> Why do you imply that the members of this panel are being disingenuous?
The original article claimed, "To balance things out, Farhad invited Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, but he dropped out, so it was just the three of us." Saying that Alexis "dropped out" is simply wrong, so the statement is disingenuous at best, dishonest at worst.
Being disingenuous or dishonest would require knowledge on her part that she was misrepresenting. Given that the event description originally included Alexis, and the obvious chain of miscommunication above, is it not a reasonable assumption that Rebecca was simply misinformed?
This article was clearly written post-email exchange. At this point the author knows definitely that Alexis never planned on attending and that the idea that he would in the first place was simply a communications breakdown.
The author is now being deliberately disingenuous.
Perhaps. It seems strange that one would write an article without checking on this fact, and personally I don't believe I will frequent this person's writing again, but it is certainly far more forgivable than dishonesty.
"Hey Farhad, whatever happened to Alexis at the panel?"
"Oh, uh, it fell through."
"Oh, ok."
I can think of hundreds of other variations of the same exchange that don't include negligence on the author's part. This isn't a cross examination - which is the price we pay when we gleefully shoved a knife in the chest of real journalism and twisted it hard, and went and partied with blogs afterward.
Indeed, but this is also the reason why I mostly frequent technical blogs. I'm afraid I hold people who write about people to a higher standard. When you risk impugning someone's reputation you have a higher responsibility.
Except real journalism probably never would have covered such an insignificant event. Blogs have a lower barrier to entry, but they also have a lower barrier to entry, if you follow.
Farhad didn't know what happened. All he knew is that Ohanian was supposed to at least be asked, and he supposedly wasn't even corresponded with, which could, by all accounts, not even be true. He was on the invite list, and decided against. I'm not sure what part doesn't correlate with "dropped out."
How can you possibly "drop out" of a panel that you explicitly said you were never planning on attending?
Dropping out means that you were planning to go and then you had to cancel. Whether Farhad knew this before or not, Alexis's email was very clear and so there's no excuse to claim today that Alexis dropped out of anything.
You are inferring a motive in SkepChick that isn't apparent to me. Care to elaborate? Do you have reason to believe that she isn't actually concerned about bigotry and child porn perpetuating on reddit? If she was after page views, wouldn't she have linked to herself more than she did (one slate article she wrote, out of a dozen links)?
...because there isn't an effort to have the discussion she pines for. She asks great questions, but instead of using the forum to raise the level of discussion and provide answers and a forum on how to manage freedom of speech in the digital age where every degenerate and "loser" has a place to express themselves, instead we get more of an us vs them, finder pointing, shaming, ala Bill O'Reilly on Fox News, which rightfully causes defensiveness. She is more interested in pointing the finger and screaming fire, instead of grabbing a hose.
Her blog post starting out fine, but half way through, she decided she was more interested in mud slinging and shaming than having that discussion she so desperately wanted to have. It is left up to the reader to infer a motive for her choice in direction.
Please provide quotes which represent us vs. them, finger pointing, or mud slinging [0]. I'm not seeing it, but I'm also generally predisposed to enjoying her writing and personality.
[0] Shaming I'm not so concerned about - a few of those tweet authors should definitely be fucking ashamed of themselves.
I have an idea: Why don't you take it upon yourself to put the effort in and read the article as if you weren't someone who was predisposed to her writing and personality rather than demand people on the internet spoon feed you how to think.
If there are images of child sexual abuse being put on Reddit people can contact the Internet Watch Foundation (http://www.iwf.org.uk/)
There are other problematic images: non photographic images of child sexual abuse not hosted in the UK. I have no idea if these are on Reddit, nor what Reddit would do about those. Christopher Handley trials suggest that these are criminal and could cause trouble for Reddit.
And the sexualised (not not sexual) images of children are also a problem. Luckily Reddit has banned /r/jailbait and continues to ban similar subreddits.
To be fair, it doesn't. But every time I'm invited to read what she's written, it is 50% her complaining about people being mean to her, and maybe 15% the actual issue. Excuse me for inferring her priorities
Unfortunately, your conspiracy theory conveniently overlaps a condition where the panelists simply want to represent themselves and their side of the story.
Did she know that? It sounds like Farhad was point on the get-a-guy-from-reddit thing, so she may have not known the details, just that "Alexis was asked, but he isn't coming".
She's misrepresenting the facts. Does it matter that she didn't know the facts she was presenting were wrong? Her job is to find out, check sources, etc.
This is part of the responsibility of self-publishing.
Using words like "misrepresenting" and "disingenuous" and "dishonest" attaches serious implications to the facts of the matter: "dropped out" was not the best phrasing. As Hanlon's Razor puts it, "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by [ignorance]". Why does the three sentences about Alexis need thorough researching, when the vast majority of the post is about Reddit; an entity that Alexis left years ago?
It reminds me of grammar arguments on the internet; people don't like what she says, so they find some easily arguable but minor flaw in the text to jump on.
It might not be malice. It may be ignorance. It's definitely irresponsible.
Those three sentences do not need thorough researching. Maybe she just needs to write a quick email to Alexis for a comment/confirmation (or omit the 3 sentences). Or are bloggers not journalists, anymore?
Also, I didn't attack the premise of this article at all, so don't lump me in with that crowd—I just think that the author does a disservice to her premise/argument. For what it's worth, I agree with the high-level sentiment of the article (though not all of the details).
Of course they're not. For better and for worse, bloggers are not and never have been journalists in any useful sense of those two words. Blogs do, however, fill some of the same niches that used to be the exclusive purview of journalistic channels, such as news curation and commentary.
If you're expecting blogs to match the rigor of journalism, you're just setting yourself up for disappointment. I should note, however, that blogs are much more of a two-way street; they're more likely to get things wrong, but they're also more likely to be corrected when that happens.
- Yes you never agreed to the panel, but how does this email chain not reflect an honest invitation?
- Of course the debate was framed; it is impossible for an event to not have context. Would you have preferred it framed differently? How so?
- Are you implying that these panelists prefer pageviews over progress? If not, who are the boogeymen you are invoking here?