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Wednesday's Most Active Threads
The topics with the most engagement yesterday included Dooce, Arlington's School Board election, Republican allegations against Biden, and the location of top state flagship universities.
The most active thread yesterday was titled, "Dooce /Heather Armstrong" and was posted in the "Entertainment and Pop Culture" forum. Armstrong was one of the original "mommy bloggers", posting under the name "Dooce". She tragically died by suicide yesterday. This thread is currently eleven pages long which would be significant on its own, but a separate thread about her was also started and reached six pages before I locked it. I know very little about Armstrong and what I do know is limited to my brief interactions to remove inappropriate posts in threads about her that were occasionally posted on DCUM. As might be expected, posters familiar with Dooce posted about their surprise and sadness regarding the news. There is considerable discussion of her very personal and revealing blog. We have an informal but generally consistently-applied rule about criticizing individuals for the first 48 hours after their death. Because so much of Armstrong's life was apparently public, I had a hard time trying to draw a line between posts that were simply describing her life and those that were inappropriately negative. But, the thread was eventually growing so fast that I couldn't keep up in any case. As a result, the thread is likely very much out of compliance with our guidelines. The few times that I was able to read a few pages of this thread, I noticed that discussion had less to do with Dooce specifically, but more with "mommy bloggers" and others who lead their lives so publicly. In addition, there is considerable discussion of the "Get Off My Internets" website or GOMI. I also know about this website solely through earlier threads about Dooce and based only on that very limited knowledge, it appears that GOMI is basically devoted fulltime to critiquing bloggers and that Dooce was one of their favorite targets. As a result, there is considerable criticism of GOMI in this thread for potentially contributing to the blogger's mental health issues. While probably not appropriate for this thread, there is an interesting conversation to be held regarding discussion and criticism of those who willingly lead their lives very publicly. What boundaries should be observed with regard to those who themselves adhere to few boundaries?