Over at South Florida Daily Blog, Rick says it is Closing Time for his local blog aggregator and regional lens.
This is a shame — SFDB was a great asset to the South Florida blogging community of which I am only a very peripheral part. But I’m sure it was an awful lot of work, and he sounds if not burnt out then at least a little toasty.
I’ll miss SFDB. Only consolation is that Rick hung up on a a really successful local blog once before, then come back for a great second act. So can we hope for a third?
Nope.
Thanks for the words, Michael. It was a pleasure meeting you. Take care and stay well.
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If he had just stuck to critiquing blogs he would have been fine.
But as one blogger wrote on Twitter, [for Rick] “there was no better feeling than being anonymous and unaccountable. It gave him carte blanche to lie and slander with impunity.”
He’s a thin-skinned, mealy-mouthed hypocrite and a coward. Good riddance.
I don’t agree. He was accountable – he had comments enabled on his blog (for most posts).
He wasn’t particularly anonymous — I’d met him, many people know who he is, it’s not much of a secret. He was at most consistently pseudonymous, and there’s a long fine tradition of that. Was Mark Twain (born Samuel Clemens) “anonymous and unaccountable”?
I’m not sure how you hold a blogger “accountable” for their opinions other than to sound off in the comments of the post, like Michael suggests. I wasn’t a regular reader, but as far as I know, SFDB’s comments were always open, albeit with some regular restrictions. Maybe a blogger firing squad? Just kidding.
Based upon some of the discussions over there, Rick was far from thin-skinned, as you say Bill. Have you read some of the comment threads? He’s been called pretty much everything over the years.
It sounds like he’s just tired of it.
The downfall of SFDB is classic hubris. Michael described Rick as a local “blog aggregator,” which is fair for 95% of what Rick did there. And he did a decent job of it.
Rick’s moderate success as an “aggregator” was a validation that locals were interested in his views on arts, events, and culture. The problem is that he somehow convinced himself that he had something valuable to contribute to political discourse. 5% of his blog became dedicated to radical progressive blog “snippets”. Many of those were non-local, and worse, bare-bones copy and paste with no relevant commentary. Unlike, for example Michael who uses others’ blog posts as a reference for his own comments and insights, Rick would simply re-post others’ work with a comment amounting to (and sometimes literally) “Yeah.”
The real trouble arose when disagreeing readers (like myself) called him on the political posts. Again, unlike Michael who is intellectually capable of going toe-to-toe with the likes of me or “Vic” and others in a constructive (albeit sometimes heated) way, Rick could not. It soon became clear to me and others that Rick’s politics are very much driven by hate, that he was very much the bully in his comments. Bullies tend to leave the playground when the other kids start pushing back–query whether that is in play here.
Also, I am not well versed on the systems for traffic measurement, but I think Rick made a big mistake when he started snipping his RSS feeds.