I'm loathe to give his name – seeing as he's shut up shop precisely because he wanted to avoid the glare of publicity – but he had achieved some kind of notoriety for for his incredibly downbeat recollections of his previous 24 hours, his regional weather reports, his take on the coming evening's television schedules and, most notably, his highly instructional video on how to make iced tea. Not groundbreaking, I admit, but curiously addictive to watch.

Despite being intensely private, he thought nothing of sharing his thoughts online. He deliberately steered away from self promotion, and the fact that the world was able to observe him chatting away seemed to him to be a slightly irritating side effect of the process of making videos. But then someone, or a group of people, decided that he looked like a "paedo", or a "rapist", and suddenly – so it seems – he was targetted in a campaign of online harrassment. When his family started to become involved, our videoblogger understandably decided to make himself scarce.

The New York Times recently published a long feature about "trolling" and online harrassment. It's a fascinating piece, despite the fact that it's impossible to feel any sympathy for any of the characters involved. Particularly when they decide to refer to their activities as as "experiments", or "sociological inquiries into human behaviour", rather than "bullying", or "making the lives of others distinctly unpleasant for no particular reason".

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