rc3.org Strong opinions weakly held

Given what advocates of transparency BoingBoing has been, I find the move to be pretty disappointing. Of course they are free to do what they like, but I don’t think that was the point. The point is that they disappeared posts without saying anything about it or acknowledging it directly, which seems petty, childish, and contrary to the values I expected from BoingBoing.

I am free to stop reading them and to criticize them for being jerks, too, so that is what I will do.

Posted by Thud on 1 July 2008 @ 8pm

I don’t think there’s any kind of absolutist argument against BoingBoing’s decision to unpublish.

Absolutist? Probably not, but in general I’d argue it’s a stupid move for a blogger to make. (In particular, it was a very stupid move for these particular bloggers to make, but that horse has been flogged to death elsewhere.)

Simply deleting existing posts, post facto, breaks things that have pointed to them. I don’t know about you, but I think about the stability of things I link to before I point to them.

In the example you give, you could accomplish the same result by either removing the link to the offending site, or by inserting a “Update on $DATE: This site turned into raving nutjobbery post 9.11; this link does not constitute an endorsement of the current content.” or similar.

I quit reading one of the original webloggers (he would claim the original weblogger) when it became clear that he had no problem with posting something and then later either removing it or editing it to completely change the content or tone. If I can’t read something and have some assurance it’s going to stay stable for me to point at from my weblog, why bother to read it at all?

Posted by genehack on 1 July 2008 @ 9pm

Sure, bloggers have no strong responsibility to leave their past published items untouched for posterity. We all know blogs are the product of editorialists, not historians.

It just seems uncharitable, even Kafkaesque, to refuse to tell someone why they are suddenly blacklisted.

Posted by Thomas B. on 2 July 2008 @ 12am

I think in your example, it would be much preferable to leave the original post, but add an addendum:

UPDATE 10/13/01:It has since become clear that [referenced person] is an idiot. I retract my earlier compliments.

Thus the historical record remains intact, but your revised feelings are clear as well.

Posted by FS on 2 July 2008 @ 4am

Unpublishing is — for want of a better term — Orwellian in its tone. They deleted it. Do they have the posts on the database somewhere ready to republish if the offence has abated? That’s a little idiotic? And then they talk about the Wayback archive. This use of language is shoddy, at best.

“Unpublishing” or deleting is a bad. Obviously they forgot Cool URIs don’t change . Delinking URIs that point to the offending site within the post is probably a better thing, and/or directing web-bots to noindex, noarchive. Clearly they make money on that site so they could afford somebody to do that stuff, gracefully.

Posted by G on 2 July 2008 @ 7am

I don’t care to get into the details of the BB thing, but as G says here, “unpublishing” is a term only Pravda could be proud of. I prefer my media outlets to maintain complete archives and not to randomly disappear things, however big or small they are.

That’s really the beginning and end of it for me – it’s not a concern specific to the incident in question, about which I couldn’t possibly care less. But I’m not going to go along with the idea that erasing your past publishings is just fine.

Posted by Jacob Davies on 2 July 2008 @ 2pm

For what it’s worth, I’ve never removed anything that’s been up longer than an hour or so. I have removed items that I regretted immediately.

Posted by Rafe on 2 July 2008 @ 3pm

i removed the particular fellow you reference above from my blogroll and stopped reading his material after his conversion to his new hateful format, but i never explicitly went back and trimmed references to his site out of existing posts.

in this case, it’s not as though he were a contributor of mine or anything, and while i got links from him occasionally, i never posted anything particularly complimentary of him as a person that i would have felt weird about leaving in the archives.

obviously, it was well within bb’s rights to remove content they no longer wanted to have on the site, but it would appear that the irony of the situation in light of their position on openness has been lost on them. (as has been mentioned ad infinitum in many other posts.)

Posted by jb on 2 July 2008 @ 3pm