When you get banned by the people you agree with you start thinking about your faith in humanity …
I am reading her articles for as long as I am on Medium. There was a time when I was checking Medium, despite my anger on listicles, before users could be blocked, before the feed could be tweaked, exclusively checking my feed to see if @girlziplocked wrote anything new. I think, that is what one does when one likes some music, written think pieces, videos on Youtube or whatever: you follow up and check it out for new stuff. Right? Am I bad at Internet?
But then I took the invitation of Medium and started answering to people. I did my best to answer with things that make sense as standalone articles, enjoying the bumps in my stats that answers to popular stories brought in. There were some answers I really, really cared about, such as this one:
https://medium.com/p/dcb77d98317b
or this one:
https://medium.com/p/dcb77d98317b
or this one:
https://medium.com/p/dcb77d98317b
These are some things that inspired me to reply. I know, if you look I rarely reply with “yes”, “kudos”, “amazing stuff”, “THIS”, “great stuff”. It hurts me to hit publish to such things. I do sometimes, when I find I can develop an idea from a positive thing I reply with congratulations, like this:
https://medium.com/p/dcb77d98317b
So, then following up on @girlziplocked for so long, I found myself wanting to write back. Yes, despite my admiration, no kudos were sent. It must have been this? I had some articles as replies to her:
https://medium.com/p/dcb77d98317b
and this:
https://medium.com/p/dcb77d98317b
Then, today, trying to respond to Conor Kosidowski I noticed my original reply was an orphan. And I thought, well that must be a bug. Then I feared, for one minute, that something happened to Holly Wood. Something of the horrible sorts that swiped out Kel Campbell a while ago. And again, I was too late to understand what happened. No! I felt sorry. I searched for Holly Wood and I found this: Holly Wood. Where is the other account? What happened?
I rushed to twitter, to ask a question and behold:
… thank you kind Twitter software, I don’t want to follow those people. I want to understand, its my bug.
I just don’t get it … I know I am a rushed up type, maybe I should wait out to understand, but then again, patience still isn’t my thing.
I am an amateur writer who jumps for joy when Todd Hannula 🤓 or Tim Barrus or Leah Stella Stephens 🐀 highlighted or twitted something I wrote. Maybe I bored Holly to death. … OK, sorry for the ironic victimization, I couldn’t help it, I am anything but modest, but I do jump for joy. I jump for joy for any of you people who out of the blue stumbled upon my thoughts, as tinkered with as they are, and decided to follow or to recommend, or, the best part, to talk to me. Do I sound like an obnoxious person who stalks people and should be blocked?
The only thing I really, really hope for is that this ban/block is not a form of shielding, a way to turn off any sound that distracts from a “message”, from a staged play with people’s ideas and minds. This would be a disaster, to find that one I watched as a leader in clarity for so long turns out to only care for effectiveness and efficiency, not for debate and truth. Oh, that, that would be terribly sad.
I still hope it’s a bug on Medium.