Returning to Plans

[dimova], [spurgeo1], and [chokhani] have written or posted, urging me to return to Plans. This post is in answer to them and any others who feel the same way.

Until recently, I've been telling people that I was willing to copy my posts on “Hacking gadflies” to Plans, when and if the Plans developers provided a mechanism for uploading from a file. (It's unlikely in any case that I'll write anything on Plans that doesn't also go on my Web log.)

However, the introduction of Secrets has made even this limited participation in Plans much less attractive to me. I enjoyed being part of the Plans community and liked almost everyone that I met through it; by contrast, many of the contributions to Secrets manifest ugly traits of character or reflect values and habits of mind for which I have little sympathy. That's not a community to which I care to belong.

I am also worried that the popularity of Secrets makes it more likely that the maintainers of Plans will encounter legal problems, especially now that Secrets is moderated. (The fact that [oneileri] reads all the posts and deletes some of them means that her share of the responsibility for the publication of the others is greater.) I wouldn't want people who know about my previous enthusiasm for Plans and the assistance I gave to its former maintainers to infer that I have any kind of complicity in the decisions that are being made about it now. Accordingly, I'm thinking of asking to have my Plans account removed entirely.

Added later: Two correspondents from off campus have asked about the moderation of Secrets, since it doesn't seem to have been announced explicitly on Plans. The December 9 issue of the Scarlet and Black includes a long article on Plans and Secrets. The article quotes [oneileri] as saying “We don't edit ... If someone feels something that's not PC, they should be able to express it. It's not our job to moderate it. It's the community's job to respond.” However, it also quotes her as saying, “I've been reading every single word,” and reports that “O'Neil has removed threatening posts that mentioned names and several posts which caused technical problems.”

Perhaps I should emphasize that I'm not criticizing the new Plans administrators either for moderating or not moderating. It is the community's job to respond to the trolls and fools whose posts dominate Secrets. My response is repugnance.