> I honestly don't care what the HN trolls, and the people who upvote them, supposedly "think" about me.
If that's true, why 750 words on the subject?
The issue I take with Dave Winer is that he seems to feel as though his accomplishments or contributions somehow elevate his words beyond criticism.
I will say again what I said yesterday – his post "about" Marissa Mayer was something I can only characterize as whiney. We can call it other things if that's less offensive: petulant, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing, perhaps. But the sense of entitlement to the respect and admiration of other people was something that dripped off of the post, and then off of his comments, and is a recurring theme, to my eye, of the man's writing.
His poor rhetorical choices – name-dropping, specifically – overshadowed his point. That's the gamble you make when writing headline-driven link bait.
But guess what? Fuck me, because I'm just some guy on the internet. But guess what else? So is Dave.
Participating in a technology doesn't afford a permanent apotheosis to all of one's self and works. Your words must still carry their own water. There's effective persuasion and then there's ineffective persuasion. Those outcomes vary depending on the audience.
Now we all have a choice: we can tightly corral our words. We can be selective in our audience, we can dole out our rhetoric with caution and precision.
Or we can blast that shit out to the whole of the world.
Now, Dave is quite excited to tell us how he helped make such a feat possible. And the consequence of his great work is we all get to talk about it. And sometimes we're not going to agree.
Sometimes we're not going to worship.
And that's life.
I take the point very well that HN comments can be pretty toxic. But a lot of the dissent around what gets posted from Dave Winer seems pretty legit. Even PG has weighed in on his poor attitude: