Iran's blogfather: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are killing the web
Throwaway account for obvious reasons.<p>At the time of Iranian disputed elections of 2009, I worked as an engineer for one of the biggest Iranian websites with millions of audience looking for reliable source of news, in the strict absence of any news, when people were getting killed on the streets of Tehran.<p>I see the need to clarify who this self-titled 'blogfather' of Iran is. I see this need as things get out of control quickly on hn due to hype and links like this jump to get 1k votes, where most of the voters simply vote because others voted.<p>For those who do not know, since just before the Iranian disputed elections of 2009, Hossein Derakhshan has been living in Iran. He was 'supposedly' in jail, but there were rumors about his collaboration with the Iranian government to build their cyber presence, which almost did not exist at the time. Shortly after his arrest, many anti government bloggers inside Iran were arrested too, there are speculations that he revealed their identities.<p>Years before entering Iran, Derakhshan was busy with 'blogfathering' Iranian web space for a few years, explicitly being anti Iranian government, which always bring visitors. This way, at the rise of the weblog era, he was doing good. He had a big number of visitors which could make him enough money to not look for another job.<p>During post golden era of weblogs, specially when the Iranian Digg copy websites appeared, his monopoly weblog business was going south. At that point, he started publishing more unconventional content in Iranian web space to gain attention. Mostly, they were of sexual nature. A good example is a video he published where he asks an Israeli girl to repeat graphic sexual words in Farsi (Persian) after him. The girl did not speak a word of that language. Another example is his dedicated website to naked pictures of Monica Bellucci.<p>I am not writing this to reveal that Hossein Derakhshan is a successful web attention seeker. I am writing this to let you know that in summer of 2009, when our tiny team was trying to protect huge DDoS attacks on a handful of low budget EC2 instances funded by donations, we were convinced that on the other side of the line, Mr Derakhshan had made a deal to conduct the operations by hiring Russians. This was by tracing his old account on our website to multiple new accounts claiming how they enjoy taking down the website, and let me tell you this, if you write thousands of lines on the web with your identity, it is not easy to escape your writing style when you pretend to be someone else.<p>Another elections is coming in a couple of months in Iran, where the government allows high profile media to report from inside Iran, hence this article pop up out of no where. This is a known pattern.<p>I had to get this off my chest after so many year. It is disturbing to see links like this on the front page of hn, where people claim to be pro democracy and freedom. This hurts.