It’s happening all over the place. There’s a website, Sepia Mutiny, which is dedicated to issues for second-generation south Asians (Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Bangladesis, etc). All of the bloggers on the site have been threatened and haraassed in one way or another, but the trolls have focused most strongly on one of the women bloggers, going so far as to create a WordPress blog just mocking her, posting personal attacks about her life and weight, and revealing personal information about where she lived and worked until Google finally yanked it. But not before the blogger had shut down her own blogs, stopped posting on Sepia Mutiny, and cancelled all of the meetups that’d been scheduled.
Eventually she was coaxed back out, but still, over and over again these attacks come up.
It’s unfortunate, and makes me extremely sad that these kinds of things happen and keep happening.
Talk about coincidence! I just found out about Dare’s website last week and now I see that he’s no longer blogging. Well, at least Dare’s posts and Kathy’s posts will remain forever available for future generations to read and being inspired…I sure was!
Jeff, I know you feel comments are essential to keeping a blog running, but there’s a threshold at which they take up more time than necessary. I do not think comments necessary on every blog. I debate the usefulness of them on here. It is rare that I glean any additional insight from them. Usually it is the same four points repeated over and over, but with lots of grammatical and spelling errors. Oh and lots of those cool Internet memes that somehow are acceptable in place of actual things to say.
There simply isn’t enough of a time investment required to say whatever users want to say. The more of a hassle it is, the more determined users have to be, and that happens to weed out a lot of the noise.
I enjoyed Kathy’s writing and her no longer writing is a loss to the development community. It is very sad that this kind of thing happens, but it’s an unfortunate reality.
I’m a tall athletic white guy who doesn’t feel threatened easily, but I can still empathize with Kathy and understand her. My personally most fear-inducing moment of my life was when I served on a jury and we found a defendant guilty of second degree murder. Standing there while the verdict was being read and stating that I, juror number 4, agree with this verdict, while the scumbag we convicted (who was an admitted drug dealer and thug) was staring at us, was a bone-chilling moment that seemed to last a lifetime. Even prior to that, during the week the trial lasted, the entire time this guy was starting at us, unsmiling and cold. He knew more about us from the jury selection process than we ever learned about him, including our names and addresses. I must admit there were times during the trial when I played with the thought of finding the guy not guilty so I wouldn’t have to deal with him coming after me. I know that sounds irrational now, but unless you’re been in that situation, you can’t imagine how real and scary it feels.
It’s said to see good blogs die. However, we can’t be mad at the authors. They need to do what is right for them. If they felt obligated, then they might keep their blog going for a little while longer but it just wouldn’t be the same.
To each his own…
And forget about all this “letting the bad guys win” BS! You want these individuals to stand up to the “bad guys” and be threatened and harassed so you can read their RSS feeds? Writing a blog is not a battle of good and evil. I think you might think differently if it was happening to you.
…reverse death threats. Instead of threatening bloggers who currently write, you threat bloggers who have shut down their blog if they don’t start up again!
In all seriousness, I find it lame that people are scared of death threats on the internet. It’s not hard to find someone’s personal information if you have their real name and they have a BLOG. Just because I can phone you in real life doesn’t mean you should believe my death threats any more than the guy who emails you “I h8 u, i wll hng u!!!1”.
I’ve never been in a position to share my opinions with more than a dozen people at a time, but I hope I never have to say that my opinion is more trouble than it’s worth. This world would be a much poorer place if there weren’t people over the years who had shouted their opinions from the rooftops, regardless of the cost.
decided that the negative column outweighed the positive.
Sure, that’s your call to make.
By the way, I asked on Twitter what the benefits continuing my blog would be to ME and I didn’t get an answer from you.
Actually, you already had my answer. I think it’s easier to cause change from outside Microsoft with an influential blog, than it is to try to change it from the inside using the existing power structure. So when you stop blogging, you stop having the power to influence and change what happens at MSFT in any real or significant way.
Your comments implied that it was an either/or choice-- either stop working at MSFT or stop blogging. Is that true? I have an opinion on this as well (surprise!) but I don’t want to belabor it if that’s not the case. Ideally I think you should continue to do both things.
As I said in my Twitter comment, “you know that really effective high profile thing I do that a lot of people know me for? I’m gonna stop doing that.”
Very little that MSFT employees do on the inside results in anything tangible for me or 99.999% of the rest of the world. Whereas writing a blog is you shipping a product directly to us, with no intermediaries. Why you’d give that up is a mystery to me.
Anyway, for further followup I might email you directly, per the rules of Communication Escalation.
“People may be online, but they also have an entire life offline, most of which we know nothing about.”
Precisely!
I’ve long thought that people should have a personal (likely with extremely good security measures) blog/diary before venturing into establishing a general public facing one because there are things that are simply hard to explain without knowing a person’s entire life story. And, by having a personal diary, you get to have some benefits of blogging without the hard and sometimes impossible task of telling the general public what your personal motivations, agendas, and rationales are.
I think the threats and insults come from the “insulated” quality of communicating via PC. When the worst thing that can happen to you sitting behind your computer is getting fragged while playing Half Life 2, we tend to get a little cocky thinking that what we say won’t have much of an effect, either. But:
WORDS MEAN THINGS.
IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES.
