Sunday 22 January 2012

Freethought Blogs killed the Atheist Feed on tumblr.

Well it looks like Freethought Blogs managed to to censor The Atheist Feed on tumblr. The entire site has been removed, but not by me. You can still follow the Atheist Feed on Twitter and on Facebook and I will continue to look for new ways to read it. Here is a graph showing all the traffic that the Atheist Feed sent to Freethought Blogs over the last month. As you can see, it really started picking up in the last week or so:



Also set up a Twitter bot @freethoughtfeed, it will go dead in protest. You can still follow all the latest posts @AtheistFeedz, but I no longer wish to support Freethought Blogs' branding or logo. Perhaps they should try setting up their own Twitter bot.

36 comments:

  1. It's not censorship when stolen material is taken down. Only the voice of the theif is being silenced. All the content is still freely available at the source, uncensored.

    It's a shame you can't think of anything original to post ... But that would take effort ... And talent

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  2. Wow, you are seriously delusional.

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  3. FTB didn't kill it: your stubbornness did. Free-thought doesn't mean that you're free to profit off of other peoples' thoughts. Changes would have made the site acceptable, but your ego couldn't handle that.

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    1. I make no money off the Atheist Feed. The only way I profit from it is the same way everyone else does, by reading it.

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    2. False. The owners of the content profit materially by the advertising on their blog, and immaterially by the effect of developing an audience for their blog.

      When everyone is telling you that you are wrong, it's time to rethink. You were stealing content, plain and simple.

      Delete
  4. All you had to do was attribute the work to the proper source and truncate the feed. The Atheist Feed would not have been taken down, whatever value you think it provided would have remained and the atheist community wouldn't have been represented by an morally bankrupt twit.

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    1. I did suggest using truncated feeds, but was only met with more threats and demands.

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    2. A little less dishonesty would be such a refreshing change. You did not offer to truncate. You said that you may have considered truncating if they hadn't hurt your widdle feelings. Since your fee-fees *were* injured you most definitely would not ever truncate. ("So there!" flounce implied.)

      You're in a very deep hole, stop digging.

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    3. You're right, I didn't offer to truncate their feeds for them. That would not have solved their problem as anyone else could simply use their feeds as I did. I suggested that those bloggers who waned to truncate their feeds should do so.

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    4. Huh? Truncating feeds WOULD have solved the problem. You were told this.

      They've chosen to let people read content by the feeds. The minor problem is the there are one or two dishonest nitwits who then use this to set up an automatic script to simply grab all the articles and reproduce them on another site.

      Fortunately, not many people are that dishonest; if everyone did that then it might be necessary to restrict how feeds are used. Most people are most honest, and so the problem is simply the one or two -- like you -- who are not.

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    5. Of course that wouldn't have solved the problem of attribution. Peter Grant who hasn't the wit to write something original enjoys having people think that he's the one writing. Giving credit to the true author is "not his problem."

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    6. It's got nothing to do with attribution or credit. The problem is simply wholesale copying of the content to a different site.

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    7. There were links to the original content, as well as this site which explains everything quite clearly.

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    8. oh there were links(but not full links, actually)! Who needs those when the entire articles are right there...

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    9. "You're right, I didn't offer to truncate their feeds for them. That would not have solved their problem as anyone else could simply use their feeds as I did. I suggested that those bloggers who waned to truncate their feeds should do so."

      bullshit. The real problem here is that you rebroadcast the feeds, publicly. If this was for YOUR benefit, and you collected them yourself, in private, there would be no problem, because that is expressly allowed.

      you're a dishonest git.

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  5. Everyone, tonight Peter will be setting up a big screen at a park near his home and showing the latest blockbuster movies all night for anyone in the public to watch!

    And its all ok because he's not profiting from it ... Right?

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    1. Sounds good to me, that's what we do in Africa. We have a big party, everyone's invited.

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  6. "but I no longer wish to support Freethought Blogs' branding or logo"

    Newsflash, they don't need you mate.

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    1. Never said they did. I'm really quite surprised by all the fuss, only had about 50 followers.

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  7. What's bizarre is that everyone has been explaining this to YOU, but you STILL don't get it.

    People who write original content for blogs have value associated with people reading their material AT their blog. Simply taking their work and reproducing wholesale at your own site devalues this. It costs quite a bit of money to set up a stable such as freethoughtblogs. They recoup that by advertising, and there is also a benefit to having the community supported at their blog, in their comment streams, on their pages.

