Calling someone a bitch and offering no justification for other allegations is not “reasonably” disagreeing. If someone had done that to Xeni she’d have been on their case like a sledgehammer.
Still, people change and move on and who are we to question? Onward and upward, BB.
my perspective, as a reader:
xeni’s contributions to journalism and boingboing are immense. she’s endured much more in life than anyone ever should have to. her run here at BB is legendary. Almost 20 years is a very long time to do anything, let alone consistent contributions to one of the biggest and oldest group blogs online.
People change a lot in 20 years and without firmly grounding the WHY and what you’re fighting for firmly, it is easy to just attack people for the hell of it, even longtime allies.
the kindest act an employer ever did for me was to fire me (got a severance package) when it became clear we had very different goals and values.
no partnership lasts forever but as a reader, watching this one fall apart has been hard.
so long, Xeni, and thanks for all the fish. best of wishes, live long and prosper. wherever your travels take you, I hope you find happiness.
In fact, one time a while back, I did have a disagreement with her and it resulted in some very singed Lion fur and I was off the old comments for a three month vacation. And I was civil and nice and certainly didn’t use words like THAT. I can’t imagine what happens to people who use words like that to describe her, I imagine something similar to the Thanos snap.
I’ll say (with as much respect as I can muster, because I certainly have gotten a lot out of BoingBoing over the decades and have always loved the place, though I visit the front page less now than I used to) that all the BB editors have always been fairly thin-skinned at being criticized, or even mildly disagreed with, from the comments.
To the topic at hand, I follow Xeni on Twitter and was always interested in what she has to say. I’m often a bit confused by some of her posts, to be sure, but having very different perspectives to follow and vantage-points from which to see the world is part of what can make the internet great.
(Seeing the viciousness of the AOC tweets, however, which I had missed, does make me start to doubt myself.)
I’m just a guest here at the will of the people who host this wonderful site. I still contend I did nothing wrong (and even apologized in a letter which was received with the response “I have no idea what you’re talking about, I don’t ban anyone at all from BB ever”) , and that they were still within their rights to do whatever. I’ve been around the internet long enough to try not to take things personally at this point. I just try to be a good person as best I can
I learned about a ton of music from Xeni back in the day, like Junip and We Have Band and Zola Jesus. BB will definitely not be the same.
I will always cut content creators a hundred miles of slack on this one.
I’m a YouTuber and people always tell us we need to be thick-skinned. The thing is, try having a hundred thousand people pick apart every single thing you say, do, and wear every single day. There is no skin thick enough for that. The simple good-intentioned joy of sharing something you love is easily ruined by a thousand “my opinion is special” drive-by “mild criticisms”. If it were up to me, the majority of content would have no comments enabled on it. They’re adding nothing to the world.
BB BBS is different, of course- the discussion here is excellent. Lightning in a bottle, even. But I believe the editors here probably still feel constantly attacked as YouTubers do.
Content creation is a 1:many relationship, and most people have only ever been on the “many” side of that very unbalanced ratio. People who say “be thick skinned” have never bared their soul in front of the Internet. Be thankful for people who take that bullet so you can enjoy free content.
I’m not a youtuber myself, but I’ve done public speaking in my own career, and sometimes you get criticisms that are basically just aimed at undermining you, not in furthering the conversation or making the work your doing better in some material way. This is doubly true if the person who is being criticized is a woman or a POC. And the people doing it think they are doing you a favor, or worse, making you look silly, when really, it’s just making them look like assholes. It seems to me that this sort of undermining disguised as discourse has made public discussions measurably worse.
100% yes. In public discourse, I’ll go as far as to say the vast majority of comments are so-aimed. When you drill into them, it always ends up being about them, not us. They’re insecure about something, or unhappy in their life or whatever.
Here’s hoping she recovers quickly! All my best to her!
Damn that sounds awful. I hope she ends up well enough on the other side of this.
Thank you Jason for letting us know. There have been some pretty wild reactions to her announcement, eg someone upthread suggesting that she’d joined Qanan.
