Mid-Nov Circular

Dear all,

With everything going on in the last 48 hours, we wanted to send a short note to everyone directly. BP has sputtered back to life in the past year, and with that revival comes all the familiar subcontinental pathologies: everyone believes they’re right, everyone believes moderation is biased, and everyone believes someone else is being unfair. In that sense, BP is working exactly as it always has.

We want to restate something very clearly: we’re not going to run a hyper-moderated blog. It takes too much time, too much energy, and, crucially, it’s an unfunded mandate. Nothing is more dispiriting than a dead space. Our approach has been simple and consistent:

1. Authors control their own threads.

If things escalate on your post, you shut it down when and where you see fit. That’s the cleanest system and the only one we can realistically sustain.

2. No bans, shadow bans, or entrapment games.

Once we go down the path of micro-policing, BP loses its character. That’s not the direction we want to take.

3. We do not manufacture controversy.

If anything, the only thing we are biased toward is what the audience reads and engages with. That’s it. Everything else is noise.

Reflections:

Some of you will have seen the recent exchanges where accusations were thrown in both directions, and where intentions were questioned. Without going into details: this is exactly how online political communities melt down; by assuming the worst in each other and by escalating minor provocations into existential battles. It’s the same pattern we saw a couple of years ago at a public talk by Rahul Gandhi in Cambridge: someone asked a loaded, “gotcha” question, the out of context reply went viral, people got outraged, and the whole thing became a cycle of reaction and overreaction. We’re drifting into the same dynamic.

Let’s not.

BP works only when people post, comment, disagree, and move on. If that stops, the blog dies. And as Omar’s recent post highlighted, we want authors to write more, not less.

So our simple request is this: Calm down, carry on, manage your own threads, and do not fall prey to the outrage factory.

If you feel strongly about a situation, reach out; if you want more balance, we’re happy to add an additional admin to offset the load (BP’s editorial board already functions with more factions than the Lebanese Parliament); if something crosses a line, handle it on your post. But let’s not turn BP into a miniature Whitehall where everything becomes bureaucratised. We’ve done extremely well this past year. Let’s keep the energy without burning down the house.

Warmly.