Reconsidering Bearblog; or, On the Value of Words

Last Sunday, I wrote a post calling out Robert Birming's repetitive writing. The post gained traction, receiving around 85 toasts before it got shadow-banned—removed from trending. I'll admit it: I got salty over this. Was it because the post was controversial? That it continued to receive toasts even after being hidden—and that I received a few supportive emails and guestbook entries—suggests that it wasn't a touchy or taboo subject. Was it because the post was low in effort? Sure, it took about 15 minutes to make, and there's an element of hypocrisy in calling out low-effort posting through a low-effort post, but I've written short posts that are more trivial and less consequential (e.g., responding to a quote when the quote is longer than my response or jotting down unicode inputs). Was it because it was too harsh? I didn't go as far as to suggest Birming's writing was lame or the equivalent of AI slop (but see Absurd Pirate's effort), and my remarks were directed at Birming's…