The social network says in the "Warning" dialog (below) that it was simply responding to complaints from users who reported the content to be objectionable. Hmm, we're curious who those users would be, and who they work for.

In any case, the ban, to whatever extent there was one, seems to have been lifted, at least judging from our own ad-hoc test just now.



In the meantime, we've just updated the original post with an important new privacy tip and some clarifications on two of our existing ones. Enjoy, and feel free to share — while you still can (cue ominous music).

UPDATE: Another tipster informs us that one or more of our Facebook articles were temporarily blocked from being posted within this Facebook group on the privacy changes.

(Top pic by pshab on Flickr)

As editor of the late Time Inc. title Business 2.0, Quittner once employed Valleywag emeritus Owen Thomas (as well as your current Valleywag). But somewhere along the way, Quittner soured on Thomas.

Thomas jumped to Valleywag and Business 2.0 folded. When Quittner landed at Fortune, Thomas wrote about Quittner's inflated title, covered Fortune's suspension of his blogging privileges, and quoted the Scrabulous-playing columnist saying he had "too much time on my hands."

Quittner seemed to take it personally. After jumping to Time, he used the magazine as his personal burn book, noting in January that a Sony virtual world wouldn't create an avatar "as fat as your average tech-gossip blogger."

Now Quittner's at it again, with a Sims 3 review in which he creates a "Loser" character named "Thomas Woodchuck" and burns him alive (see clip above). As several tipsters have noted, the resemblance between Woodchuck and Thomas can't be missed — nor can the creepiness of teaching his daughter to drown an enemy in the pool.

It seems early to get too alarmed; there are worse things than being called an "unredoubtable... woodchuck" in an anonymous comments, or killed virtually in a videogame. We're just a little surprised Time indulges Quittner's grudge — or that the reporter, after all this time, still holds it.

The hedge-fund chief today answered a series of questions about his press on PE Hub, a website for the private-equity industry. Valleywag's coverage of Thiel figured prominently. Some choice quotes:

I think they should be described as terrorists, not as writers or reporters. I don't understand the psychology of people who would kill themselves and blow up buildings, and I don't understand people who would spend their lives being angry; it just seems unhealthy.

Awww, he thinks we're angry!

It's like terrorism in that you're trying to be gratuitously meaner and more sensational than the next person, like a terrorist who is trying to stand out and shock people.

It's odd that Thiel would equate provocative writing with terrorism when the arch libertarian seems so comfortable saying sensational things to get attention. Last month, he wrote that women's suffrage ruined democracy in the early 20th Century. At Stanford Law School, Thiel started a conservative newspaper and is said to have had some kind of noisy fight with campus liberal Rachel Maddow, now of MSNBC fame.

So it's surprising that Thiel is so tight-lipped after saying "what gets written is half right, and half entirely wrong." We'd love to hear specifics. Sadly, as in our past attempts to get comments from Thiel, none have been forthcoming.

Thiel is hardly alone in trying to turn tech blogs into a rah-rah chorus. There is now an entire media ecosystem dedicated to disseminating CEO and investor spin. Thanks to Thiel, anyone who questions the publicist-approved message can now be labeled a terrorist. Whatever: Valleywag will continue to be a place that prints the truths that others are too polite to say out loud.

And Peter, on this my first day as the Valleywag, you couldn't have picked a better welcome gift.

Still, if we'd known repurposing other people's content, whether on Twitter, Tumblr, Tumblr or Tumblr, was a fast track to literally tens of thousands of dollars in publishing money, we'd have jumped on that trend sooner.

As opposed to what we're doing now, which is, uh, totally different.

(Top pic via Nick Douglas)

Because it sounds somehow even lazier than making a book out of your mom's email messages, a scheme hatched up, perhaps not coincidentally, by another Gawker writer.

Douglas insists the work is backbreaking — "reading a thousand jokes is like watching five hours of porn" — but he's already automated the process of collecting submissions and permissions. Those who make it into the book get no royalties, but a free copy of the work ensures they at least won't have to pay to see their own content in printed format.

So we've seen blog books, internet cat-picture books, a family email book and now the first book collection of tweets. Remember when the internet was the desperate medium, and had to steal its content from the incumbent players, rather than everything working the other way around? Those sure were the days.

Denton was impressed with Lacy at the time: She had a big cover story, a book deal, access to hotshot young founders and, oh yes, was "the hottest reporter in the tech world — ever." She passed on the opportunity and now writes for the likes of Yahoo and BusinessWeek.com.

But Lacy can stroke her ego by imagining how well things might have gone — and sending a "shout out" to the scandal-mongering publisher who, in a rare turn, briefly stroked that same ego himself. Fantasyland is the place where bubbles never explode!

