Editor’s note (April 2026): This article is part of Blog Herald’s editorial archive. Originally published in December 2005, it has been reviewed and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
Only the early blogosphere could produce this kind of irony: in December 2005, Mena Trott — co-founder and president of Six Apart, the company behind Movable Type, TypePad, and LiveJournal — took the stage at Les Blogs in Paris to deliver a speech about civility. About kindness. About the importance of thinking before you type and treating people online the way you’d want to be treated yourself.
Somewhere in the audience, projected live on a screen behind her, a backchannel IRC chat was running. And somewhere in that chat, a British attendee named Ben Metcalfe typed two words: “this is bullshit.”
Trott stopped her speech. She asked Metcalfe to stand up. When he did, she called him an asshole — and used language that, by any measure, would not have passed her own civility test. The room of 400 people went very quiet.
What followed became one of the defining incidents of early blogging culture. Not because it was uniquely dramatic, but because of what it revealed — about the difficulty of preaching values you haven’t fully internalized, about the gap between how founders present themselves and how they behave under pressure, and about what happens when the person you single out in public turns out to have considerably more standing than you assumed.
Who Ben Metcalfe actually was
Within hours of the confrontation, it emerged that Ben Metcalfe was not simply a random critic with a laptop. He was the project lead for the BBC’s developer network backstage.bbc.co.uk, an initiative representing one of the most respected public broadcasters on the planet. One that, it turned out, was also a Six Apart customer.
The optics were not good. Six Apart had just publicly humiliated a senior figure at the BBC — a paying customer — during a conference it had organized, in front of an audience of peers, investors, and press.
Metcalfe, to his credit, handled it with more composure than the moment might have demanded. He wrote about it on his blog with candor, acknowledged he’d lost his cool in using the word “bullshit,” and described the private conversation he and Trott had after the session — which he said ended with a handshake and was, in his words, genuinely useful. He didn’t try to escalate. He raised questions worth raising: about how blogging culture handles disagreement, about the tension between the American West Coast approach to communication and the directness common in British and European professional settings, and about whether “civility” as a concept was being used to suppress legitimate criticism rather than encourage genuine dialogue.
Those are still live questions. They didn’t get less interesting with time.
The contradiction at the center of it
What made the Les Blogs incident stick — what gives it staying power beyond the initial gossip — is the precision of its contradiction. Mena Trott’s core argument wasn’t wrong. The mid-2000s blogosphere was getting meaner. Personal bloggers were facing harassment. Comment sections were deteriorating. The dream of the internet as a space for genuine exchange was running up against the reality of anonymous cruelty.
But delivering that message from a stage, then immediately losing your temper at the first person who pushed back, demonstrated exactly why top-down appeals to civility so rarely work. The problem was never that people didn’t know they should be kinder. The problem was — and remains — that being kind is harder than preaching kindness, and that the pressure to perform civility while suppressing authentic reaction creates its own kind of dishonesty.
Metcalfe wasn’t being cruel. He was being direct. He disagreed with what he was hearing and said so, using strong language that, in his own cultural context, was closer to frustrated emphasis than personal attack. The decision to project the backchannel on the main screen — a choice Six Apart, as conference organizer, had made — meant his comment became public. In that sense, Trott was reacting to something she had inadvertently made visible.
There’s a lesson here for any founder who builds a public platform around a set of values. The values have to survive contact with real criticism. If they only hold when everyone agrees, they aren’t values — they’re preferences.
What this meant for Six Apart’s reputation
By late 2005, Six Apart was already navigating choppy water. MSN Spaces was eating into their audience. WordPress was growing faster than anyone had anticipated. The company was managing three distinct products — TypePad, Movable Type, LiveJournal — each aimed at a different market, each requiring sustained investment.
In that context, the Les Blogs incident wasn’t catastrophic on its own. But it added to a pattern. Mena Trott was Six Apart’s public face — its most visible spokesperson, its keynote voice. When she behaved in ways that looked impulsive or tone-deaf, it didn’t just reflect on her personally. It colored perceptions of the company’s judgment, its culture, and its ability to lead a space that was, at its core, about authentic communication.
The blogging community is unusually attentive to how its leaders behave. You don’t get to advocate for openness while shutting down criticism. You don’t get to build tools for self-expression while punishing people who use theirs.
The harder question the incident never quite answered
Ben Metcalfe, after the dust settled, wrote something worth sitting with. He noted that most of the people who objected to Trott’s speech had, in the years that followed, come around to seeing what she was pointing at — that the hostility of online spaces had real costs, particularly for personal and amateur bloggers who hadn’t signed up to be public figures.
She wasn’t wrong. He wasn’t wrong. Both things can be true.
The blogosphere in 2005 was learning something that social media platforms are still learning now: that genuine community requires more than a publishing tool. It requires norms, shared expectations, and some mechanism for handling the inevitable friction between honesty and harm. That problem hasn’t been solved. Every platform that promises to be “different” — more civil, more considered, more human — eventually confronts the same tension Mena Trott stumbled over in that Paris conference room.
What the Six Apart vs BBC moment captured, in miniature, is the central difficulty of building communities around values you genuinely hold but can’t fully embody. It’s easy to be for civility. It’s much harder to model it when someone types “bullshit” in large letters on a screen behind you, in front of 400 people, in a room you organized.
The incident didn’t end Six Apart. It didn’t define it. But it was a moment where the gap between the company’s public identity and its private reality became, briefly, visible to everyone — including the BBC.
