.

Some of the self-appointed guardians of the citadel over there -- not Boingers but other commenters -- have taken to shredding people who so much as question this action. The actual response from Boingers has been laughably inadequate.

This is very different than, say, deleting Ecce Homo's comments. This would be more like disappearing, oh, me for instance, if someday my presence here was no longer wanted -- not just these comments but the items I've been allowed to contribute to the blog itself. It's rewriting the past, and despite the strenuous objections over there, it does in fact whiff of Stalin.

They really fucked up, but they don't appear to be even slightly interested in admitting it. Only ass-covering matters now. TNH, who claims to be a "professional moderator", and who has even written a book on the subject, has proven herself to be instead a world-class DE-moderator, a veritable flamethrower in fact. And Xeni is just plain in the wrong. But Cory Doctorow is the one whose hypocritical failure here stings the most; he comes off looking like a clueless fool who can't even figure out what his own principles stand for.

I'm certainly not going back until they put all the material back, admit that they were completely wrong, and apologize. I doubt it will happen.

Metafilter's ten times more interesting, anyways.

Memory holes like this are certainly a pretty strong argument for net neutrality. Once all the news archives migrate over to the ephemeral digital domain doing retcons on history becomes that much simpler, especially if people can't just surf on over to a convenient storehouse for the info like the one I just linked to.

There are two things that struck me about this mess back when it was still fresh

1) The folks at BoingBoing seem to consider their site to be just this thing that a bunch of friends are doing. Meanwhile, everyone else sees it as a (vaguely if you squint) objective resource kind of like, yes, a newspaper. [Which I suspect is why so many people grouse about some of the posts here] So it's all very well and good for me to go back and wipe any reference to an ex or a club I'm avoiding from my blog because it really is a personal thing and nobody reads it. With a presumed audience of millions that rely on the site and its authors for opinion and insight, that's no longer the case.

Say what you will about Slog, but you can still find Dan's posts in favor of the war in Iraq.

2) The phrasing of the deletion was that the BoingBoingers could no longer support Violet Blue and so removed all reference to her. But what if it was a product called KerBlooie Blue that they really liked but, after some bad news came out (nothing major, just that it didn't work nearly as well as they said it would), they decided to recant on their opinion. I'll bet that they'd post something about that, something about how they were huge fans of KerBlooie Blue when they first heard about it and had been touting it but in light of recent events... blah blah blah.

This? Oh that's what the memory hole is for.

It's a lovely little debacle and probably overdue given the hubris displayed by the management there.

...and nothing of value was lost.

There's a strong tendency to personalize everything over there - any criticism of TNH is defended by Xeni as an attack on her BFF, and vice versa. I was disemvowelled by TNH for a comment about equating sexism with racism that she disagreed with. I've watched her infuriate a number of people, immoderately. History is rewritten there routinely, they delete comments they don't like, they re-write their own comments, posts, and policies without leaving a trail. *shrugs* It's a fun site, but has an ethics problem that keeps it from being more than that.