    Get it yet? By stealing content, you really are making a material difference. Giving attribution doesn't fix that. Giving links doesn't fix that. The problem is not with attribution or links; it really is with the wholesale copying of their material and putting it all on your own site.

    The material is already easily available and anyone can read it. You make that WORSE by being a parasite on their work; and if everyone was as incredibly thick at figuring this out as you appear to be, then they would probably have to be a bit less free and easy for general users.

    Fortunately, you are an outlier. You can be handled pretty easily -- and you have been -- without adding restrictions on more ethical users. What remains to be seen is if you ever actually grasp this; or if you are simply incapable of understanding why what you did is earning universal opprobrium.

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    1. You, and many others, seem to be confusing information cost with information value. Copying information reduces the cost of the information but it does not decrease it's value. If the information is valuable to begin with copying it will only increase it's value by giving more brains access to it. Individual websites go down quite often, or can be censored by governments like China, distributing information across multiple platforms is the only way to ensure that everyone has access to it.

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    2. Freethoughtblogs pays for itself using advertising. There is a real cost associated with running the site; and that cost is recovered at the site itself. There is also a small material return to the original authors; and immaterial benefit in better access to their readers. You unilaterally devalue all of that when you simply take all the content and put it on another site.

      Anyone who can access your site can access their site. You are not giving anyone additional access; and you are removing value. Furthermore, it isn't your prerogative to decide what is best. When you were asked to stop copying material, you should have done so. You've decided to be a jerk, and at this point you seem to have a deliberately determined refusal to acknowledge the obvious values and costs involved.

      But fortunately, this isn't up to you. Despite having no apparent understanding of the actual costs and values and ethics of the situation, you've been shut down.

      This is not censorship. This is not preventing access to the material. All the material is still there and accessible -- on the site where it provides appropriate return and value to the owners -- INCLUDING helping to cover the real costs of maintaining the site.

      The question is whether you will ever understand the problems with wholesale copying, and why an ethical person only does this with permission.

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    3. We obviously have different values.

      You seem to value information for its monetary worth. It therefore makes sense for you to want good information to be as scarce as possible because this will drive up the price. You also want to control how and when others access that information.

      I value information for its content. It therefore makes sense for me to want free and open access to all good information for myself as well as others.

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    4. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    5. That's retarded.

      You did not make it available to anyone additional. There is already free and open access to the information. Anyone can read it and it costs them nothing to do so.

      The truth of the matter is that your actions are putting free access at risk. If your ethics and behaviour was normal, then it just becomes harder to support free and open access.

      You apparently don't understand "open access" either! You know the difference between an open access journal and a paywall? Hint. It is NOT that one allows you to copy everything to your own public site and the other doesn't.

      (deleted and reposted to fix incomprehensible grammar)

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    6. "you are simply incapable of understanding why what you did is earning universal opprobrium."

      Pete Puma is hard a working proving this.

      what's left to say, really?

      He's created a laughingstock of himself.

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  8. To repeat, yet again, there is already free and open access to the information on FTB, at FTB. There is no need to republish all of it somewhere else. It is not one bit less free and open now that you can't republish it any longer.

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  9. Not really, as has already been pointed out there are ads. The site also goes down quite often and can be blocked in some places. Truly free and open access would be something like usenet.

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    1. "as has already been pointed out there are ads."

      and as has already been pointed out, that has fuck-all to do with open access.

      do you like being the internet joke of the month, there, Pete?

      How about we start calling you "Pete Puma"...

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKyhTX9LQEA

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  10. Haha. Censorship! You're saying that FTB managed to censor....themselves? That's hilarious.

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  11. Pete, you're an idiot. Do you have to pay anyone to read FTB? No. It is free, advertisers be damned. And this can be blocked just as effectively as FTB, as I'm sure you're now aware.

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  12. Peter, perhaps reading the Creative Commons* licenses will better enlighten you to how people value their information. People who copy information to increase availability of it and are not challenged by the creators of that information are people who *asked or have license* to copy that information for that purpose.

    (*The authors at freethoughtblogs.com and elsewhere did not grant their visitors a CC license to copy content, so my point with their licenses is for general education, not this situation.)

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  13. And sometimes the electricity goes out, therefore Peter Grant gets to republish all of our content? I don't think so.

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    1. There are several other sites that seem to be doing roughly the same thing. I don't think you will shut all of them down as easily, but good luck trying.

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    2. It's not really necessary to shut them all down at once. One clueless parasite at a time is okay.

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    3. Way to beat exponential growth, have fun!

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