The seven habits of highly anal employees

Dear Examiner.com writers (and CubeGuy),

Go spam another site. You are not welcome here.

I empathize with you. Examiner.com has brought you on to cover topic X for them, in this case "Cubicles." If their sales pitch is similar to the one their Chicago coordinator tried to use to poach away my writers, they probably promised you exposure across a large, growing, national audience and told you that several of their examiners are making thousands of dollars each month.

However, the reality is that they pay you less than $5 per thousand impressions you receive on your articles and they're recruiting so, so many writers for inane topics like "Chicago Christian Fiction" and "Chicago Cult Classics" not to mention such great topics as "Jonas Brothers" and "Howard Stern" that there's no way anyone can get much of a push from being featured on their already crowded front page. You're on your own.

So you guys spam reddit. And you spam it hard.

Examiner.com writers spam Reddit (and Digg) so hard and consistently that I can only assume their editors explicitly direct their "examiners" to post their stories to the site. If that's the case, it's not much of a distribution system.

Case in point: The New page of the Chicago Reddit features 26 stories. As I type this, 11 of them are from Examiner.com. I often go over there looking for interesting local news and links. Over the last 6 months, as it has been overrun by "Examiners" I've found less and less there. You've killed that Reddit for me.

And so tonight I notice a linkbait headline on my beloved hacker news...with the dreaded "Examiner.com" source tag next to it. As a news junkie, that tag has become synonymous with blogspam and low-quality writing. So that's one strike against it.

Then I click inside to the comments and see someone else is wondering how this received any votes at all.

And then I see that the submitter has only submitted Examiner.com articles to HN.

Stop spamming us with your spammy content. It's not our fault Examiner.com has no way to help you get readers so you can make a few bucks a month.

Wow, that's a needlessly snarky article. "Proofreading emails multiple times before sending" and having hand sanitizer are bad traits? All of these examples are vague rants on reasonable behavior.

The best complaint he has is "parking their car crooked in the parking lot", but how does that make a person "anal"? If anything, it's careless anti-social people who park crooked.

Why is this garbage being voted up?

Phew, only two. Proofreading, of course - but not only that, but also checking and double checking the To and Cc. I don't want my email correspondence to end up on the internet jokes website because I accidentally include 'All' in the Cc. * And yes, it is exactly Outlook that is the very first application opened in the morning. After that I can safely pretend that I'm checking my email and read some Hacker News!

* This comment has been proofread. It has also been copied to clipboard in case my browser crashes on posting. Some spelling errors have been eliminated.