Subtitled "A mischevous online bogey man is haunting the dreams of new Brooklyn," the article is mostly about the tone of the discussion over at  Brownstoner—what writer Adam Sternbergh calls "the unique undertow of anger in Brownstoner comments."

The NY Mag story also focuses on a commenter named "The What" and his obsession with the coming Brooklyn apocalypse.

I can’t tell if this article will be of interest to anybody/everybody.

Snarky commenter, The What, is the real story here. But the article does talk about John Butler,  and his blog, the Brooklyn Flea and all the rest (Upper East Side childhood, Princeton education, MBA from NYU, Hedge funder, who blogged onthe side…) They sure do love Brownstoner over at New York Magazine.  Here’s an excerpt:

"Butler’s adopted borough has proved to be especially fertile soil
for blogs, as many of its recent transplants have, like Butler, been
eager to chronicle their experience in dispatches sent out to the
world, like homesteaders mailing letters back from a new frontier.
Among these sites, though, Brownstoner holds a distinct and exalted
position, thanks largely to Butler’s acumen in staking out the happy
middle ground between citywide Websites like Curbed and Gothamist and
the dozens of Brooklyn microblogs and message boards where people
gather to rant and rail and cheer and commiserate about the foibles and
frustrations of their neighborhoods. Brownstoner covers the whole
borough (although the objections here of residents of Bay Ridge,
Canarsie, and other outlying regions are duly noted), but it covers the
whole borough as though it were one big block, where everyone has
gathered to gossip on their stoops.

"As
such, Butler’s become not only a fairly well-known blogger (the site
draws 150,000 visitors a month, and he was introduced to the world in a
2007 Observer article headlined BROWNSTONER: IT’S ME!), but
also a kind of virtual developer, someone who doesn’t literally rebuild
neighborhoods but who has the power to shape the way those
neighborhoods are perceived. By uncovering derelict architectural gems
in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, or trumpeting the opening of an inviting
new bar in Crown Heights, Butler has introduced Brooklyn’s far-flung
neighborhoods to people who would otherwise never consider visiting
them, let alone buying a house and settling there. On Brownstoner, the
bridesmaid borough is now the bride. The site celebrates what’s
sometimes called New Brooklyn: a vision of the borough as a diverse and
lively enclave of flowering neighborhoods, all jammed with engaged
homeowners, reborn blocks, and gorgeous and stately and (by Manhattan
standards) bargain-priced real estate, waiting to be polished up under
a tasteful eye. Brownstoner didn’t create the Brooklyn renaissance, of
course, any more than a weatherman creates a storm. But, like a
watchful forecaster, the site has tracked the course of the weather
pattern—in this case, the vortex created by rising real-estate prices
that sucked in a fresh batch of hopeful residents, drawn by the promise
of more space and tree-lined blocks and safer streets and majestic
brownstones and ample sunlight and the borough’s sudden,
self-perpetuating cachet…"