• Some guy named Denton can't figure out how to sell ads on Valleywag.
• So he's going to sneak Valleywag posts onto Gawker.com, where Ketel One is happy to buy banners.
• Valleywag.com the URL will still work. Valleywag's RSS feed will still work. You will not have to go to Gawker.com to read Valleywag stories.
• In 2009, Owen will be posting full-time, maybe 6-12 posts per day. Everyone else is fired.
• Denton's trying to follow Wired's footsteps: Take an insidery, localized publication and make it a national daily read. Will it work? Maybe. Will Chris Tolles still reload obsessively? That's the challenge.
• Valleywag's traffic isn't enough to pay for two writers, even with Ketel One ads on every page. Denton's keeping Owen instead of me, because Owen likes to write about boring money issues that, in theory, Chris Tolles thinks are way more important than photos of Steve Jobs parked in a handicapped space.
• I'm here until December 1. Owen gets his Thanksgiving vacation. I get an extra month's rent.
• TechCrunch gets to pretend we don't exist, which makes them look like a bunch of five-year-olds. Everybody wins!
• You're worried about me? I owe the New York Times one short freelance article, that's all I feel comfortable saying. I'll be fine, because I'm nuts. Nuclear combat, toe to toe with the Rooskies!

Get out of categories such as politics to which advertisers are averse. No more election coverage on Gawker!

Renegotiate vendor contracts. So much for the bar bill at Joey & Eddie's.

Consolidate titles. I will soon be writing Valleywag as a column for Gizmodo or Gawker, whichever will take me. Gabriel Snyder is a lovely young man. As is Jason Chen. I can't decide which one is more handsome and brilliant, really.

Offshore more. And I will be writing said column from a newly affordable Iceland.

Variable compensation. For less.

More value for marketers. With more ads on it.

1. Stick to people and/or companies already famous on the Internet, either as Net celebs or because they're in today's news. Sergey and Larry doing anything is gossip — photos are even better. A bank intern would have to do something really crazy to be news.
2. Tell us something more specific than "She likes the booze." Tell us something unique and entertaining she did while drunk. Something David Duchovny would do on Californication.(Illustration by HowStuffWorks)
   
   
3. When in doubt, hit Send. We'll sort it out. Some readers worry too much that we've already seen it. That's not a problem here. Worse, you might worry we'll cost you your job. That's a valid concern. But we've got over twenty years' total experience at protecting our sources for national publications. I know how not to "burn a source," in newsroom jargon, as reflexively as I know that I began the previous sentence with a conjunction. We know your manager reads us. It's in the server logs. So yeah, trust us. People say Valleywag will stab you in the back. That's a lie. Valleywag will only stab you in the face.

• Nicholas was the first to get a look at Yahoo's Buzz:
  Screenshots of Yahoo Buzz, a Digg competitor
• His historical analysis of why newspapers keep failing to grasp the online opportunity was widely read in the industry:
  5 ways the newspapers botched the Web
• He covered the craze for Facebook applications on its way up — and down:
  The Valley's Facebook frenzy fades
• Google's Chrome browser provided endless comedy:
  Uh oh, the b-tards got their hands on Google's Chrome comic
• He dug into what really made some tech gigs suck:
  Tech's 10 worst entry-level jobs
• The fiery implosion of Pay By Touch, a biometrics company, provided Carlson with one of his best ongoing stories. A former Pay By Touch employee recently complimented him for his work, telling me that his stories on Valleywag were the best source of information on what was happening to the company:
  Pay By Touch story archive
• And most recently, Nicholas uncovered the love connection behind Michael Arrington's MySpace scoops:
  Michael Arrington pounding his MySpace source

• Melissa's debut column was not afraid to be servicey — and also telling about the Valley's peculiar sex culture:
  How do I get a Stanford girl to blow me?
• The first question Melissa got asked: "No one actually goes to sex parties in the Valley, do they?" The second: "Can you get me in one?" That prompted a column:
  Sex parties in the Valley — how do I get invited?
• The sexographics of the Web's top companies:
  Googlers getting laid way more than Microsoft, Yahoo
• We called the SXSW conference in Austin "spring break for geeks." Melissa lived it:
  The art of the SXSW orgy
• Melissa tackled the Web's relentless misogyny with wit:
  Five reasons why women really do need to get off the Internet
• And she also critiqued the media's writing about the business of sex with an insider's eye:
  How the New York Times missed the latest escort scandal
• My all-time favorite?
  
  How to lie to your friends with Web 2.0

• An expert in online video from his film-school days and his stint at NewTeeVee, Jackson was not afraid to be servicey when the Olympics rolled around:
  The definitive guide to watching the Olympics online
• Jackson was one of the first to publish the news that sex blogger Violet Blue had been unpublished:
  Blogger completely deleted from Boing Boing archives
• Apple cofounder, cable-TV star? Jackson knew pageview gold when he saw it:
  Steve Wozniak and Kathy Griffin all broken up
• The surreal estate of the Valley's rich and famous was a constant obsession:
  Larry Page's $7 million manse
• Who needs venture capital when you've got a trust fund?
  How daddy's money paid for Andrew Baron's Rocketboom
• Jackson and I loved to disagree about San Francisco's gay-marriage- and hair-gel-loving mayor:
  The east coast's love affair with Gavin Newsom
• Google executive Marissa Mayer was this site's first obession, but Jackson's fashion sense took his critiques to a new level:
  Marissa Mayer and friends on display at department store
• Who can forget the time Jackson got TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington a milkshake? Readers drank it up:
  Michael Arrington drinks Valleywag's milkshake

I have some bad news. Here's the heart of it: we are cutting 19 of our 133 editorial positions and suspending bonus payments at the start of next year. With the savings, we are increasing base pay and hiring 10 new people on the most commercially successful Gawker sites. But I know that's scant consolation for the colleagues we're losing and for those of you who have been enjoying the bonus windfalls from breakout stories.

