30

After taking a week off, I was not sure how to get back to blogging today. One option was to just ignore the last week and start with a discussion of the most active threads over the weekend. The other choice was to look at the most active threads during the entire time I was off. For better or worse, I have chosen the second option. The most active thread during that time was the one that I have already discussed about the murder of the UnitedHealthCare CEO. After that was a thread titled, "Why is Blake Lively so overrated?" and posted in the "Entertainment and Pop Culture" forum. Let me preface this discussion by admitting that I am probably the least qualified person imaginable to discuss this topic. Frankly, I have no idea who Blake Lively is and could not pick her out of a police lineup if my life depended upon it. I understand that she is an actress, but I am not aware of any role that she has played. I may very well have seen her in a movie or show, but if so, I don't remember it. In fact, were it not for this thread, I am not sure that I could correctly identify her gender given that "Blake" can be a male name. What I can say is that this thread was started in September of 2018 by a poster who believed that Lively has "a weird looking face" and is a bad actress. After three pages, the thread died and sank into obscurity until it was revived just over two years later by a poster who claimed that Lively's biggest accomplishments were getting married and having children. After five posts, the thread returned to obscurity. Then, two months later, it was resuscitated by a poster complaining that Lively's "eyes are small". The thread then returned to hibernation for over a year, being awakened in March 2022 and then taking another year and change off. It was not heard from again until May 2023, at which time it received only a few posts. It was then zombied in August 2024. When the thread was revived in August, it was 8 pages long. Today, it is 95 pages. I understand that most of the new interest is the result of a lawsuit that Lively filed against Justin Baldoni, accusing him of sexual harassment. However, that lawsuit was not mentioned until page 28, so there were 20 pages of fairly recent discussion even before that occurred. Threads like this that are nearly 100 pages in length present a particular challenge to me. I wouldn't read a thread of this length even if the topic interested me, and this topic doesn't. As a result, if there were a lot of complaints about it, I would probably just lock it rather than devote the effort necessary to moderate it. But, as it happens, there have not been a lot of complaints about this thread. Instead, there was a thread started in the Website Feedback forum suggesting that the entire thread consisted of nothing but "PR bot vs PR bot spam". Apparently, "bot" is used in a rather unorthodox sense to refer to people rather than automated posts. At any rate, I noticed one anti-Lively poster who posted 27 times, another poster who posted 26 times, and a pro-Lively poster who posted a whopping 87 times. I suspect that these are actual humans with too much time on their hands rather than paid public relations professionals. I must admit, however, that the suggestion that Hollywood public relations firms would find DCUM discussions worth influencing is rather flattering, if somewhat unrealistic.