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I’m in Charlottesville, VA at UVA to give a speech during its “Proud to be Out” week, but wanted to see your comments on this news…covered by LezGetReal, Bilerico, and David Badash.
I don’t have time to do a full writeup, but I wanted to post because the news is kind of timely, given how I’ve considered what to do with the Blend (you’ll learn more soon about that issue since the news about the dealings with the bottom-feeding goons at Righthaven, LLC has trickled out on FB and Twitter). Righthaven, which works in partnership (and profit) with the Denver Post, has found itself in a lot of trouble lately that could affect the hundreds of blood money settlements that have been extracted from bloggers well-known and unknown. But we’re still here — broke — but still serving up Blend.
It’s odd that the corporate-money funded Queerty should shutter before independent, unfunded PHB. But it’s not clear what took Queerty down.
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Since you’re on locationI’ll provide the commentary on Queerty’s demise:
Buh-Bye!Good riddance. Queerty was one of the biggest offenders among trashy gay blogs that resorted to bad stereotypes, but also constantly misgendering trans women, offering the painfully outdated notion that all trans women are just gay men in extreme denial, gayjacking trans news to further their own agenda while throwing the trans community under a bus, etc. Most recently they proved their utter worthlessness and opportunistic nature by opening a story about murdered Brazilian trans activists by not only putting one of the victim’s male birth names in bold type to emphasize it, but then proceeding to show an uncensored picture of the poor woman lying on the morgue slab with the bullet holes highlighted, without offering ANY kind of content warning AT ALL. Queerty can fuck itself square in it’s ear. Good riddance to bad bullshit. I’ll celebrate it’s demise. Pam’s is 5000 times the site Queerty was.
Never read it.Guess I didn’t miss much?
I mostly read it…for the “Morning Goods” posts, until they stopped some while back, and they were (rather obviously) very gay-male-centric – unlike Gloria Brame’s posts on Bilerico! After that Queerty didn’t have quite the same appeal, and I only ever checked it out if I was really bored. I can’t say I’ll notice it’s gone.
Bye bye.
Not a big lossThey sometimes had a few interesting news items that other sites missed. But the articles themselves were just written horribly
Technical IncompetenceIt takes two things to run a “news” site. One is the business acumen to edit stories and sell ads that will generate clicks and money. The other is the technical and administrative competence to run the site. Queerty has had technical issues for a very long time — they were even visible to casual readers in the form of very slow response times.
What finally took them down was the same thing that kills a lot of technically incompetent small businesses: NO BACKUPS. If they had backups, they could have just restored the state from a previous backup. The inability to restore from backups has killed many a small business.
It is not enough to back up your data. You also must test the backups to be sure they can be restored. The worst time to find out that the backups are no good, is after the primary copy is gone.
And, while you are at it, make sure you have your source code, and that you can build your programs again if needed.
About timeI’m thrilled Queerty has shut down. It censored comments and allowed antigay trolls to villify, denigrate and dehumanize a lot of gay people on their site. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them were paid shills. Serves them right though. Good riddance!
Good riddanceanti-gay trolls, racist trolls, etc.
I will say that a small part of Queerty’s charm was that it was like the bitchy queen that stands in the corner of the bar throwing shade at everybody and evrything; the shade is hilarious the first few times you hear it but after that you kind of wish that the bitchy bar queen would get a life…
Queerty was kind of like that.
Won’t miss it.