Larvatus Prodeo

This post is likely to be of interest mostly to those who are hosting a blog on Wordpress.com.

Looking at Fire Fly’s blog, I noticed that she’s discovered that a new feature on her hosted-by-Wordpress.com blog. It turned up without direct notification, and is opt-out, not opt-in. … » Problem No.1 (She’s disabled it, and you should too if you blog on wordpress.com - see below for instructions)

This new feature generates a list of “Possibly Related Posts” at the foot of your own posts, and it searches through a database of all other Wordpress.com blogs to do so. Now, just consider the variety of attitudes people have to the words “feminism” and “racism” for instance, and can you guess where this is going? Oh yes it did - the list of “possibly related posts” on Fire Fly’s feminist blog included links to posts written by white supremacists and anti-feminists (often in the same link) - fanfuckingtastic, eh? So your readers might well think that these posts are being recommended by you, instead of automatically, and what does that do to a poster’s credibility? …. » Problem No.2

Did I mention that these “possibly related post” links are not visible or able to be edited when you are writing your post? … » Problem No.3

Not only that, by having this feature enabled on your blog, it also means that posts from your blog are being included in the list generated by this “feature” on other people’s blogs, which for Fire Fly included those self-same white supremacists and anti-feminists, thus sending their readers to her blog. This is why she titled her post thusly: Warning! The new WordPress feature is utter trollbait. … » Problem No.4

I was very grateful for her post, because it enabled me to immediately disable this “feature” Continue reading ‘Wordpress.com enables another new “feature” to far from universal acclaim - PSA’