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The Most Active Threads Since Friday

by Jeff Steele last modified May 29, 2024 08:30 AM

The topics with the most engagement since my last blog post included the Princess of Wales, Trump's rally in the Bronx, a "post-truth" majority, and a jeans-obsessed troll.

I took Memorial Day off from writing which means that today I will discuss the most active threads over the past four days. Many of the most active threads were ones that I've already discussed and will skip today. Frankly, the threads that were left over were not that interesting and it is kind of disappointing that they were popular. First among those was a thread titled, "Kate spending time with ‘birth family’". This thread was disappointing because it is about the British Royal Family, and more specifically, the Princess of Wales, Kate Middleton. That is guaranteed to attract crazies of all sorts. Moreover, the original poster did a spectacularly poor job with the original post. The original poster did not provide a link supporting the claim in the thread's title or provide any further information about the allegation made there. Instead, the original poster implied that the Princess had moved in with her parents, something that appears not to be true. Rather, the original poster seems to have misread, misunderstood, or misrepresented an article in "The Daily Beast". According to the Daily Beast article, the Princess will be spending time at Sandringham, the country house used by the Prince and Princess of Wales. The article explicitly says that Prince William and their children will be there as well because it is a school holiday. Her "birth family" will simply be visiting. But, why bother with the truth when fiction is so much more fun? Posters immediately engaged in all sorts of speculation that the Princess is dying, that she and William are divorcing, that William wants her out of the way so he can engage in affairs, and on and on. These Royal Family threads present a problem for me. I don't like them and would be happy to delete every one of them. But posters enjoy them and continually create them. If the threads involve either Kate Middleton or Megan Markle, they will provoke a slew of reports. There was a poster who was particularly determined in this case to report any post that she thought was even the slightest disparaging of Middleton. As such, this thread immediately became a headache. Anytime I got up from my computer I would return to find a mailbox full of reports. I quickly determined that I was not going to spend the Memorial Day weekend removing posts about the Princess of Wales, someone who will never read this website, has to deal with much more visible criticism daily, and is not going to be harmed in any way by a bunch of raving lunatics on DCUM. The result is nearly 40 pages of some of the most outlandish conspiracy theories that you can imagine. I finally locked the thread last night, mostly to save my email inbox from the hundreds of reports the thread was generating (mostly by a single poster). But at that time discussion was focused on a theory that the Palace had hired a "body double" to appear as Kate in a recent video. Intermixed between the various conspiracy theories were complaints by posters who are certain that Kate is near death but are upset that she is not publicly working until she takes her last breath.

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