Minority Influence

I don’t know what I found more distasteful last night the bare knuckle fighting on Big Fat Gypsy Wedding or the behaviour on Blogger.ed. They both left me with the same sick feeling.

I’m not going to into the finer details or discuss who was right or wrong or what was going on, as this is the side of blogging that I despise and really doesn’t deserve anymore attention. In the end, the rest of us were punished. It may be coincidental, but I have a sneaky suspicion that the forum was taken down in an effort to diffuse the situation and I fully understand why the administrators may have decided to do this.  However, it may have been the web monkey’s misbehaving again.

However, it reminded me of when we were teenagers. My mom received a rather large phone bill to a female sex chat line, one of those 0900 numbers. At the time there were three teens in the house; me, my sister and my step brother. It doesn’t take a genius to work out who it was. The one thing my mother always demanded was honesty. As long as you owned up to what you did and quickly, the consequences were a lot less and trust me you didn’t want to suffer the wrath of my mother.

So, she gave the culprit the opportunity to come forward. We were all grounded (couldn’t go out) until someone owned up to it, even though she knew damn well that my sister and I hadn’t done it. For a couple of teenage girls this was hell. If I remember correctly we ended up spending the whole weekend in and I don’t think he ever owned up to it.

So, I felt a bit narked tonight when I wanted to go onto Blogger.ed and it was down. I know the administrators abhor censoring content or banning people but in this case I think it may have been an idea to remove the threads and temporarily muzzle the perpetrators and let the rest of use get on with it. Nevertheless, I’m sure it will be up and running again soon.

Author: mediocremum

A slightly older mum of one, who drinks far too much red wine and has an unhealthy obsession with her slow cooker. During the day she's an ICT Trainer, Social Media/Online Marketing consultant and does a bit of public speaking. Full Profile on Google+

10 thoughts on “Minority Influence”

  1. The politics of the Internet are perhaps more fickle than those in real life. It’s impossible to read someone body language and to undersand precisely what someone is trying to say without hearing vocal tones or styles so whist I don’t know the specific of this instance, I can safely say that I’ve been a victim of a similar problem.

    Unfortunately it seems people on the Internet are leas interested in a resolution to their problems and more interested in populating the world with fluffy kittens and dogs. If we all applied a level of humanity to the situation, then things would easily be a lot better, rather than staring at the worst case scenario in clear as day, black and white

    1. I suggested that as adults they move the conversation to a more private forum (email) but have a feeling it was the public nature that kept it going.

  2. Ah, I was wondering why the Blogger.Ed forums were down last night, and still down this morning, and I was starting to get withdrawal symptoms.

    As seems to be typical for me, I was out last night and missed whatever it was that happened. Thanks for helping me understand what’s going on :)

  3. Having been a (volunteer) mod on a fairly big discussion board, I can tell you it is berluddy hard work. The problem with removing threads is that people start new ones asking where they have gone, others who missed it start asking what happened and it all starts all over again. And that’s even if you ban the culprits – their “friends” wade in with their twopennorth, and so it goes on.

    If it’s only down for a day, it’s no biggie in the grand scheme of things. If you don’t have a lot of resource to monitor the content (and they don’t), it’s often the best way.

    1. It’s a bleeding nightmare isn’t it. Just have a question that I need answering. Oh well, I can wait and I’m sure the administrators did the right thing.

  4. I’m with Kate on the whole thread removal thing, I think it’s actually better just to leave them there – locked if you don’t want it carrying on and on forever but by taking them away it just causes more whispering behind the scenes via PMs etc and I think does more harm than good.

    It just seemed to go all of a sudden! I didn’t even see what the original fuss was all about, I was reading another thread after reading Bumbling’s thread. Did something suddenly occur to spark it all off again?

    Hope it comes back later today!

  5. Ah I had wondered why I couldn’t log in this morning

    And now I have no idea what happened but would like to – am wondering if this is the usual protagonists or something else?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *