Sunday, April 19, 2015

The Rise and Fall of Wrongplanet.net

Wrongplanet.net is a website started in 2006 that grew by leaps and bounds over a several year period.  At one time they stated in their titlebar that autism equals good.  They've also banned certain members, including your humble blogger, who wrote posts disagreeing with tenets of the neurodiversity movement or making statements that having an autism spectrum disorder might not be such a good thing after all.  The members seem to have a penchant for abuse and name calling of those whose opinions are different from theirs.  Your humble blogger has been labeled a minimally educated sociopath, an asshole, and an intellectual lightweight and other names by some of the denizens of this august URL.

The website has also been mired in controversy from time to time.  First there was the William Freund case where he posted that he was going to hurt someone and apparently Wrongplanet neglected to notify authorities and he killed two people.  There was also another member, Hans Peterson, who went out and murdered his dermatologist.  Another member named "Cephalopod" indicated that he might go out and shoot and murder as many neurotypicals as he could.  After being reported to the FBI, he was apparently interviewed by authorities in Switzerland where he apparently resided.

Some of the members were appalled when the founder Alex Plank accepted funding from their nemesis Autism Speaks for his now defunct Autism Talk TV series.

Gadfly wonders if this could have affected Wrongplanet.net's traffic.  Perhaps it has.  Yuval Levental, one of my readers, has alerted me to the fact that the WP's traffic has actually significantly declined in the past two years, as shown by the stats on this website.

Yuval has apparently pondered this also and wondered how a typical reader of wrongplanet.net might view the situation.  He created this rather amusing tongue-in-cheek video that might better explain the situation.  I wanted to embed the video here, but was not able to do it where it included the subtitles that Yuval added.  But you can view it from the above link.