On Tue, 01 Jun 2010 10:18:03 -0400, Abd wrote:
Durova's history is a classic example. She was hounded by a screaming mob when she made a mistake, even though she recognized the error and undid it within an hour.
I might well be counted as part of that "screaming mob" since I was one of the critics at the time, but my intended target was never Durova personally (who is now a Facebook friend of mine), but the entire system and its associated mindsets, in which a group of "insiders", with closed mailing lists of their own, takes on a "circling the wagons" mentality against "trolls and harassers", leading to snap judgments that can get people blocked or banned for saying politically incorrect things.
I had some comments on that situation in my essay I wrote as a rebuttal to one of JzG's essays:
http://dan.tobias.name/controversies/cyber/wiki2.html