Chief Blogging Officer
Mr. arctangent has helpfully informed me that psychotic conspiracy theorist Anton Nossik, LJ's "Chief Blogging Officer" is not actually part of the SUP leadership. arctan says he's a prominent Russian internet figure, and is in a position analogous to brad (and we know how much SUP listens to Brad). Of course, that raises the question of why SUP isn't scrambling to dissociate themselves from his ranting, since the misconception that he's actually in charge seems pretty widespread (at least among non-Russian users who haven't heard of him before). But I assume that's just SUP's normal uncommunicative incompetence, rather than an implicit endorsement of Nossik. This is mildly reassuring.
Here is Mr. Nossik's response to the whole circus. Writing in English this time, he contends that the versions of the article that made English-speakers so mad were either bad machine translations, or a biased translation produced by one of his opponents. I don't know about that -- transparent backpedaling also being a trademark of SUP -- but he does correctly point out that he never tried to misrepresent himself as the head of SUP or anything like that (he says his proper title is "social media evangelist").
I've got some real egg on my face here. After years of denouncing hasty email forwards and self-righteously directing lots of people to Snopes, I got worked up and made my own hasty, uninformed forward in a slightly different medium. Let's hope I've learned my lesson.
Here is Mr. Nossik's response to the whole circus. Writing in English this time, he contends that the versions of the article that made English-speakers so mad were either bad machine translations, or a biased translation produced by one of his opponents. I don't know about that -- transparent backpedaling also being a trademark of SUP -- but he does correctly point out that he never tried to misrepresent himself as the head of SUP or anything like that (he says his proper title is "social media evangelist").
I've got some real egg on my face here. After years of denouncing hasty email forwards and self-righteously directing lots of people to Snopes, I got worked up and made my own hasty, uninformed forward in a slightly different medium. Let's hope I've learned my lesson.