The Trials of Philippinefailblog

In our last post we detailed the origin story of philippinefaiblog.com from humble wordpress blog to a domain with it's own name.  In this post we will look at the troubles that plagued PFB leading to its first shutdown in November 2014.

http://itsmorefuninthedark.blogspot.com/2014/11/philippine-fail-blog.html

Now how did PFB go from a website that was only pointing out the deficiencies in Filipino culture and allowing foreigners to vent to a hate blog??

On December 16, 2013 FiloFail declared emphatically that PFB was in fact not a hate blog.

This is evidence that PFB was in fact facing accusations of being a hate blog. The accusations likely coming from Filipinos who had happened upon the site. So what was the source of these accusations of hate?

Perhaps it had to do with the subject matter of the articles and the comments descending into stereotypical ad hominem.

Take this article for instance.  "If you could have a Filipino brain for 5 minutes..."

What is the purpose of this article but to ridicule Filipinos? There is always a place for comedy that exaggerates stereotypes. But is this the purpose of PFB?  

The purpose of this blog is partially for my own personal therapy and venting my frustrations. Many of the comments by readers completely agree and identify with my posts. This blog is just one of many which express the same frustrations and opinions.

Surely there is a fine line between stereotypical jokes and venting frustrations.   But filofail, now FiloFail, claims that PFB has beomce a hate blog.

Did FiloFail want to stop his slide into hating Filipinos? Was the hate beginning to flow through him?Was he beginning to feel the dark side?

Is this venting or is this hate?

Let's look a little further.  Here are examples of posts on PFB before the shutdown and which might give credence to the notion that PFB was becoming a hate blog.

   

 

It's really hard to pin down what exactly caused FiloFail to state categorically that PFB had become a hate blog.  Nearly every post has the same formula: state a problem, curse and rant about it, note how dumb Filipinos are. And the comments follow suit with all kinds of exaggerated stereotypes brought out.  

It's all usually pretty funny. No one is specifically directing hatred towards the Filipino people. I can understand how cursing and ranting can be venting and therapeutic. It's much harder to locate with precision what it is that caused FiloFail to declare PFB had become a hate blog.

Nevertheless, the shutdown only lasted a day.  There is an article posted on Novemeber 5, 2014 and then the next article posted is two days later on the seventh.

With the first resurrection of PFB also came this exciting news:

Now PFB had become a social network. This particular website is now defunct but the current iteration of PFB fully integrates the social network aspect and in fact PFB is more a social network than a blog.

Thus we have a brief look at PFB from March 28, 2013 to it's death on November 6th, 2014 and it's resurrection one day later.