In recent months, the embarrassing "Stormfront for philosophers" blog ceased operations ("due to security concerns" it says at the URL for the site) and then the latest iteration of the metablog disappeared (I'm not sure when, but some time it appears in the last few weeks). Both blogs were marked by the expression of controversial views, but both were also marked by anonymous abuse--some of it defamatory in many jurisdictions--of members of philosophy academia.
So what happened?
Since I do not know who ran these sites, these speculations are based on circumstantial evidence. In the case of the Stormfront for Philosophers blog, I have heard there were concerted efforts to figure out who the contributors were, which led to the closure of the site. (The evidence I was sent suggests the contributors were not exactly "philosophers" as opposed to people who may have studied some philosophy at some point in their academic life.) In the case of the latest iteration of a metablog, it appears the person responsible for the site was not careful in covering his tracks, and was outed by the digital record by a tech-savvy grad student, who then communicated this to his dissertation advisor, among several others (including me). Prudently, he seems to have shut it down. (I will not be disclosing the name of the alleged creator of the site.)
This hardly means anonymous and pseudonymous chatter is dead in philosophy cyberspace. I permit such comments, when I open comments, though I moderate and only open comments for substantive input. The Feminist Philosophers blog (more aptly described as Some Feminist Philosophers Who Blog) continues to permit anonymous and pseudonymous posting and commenting, though they generally moderate out the worst garbage--and ever since we discovered they are a UK-based blog, they've even stopped posting defamatory material about me. Daily Nous does less well, though anonymous/pseudonymous abuse of friends of "Justice Whineberg" as he was aptly known on the various metablogs will get you deleted.
The old metablogs were not all bad, though the last iteration was pretty awful, and tedious, from the bits I saw earlier in the year. But occasionally the old metablogs would offer a gem, like this one.
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