{"id":8288,"date":"2010-07-09T09:22:04","date_gmt":"2010-07-09T09:22:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/gregladen\/2010\/07\/09\/whither-william-to-wither-or-t\/"},"modified":"2010-07-09T09:22:04","modified_gmt":"2010-07-09T09:22:04","slug":"whither-william-to-wither-or-t","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/2010\/07\/09\/whither-william-to-wither-or-t\/","title":{"rendered":"Whither William: To wither or to write?"},"content":{"rendered":"

As promised<\/a> …<\/p>\n

William the Blogger of YNH fame should seriously consider starting a new blog (after a suitable rest period in a witness protection program).<\/p>\n


\nOne reason is just because everyone should blog. But the other reason is for his own good. I can’t imagine how someone could carry out this litany of transgressions and not feel terrible about himself, but at some point … after time has past and some reflection has occurred … he needs to face the Internet again and make a positive contribution. Yeah, a little like a white collar criminal working in a soup kitchen every Thursday evening for the rest of his life. William should start a service blog of some kind, something that …. helps.<\/p>\n

And the thing is, that William didn’t really do anything that isn’t somewhat overlapping with or mirrored by things regular bloggers do all the time. He just did them to an unprecedented extreme and then got caught. Even if a blogger has never used a sock puppet, s\/he may very well have made note of a particular comment thread to an ally so that ally would come over and kick some butt. On the Internet, where no one knows you’re a dog, there is not a huge difference.<\/p>\n

Consider Quiche Moraine.<\/a> There are three of us blogging there. We blog together for a few reasons, and part of this is that we tend to agree on most things. So each of us has two auto-sockpuppets in the wings for when one of our posts is trolled.<\/p>\n

William not only used sockpuppets, but he also set up straw men speaking in mined quotes. And he became defensive when people disagreed with him. And he tenaciously pursued his points even when those points became dull. And he encouraged tribalism on his comment threads. And he was never clear about who he was.<\/p>\n

Sounds like pretty run of the mill blogging, to me.<\/p>\n

My suggestion is that William find a blog project that attempts, self consciously, to produce a very different effect, and carried out in a very different way. Perhaps instead of “You’re not helping” it should be “How can I help you?” Perhaps a very very narrow subject focus, at least at first, and one that works within a point of view, rather than addressing major differences across points of view. And, for the first dozen posts, which should be produced slowly (no more than one or two a week), no commenting facility. Get a small corpus of well written pieces out there, then start inviting the community in to discuss the topics at hand.<\/p>\n

I would not be surprised if William never wanted to go near the Internet again. But, I have a strong sense that the bloggers that were most offended by what happened don’t need to see blood drawn. Some of the commenters do, of course, but, hell, half of them are probably sockpuppets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As promised … William the Blogger of YNH fame should seriously consider starting a new blog (after a suitable rest period in a witness protection program).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[5020],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5fhV1-29G","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8288"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8288"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8288\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}