Plea to support DCPs blog

[Philo Sofee]

Why does he spend so much time obsessed with us? He could have written 3-4 books by now if he wasn't constantly checking in here.

It's really quite sad.

It's both sad and psychologically fascinating.

I see what you did here...

[Philo Sofee]

I agree with Kish. The entertainment coming from the blog is well worth visiting a few times a week and lying your ass off with a 5 star rating to keep his sagging ass writings propped up. I mean, after all, just like his Mormonism, it is always others faults his rating is so drastically low, why certainly, not his fault!

[Rivendale]

Why does he spend so much time obsessed with us? He could have written 3-4 books by now if he wasn't constantly checking in here.

It's really quite sad.

It's both sad and psychologically fascinating.

I wonder if at times Dan is in the middle of fast and testimony meeting and he thinks....Gemli is right.....

[drumdude]

With three other people, including his wife, I was involved yesterday in a two-hour conversation with a member of the Twelve. At one point, one of our number (recently announced as the next president of a large temple overseas) referred to us non-apostles and non-apostolic-wives as "the people in the pews." "We're all in the pews," responded Elder X.

It's actually quite shocking that after being in the presence of an actual Apostle of Jesus Christ, who has been given a special witness (we all know what that means wink wink) he ended that momentous day by coming here to sift through Satan's web-forum.

I think if I had met Peter, Simon, James, hell even the current Vicar of Christ on Earth, I would have spent the rest of the evening in quiet contemplation of the occasion.

Interestingly, Dan treats it more like meeting a high level Pepsi executive. "We're all Pepsi drinkers, even the CEO!" Yes, quite profound. And quite telling, in my humble opinion.

[Moksha]

I'm going to make it a regular practice to rate my entries at the HIGHEST possible score.

Dan, LDS Saints have been doing this for a long time whenever they have encountered ratings. Look at entries by the Saints on Amazon. The entry ratings are either to reward or detract, but rarely have to do with the substance. Look at how people are bolstered with likes and dislikes at Sic et Non. Your followers at Sic et Non will enthusiastically back this if you tell them it is part of the Lying for the Lord doctrine and part of fulfilling their Apologetic Oath (the one that ends in "Ca-chugga, ca-chugga, barzoom!").

[Doctor Scratch]

Quite interesting! I have several thoughts about this....

--First, DCP claims that this is an attempt to "silence" him, and I don't get his reasoning. How is a low star rating going to "silence" him? He can still "opine up a storm" as much as he wants. He's got "Interpreter" and Facebook and countless other venues where he can post his mediocrity.

--Elsewhere, he claims that this is about hurting the prominence that his blog will have in Google searches. This I don't get either. Do the star rating really affect that? And how much? He already named his blog after a very well-known Abelard work. Does that make him a hypocrite--i.e., riding on Abelard's coat-tails in the hopes of generating a higher readership?

--He also says that it will prevent people from finding their way to the blog--i.e., if they are searching certain topics, they'll be less likely to find their way over to SeN. Is this really what he wants? In case he hasn't noticed, his readership basically consists of two groups: sycophants who already know him from his role in other Church-related activities, or critics who hate his guts and are just there to tweak his nose--which is exactly what this latest stunt is. And it has been stunningly successful.

--I LOL'ed at his boast about "exceeding" his goal of writing 300,000 words per year. Yeah right! This means that he's averaging 1,000 words per day almost, and he says that he "doesn't count" his blogging! (So maybe he's counting the 1,000 words per day that he aims at gemli?) I say: prove it. Instead of recycling other people's writing in post after post, let's see some of this "massive" output. Let's see 1 month's worth of daily 1,000 word output. I say that he's incapable of doing it, and that he's lying through his teeth. He can barely manage to churn out a 250-word original blog entry on a daily basis, so his boasting in this regard seems to be little more than that: empty posturing. Pretty weak sauce.

--He complains about a couple of "new arrivals" to the comments section--folks who say they're giving him low reviews because his blog entries mostly consist of other people's texts that he's quoting. His response is to say that these are "notes" for his other, "more serious" writing project. Again: BS. Why post the "notes" to the blog? And as Dr. Stak rightly pointed out, these aren't "notes"--they're quotes. "Notes" would be points or ideas that he jotted down *in response* to his reading. The reality seems to be that he's incapable of sustaining daily original blog entries, so he recycles old ones or leans into the "cut-and-paste" thing that his been his meat and potatoes for years.

--In reality, the star ratings are a pretty low grade way of opining on the quality of the entries, and tellingly, DCP has got nothing to say about that: he doesn't care whether the entries are "good" or not--that ship sailed a long time ago. Instead, it's just about eyeballs, and drawing as much attention as possible. The thing is: negative attention is still attention, so I hope he's feeling better.

[drumdude]

The going rate on Patheos as of 5 years ago was about $3 per thousand eyeballs.

[Gadianton]

I'm pretty sure nothing DCP can do internally is going to entice search engines into noticing his blog. Google cares about things like, what other websites and blogs are linking to his blog, and the quality of those sites. The popularity of Patheos in general matters. It's a lot like how peer-reviewed scholarship works, and so we'd expect the apologists to have some trouble in this area.

It's kind of hilarious that he thinks getting a bunch of yes-men together to rate themselves very highly internally would matter to google. It's almost like building a site called Mormon Scholars Testify and calling it resounding endorsement of Mormon Scholarship.

Interpreter and FAIR Wiki linking to SeN and SeN linking back to Interpreter and the FAIR wiki is called a link farm, and it's pretty much the bread and butter of apologetics because aside from creating a phony sphere of interest, what else do they got? They always defend each other by saying things like, "The people who know Louis Midgley best..." but that's the kind of logic Google tries to break. So what they think matters to credibility is the exact opposite of what a search engine thinks.

Some links from official LDS sources could increase his profile. He linked to himself from Desert News by a non-active reference, pretty clever.

And if there's an A.I. looking for the originality of content, well then the actual amount of content he's got is going to shrink incredibly. That's how apps like Amazon fakespot work, is by looking at the repetitiveness of endorsements. And there's a whole heck of a lot of repetitiveness at every level at SeN.

[drumdude]

Lance the Atheist: "I feel I must give you a 1 star for misrepresenting me in this post."

If you're going to be ranking me low now because of personal pique (in addition, of course, to your previous explanation for voting me down), you probably won't be doing it here much longer. Today, I decided to be less tolerant of commenter malevolence and personal nastiness directed toward me than I've heretofore been.

The Echo Chamber is nearly complete.

[Philo Sofee]

Lance the Atheist: "I feel I must give you a 1 star for misrepresenting me in this post."

If you're going to be ranking me low now because of personal pique (in addition, of course, to your previous explanation for voting me down), you probably won't be doing it here much longer. Today, I decided to be less tolerant of commenter malevolence and personal nastiness directed toward me than I've heretofore been.

The Echo Chamber is nearly complete.

Next up, Fast and Testimony Meeting!