Unsurprising -- TNH herself was far, far meaner and nastier and more closedminded about the original Violet Blue drama than even Xeni herself. Xeni mainly insulted Violet Blue herself; TNH was the one who approached the ensuing drama by violently attacking anyone and everyone who dared question Xeni's actions in the matter and saying that anyone who came to Boingboing to question Boingboing's editorial policy was an ingrate and a loser and should shut the fuck up or get banned.
What really gets me is how the blogosphere in general has considered TNH some kind of ideal of how to be a firm, fair moderator with a set of subtle strategies for ensuring productive discussion. Because she isn't -- she's just another typical mod bully who uses brute force to shut people up or scare them off if they cross any of a dozen arbitrary lines, and she *appears* to be some kind of wise noble arbitrator because the only people who get to stick around are, by definition, people she likes.
Which all works fine until it suddenly collapses when the category of people she likes expands too widely to be easily contained, like "people who dislike censorship" or "feminists of color".
Hopefully if she's discredited then her nasty, bullying style of moderation will be seen for what it is and not taken as an example of how things should be run on the Internet. I'd like to see nasty little tricks like disemvowelment go away, for instance. (It's not like TNH invented or popularized anything other than taking common sense -- "If someone gets too annoying then ban them" -- and stretching *beyond* common sense so as to get a reputation of being "tough", like saying "Ban people pre-emptively if they even start being argumentative and annoying in your own opinion even if they haven't technically done anything wrong" or "If someone hasn't crossed the line to be banworthy yet then aggressively edit their posts with your own little comments or distort/disfigure the post in some way to express your disapproval, as a kind of warning shot", all of which I think is nasty, uncivil and a bad idea.)
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2009-02-02 09:07 pm (UTC)What really gets me is how the blogosphere in general has considered TNH some kind of ideal of how to be a firm, fair moderator with a set of subtle strategies for ensuring productive discussion. Because she isn't -- she's just another typical mod bully who uses brute force to shut people up or scare them off if they cross any of a dozen arbitrary lines, and she *appears* to be some kind of wise noble arbitrator because the only people who get to stick around are, by definition, people she likes.
Which all works fine until it suddenly collapses when the category of people she likes expands too widely to be easily contained, like "people who dislike censorship" or "feminists of color".
Hopefully if she's discredited then her nasty, bullying style of moderation will be seen for what it is and not taken as an example of how things should be run on the Internet. I'd like to see nasty little tricks like disemvowelment go away, for instance. (It's not like TNH invented or popularized anything other than taking common sense -- "If someone gets too annoying then ban them" -- and stretching *beyond* common sense so as to get a reputation of being "tough", like saying "Ban people pre-emptively if they even start being argumentative and annoying in your own opinion even if they haven't technically done anything wrong" or "If someone hasn't crossed the line to be banworthy yet then aggressively edit their posts with your own little comments or distort/disfigure the post in some way to express your disapproval, as a kind of warning shot", all of which I think is nasty, uncivil and a bad idea.)