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Comment by turbodog | Hacker News Reader

Um, no. These people were disappeared: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rettig_Report

Apparently her blog was only moved. Inconvenient, yes. Gross human rights violation, no. See also: comparing yourself to Rosa Parks.

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I don't see any reason to fret over a word, it was never compared to human rights violation in the post and in the context they did disappear her from her chosen handle on the site which is just as much as removing her blog as it isn't linked to the other in any other way.

Additionally, the post title 'Tumblr disappears [someone]' pretty much implies they're not being sent to the gulag or gitmo, it's just a figure of speech.

People sent to the gulag were, as far as I know, never disappeared. They were arrested, subjected to a trial, and sentenced. Transitive "disappear" entered modern English from Spanish used to describe the actions of the US's allies against their citizens during the Cold War.

"Disappear" (transitive) is absolutely a reference to a human-rights violation. See http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/disappear:

disappear (ˌdɪsəˈpɪə)

— vb

1. ( intr ) to cease to be visible; vanish

2. ( intr ) to go away or become lost, esp secretly or without explanation

3. ( intr ) to cease to exist, have effect, or be known; become extinct or lost: the pain has disappeared

4. ( tr ) (esp in South and Central America) to arrest secretly and presumably imprison or kill (a member of an opposing political group)

In the fourth of four variants, where all three of the earlier ones seem to apply well here. Language is language. Causes and issues, no matter how grave, don't get to own bits of it.

None of the first three apply here. They are all clearly marked as intransitive ("The train disappeared into the night") rather than transitive ("Tumblr disappeared her").

The first three are intransitive senses; I'm sorry the abbreviation "intr" wasn't familiar to you, but it's quite common in dictionaries. Please delete your unnecessarily aggressive comment, ajross.

It's an inflammatory word whose use is designed to associate with despicable and unpleasant deeds. It's in bad taste to dilute the meaning of the word for personal vanity.

It's a perfectly valid usage that does not at all necessarily imply political assassinations or other despicable. No reasonable person would interpret her post's title as claiming any kind of equivalence with political assassination, and any suspicion of that wouldn't survive a cursory reading of the actual post.

Also, Ms. Boyd holds a PhD from the Berkeley School of Information and is a well known & respected Microsoft researcher in social networking & media and online identity. The professional interest in not having broken links to her writings alone is sufficient to remove this matter from the realm of "personal vanity," nevermind the more substantive yet slippery matters of identity.

Absolutely agreed. What Tumblr did was rotten, but we live in an age where people are genuinely disappeared on a daily basis, and we've even had posts to HN regarding missing persons. It's very misleading to use the word to mean something different given the amount of proper usage it receives.

Yeah, but, if you're a very important social media researcher who has important information to disseminate to your followers in order to justify your own very importance, then anything short of

"Tumblr disappeared me…"

isn't going to generate the same outrage, and publicity, that Xeni Jardin did when she tried to erase Violet Blue's posts from BoingBoing. "Erase posts" being the conventional and operating phrase. So don't blame her; it's the social media-generated apathy.

No, I will blame her. Of course lying and exaggerating will generate more outrage, that's exactly what I meant by my claim of "linkbait". She could have generated more outrage by saying that Tumblr raped her, but I do not believe the ends (generating outrage) justify the means (being misleading).

I was being sarcastic if reference for not blaming her. For a person who markets themselves as a preeminent scholar on all things social, it seems odd that the only times I hear about her is when she's over-dramatizing some issue related to her personal interests or herself.

Again, this person has never created anything, held down a job that required results or contributed anything aside from opinion and self-centered promotion to any discourse. She reads about what others do in order to pass judgement and when people, or in this case Tumblr, doesn't take her seriously, she whines. I expect more reports of violations from this source in the future.

Um, no. 'Disappear' as a transitive verb predates all of that by many decades. E.g.: 1897 Chem. News 19 Mar. 143 "We progressively disappear the faces of the dodecahedron."