Deleted threads

This is bullshit.

Certain people can post conspiracy theories and get away with it, yet some cant.

Censorship has prevailed.

Uh, In all fairness to Pathfinder, the Featureati thread was one of the ones deleted.

Bravo I say.

Seconded!

Your wings make your butt look fat!

Oh that's IT mister... in game your feted butt is in SO much trouble!

Ulrika looks nervously at her Bitcherati thread, then at Pathfinder, then back at her thread. Parody is protected speech is it not? *sweat*

~Ulrika~

Oh no you di'n't!

~Ulrika~

Apparently, a few are allowed to voice conspiracy theories, while others can't.

The deletion may have more to do with the candid response re: the web site and less to do with what was being said.

Although I have not been here for past couple of hours and don't know if the tone went dramatically nasty.

Guess?

IMHO, the thread had lightened up. And I wonder at the same thing - the candid reposnse.
(Does that make me a conspiracy theorist?)

I'm glad Pathfinder's back. Pathfinder rocks.

I'm glad he got took some kind of action about some of these threads that were started solely about me, merely to attack me, filled with silly lies and malicious slander, ie. to the effect that I have "no first life" or "no job" or "I'm mentally ill" (all falsehoods through and through LOL, and easily disproved). It's good for stuff like that to be closed -- if not removed, because the Lindens have said time and again that you can't start a thread about just one person like that as an attack. There are other threads all about me without my name in the title that exist to attack me, but I don't expect any special enforcement.

I just think if you were to google everyone's forum posts, and put the percentage of time they talk about Prokofy, or react merely to Prokofy's ideas, as distinct from my posts, and my talking about myself as distinct from some game phenomenon, you'd be seeing some pretty drab results -- many people would show in the low double digits as the percentage of time they say anything original.

But in general, I oppose thread closure. And I don't even mind if that one Weedy started stayed, and got the usual collection of gerbal pictures and ass pictures and stuff on it. It just reveals more about those people and their methods.

But as I think about Pathfinder's slogan about great minds talking about ideas, mediocre minds talking about events, small minds talk about people -- I'd have to add that tiny minds censor threads. And since Pathfinder doesn't at all have a tiny mind, I can only figure he's buckling to some corporate culture or something there. My God, that closed thread even had an actual live Linden that had come in, said something not completely coherent but helpful, so it was actually fine.

And what's so terrible about talking about people and events? People and events make the world go on. Ideas are abstractions -- we can't always be Harvard and be cerebral here, we're human beings in a virtual world mainly engaged in exploration and entertainment, not university study.

Is it a personal attack to point out that there is a small group of people who are feted in this game? No. There is. We all know that. It's not a conspiracy, it's fairly benign, but they are feted, nonetheless, and they do constitute a hindrance. We can debate why that is so -- it's about ideas, analysis, patterns of behaviour, atttitudes (like anti-club or anti-land dealing or anti-Tringo, anti-mass-culture, etc). It's not singling any one person out for harassment.

If someone is profiled on the new website, and all you do is cut and paste their profiles to juxtapose three of them to show what they've said, that's hardly a personal attack. That's analysis. That's looking at the burning issues of the day. That's not conspiracy nutter theory. It's pointing out a pattern, and pointedly commenting that we need to ask why, on the one hand, the Lindens bring in people to this game throughout advertising, but then in a kind of three-card-monte, they swipe out from under them the ability to make a buck with events or to enjoy mass culture without the opprobrium of the feterati.

I mean really, if one person has *three appearances of their screenshot* on this web site, isn't that a *bit much*, Lindens? I mean, can you ever be too rich, too thin, or *too feted*??

I was always praising SL for their open forums and their refusal to suppress discussion, even robust and rowdy discussion, by not engaging, like Stratics does, in that "unpeople" kind of "unthread" stuff like the Bolsheviks used to do erasing out faces from pictures of the Politburo in the 1930s and 1940s. So thread erasure, as distinct from thread closure, is not any kind of boon, IMHO, but destroys collective memory. Those who destroy collective memory are doomed to repeat it.

Even if I benefit from it by having a dozen silly threads with my name on them (which I didnt' start) closed, I'm not for using that tool.

What I'd rather see is more frequent warnings, and more editings. A post that appears like this with the perlustration: 'EDITED FOR PERSONAL ATTACKS' at least doesn't stop a discussion dead.

It was a god-awful boring thread, in my opinion.

It had absolutely nothing to do with the "candid response" about the web site. People are free to criticize or praise the website however they like. Say whatever you like about the website.

But to start picking apart individual residents who are mentioned on the website, and having it devolve into personal attacks on those individuals, THAT'S not appropriate.

Everyone knows the TOS, and I've made things clear on this time and time again. This topic is closed.