You can guess the reason for these brutal measures: the recession. Sure, the company is currently profitable and advertising sales are up by about 30% on their level of a year ago. Our biggest clients are consumer electronics and entertainment companies that are relatively well insulated. And, yes, this is not the first time I've predicted doom: in July 2006, when we "battened down the hatches" and closed down Sploid and Screenhead; and in April this year, when we spun off Idolator, Gridskipper and Wonkette.

But now the credit crisis is clearly going to affect every sector of the economy. Advertising buys typically plunge after the Christmas shopping season, and 2009 is obviously going to be exceptionally difficult. We have to prepare for the worst, now, rather than when the worst comes upon us.

We never used to talk about the business side of the operation. Traffic was the only concern; my belief was that juicy news would draw the readers and the advertising would take care of itself. We were patient; even if it took four years for a site to develop the audience that finally registered with advertisers, we had the time. No longer.

Sites such as Consumerist, whose success has been measured more in traffic and recognition than in revenue, now need to cover their costs. I can't underline enough that this harsh commercial judgment is no reflection whatsoever on the editorial teams that are being cut.

Each of these sites performs a vital function. Consumerist provides an outlet for disgruntled consumers that exists nowhere else on the web; Valleywag has given puffed-up Silicon Valley the prick it's long needed; and Fleshbot manages to be classy and filthy at the same time. The site leads and writers on all of our sites have done exactly what we asked them to: work harder than the competition and grow the audience. It's my commercial judgment that's been at fault.

One reason we're eliminating these positions is to reinforce the teams on the sites with the most commercial appeal—Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker and Gawker—and the properties such as Jezebel, io9, Deadspin and Jalopnik which are poised to join them.

One new recruit we're confirming today is Gabriel Snyder from W Magazine in Los Angeles who, as managing editor of Gawker.com, will continue the site's evolution into a national news and entertainment site. We are also hiring new contributors at Jezebel, Deadspin, Kotaku and io9.

Even in the growing editorial teams we need to control costs. And that means a new look at traffic bonuses. We've been spending $50,000 a month on average on pageview bonuses. The scheme has made writers hustle for traffic even in teams so large that there was a risk they become lumbering. It's helped us hit a record 274m pageviews last month, up 69% on last September.

Pageview bonuses will continue this quarter. And we are committed to pageview incentives, and to measuring performance by a writer's individual pageviews, in the long term. But a first quarter spike in traffic — and the resulting bonus payments — could be dangerous if advertising markets are troubled next year. And we're assuming that the economy is so volatile that most of you would like a little bit more predictability about your own income.

That's why we're suspending the pageview bonus for the first quarter at least, but making up for some of the loss of income by raising pay. If you haven't recently agreed to a new rate, your monthly base amount will automatically be increased by 5% in January.

The news about the job and bonus cuts will be demoralizing. The golden age of the blog is over, people will say. Gawker Media is behaving like those big media companies that we mock so easily. I could come up with some bullshit line about how much worse it would have been to wait until we were forced to control costs; or how much more unpleasant life will be at the many internet ventures and newspapers that won't make it through the downturn. I could give you my optimistic spin about the glorious future that awaits us on the far side of this downturn.

But there is no escaping the fact that we're losing some excellent colleagues and the environment next year will be bleak. The one consolation is that there will be plenty of news for us to break — starting with this email, which you are free to leak.

Desperately wanting to find spin, I went to the Silicon Valley gossip site, Valleywag, which makes no qualms about writing stories with its own snarky spin. Yet calling PR people “the most annoying people in our inbox” did not raise any red flags on SpinSpotter. Writing that Rupert Murdoch is “not going to have any luck recruiting an outsider to fill the spot” of MySpace China chief executive wasn’t spin either.

What Miller deems "spin," we call "stating the obvious." But we're pleased as punch to have the paper of record declare, on the record, that Valleywag is spin-free. As a further test, perhaps it should run SpinSpotter on Miller's blog post.

Or, better yet, SpinSpotter should test its own rhetoric. The startup has made much of the fact that one founder is conservative, another liberal. But both have a clear bias: They are technologists, prone to think that they know how the world works. Media is assembled just like code, SpinSpotter seems to say, and automated tests can reveal the bugs. That only works if you assume you're smarter than everyone else. We'll indulge in a biased stereotype: Sounds like most programmers we know.