In Defense of Idiot Masses

I started one when Twitter started, got rid of it, tried keeping a "public" Twitter account for a while, got rid of that too, then had a private one for a bit with friends that I deleted when Facebook changed their feeds. I'll probably start one soon to mirror this new blog, too, hopefully permanently. (I also submit that if I weren't a strange person I wouldn't be writing about Twitter in the first place.)

> I use tumblr, and am completely unaware of the "social features" which Author speaks of. Threw a hissy fit? Really? Isn't that caring just a little too much?

Tumblr used to be my absolute favorite site, back when it was fresh and new and entirely basic. When they added the liking and reblogging I thought it was unnecessary, but acceptable. What pissed me off last year was their Tumblarity system. I can't fucking stand having numbers on web pages; it sets me off. (I dislike karma on HN, too, but this is a social site, whereas I always used Tumblr as a private engine.) It's what led to my ending the last blog I kept. I had a more freeform blog, and I'd started to realize I was posting more fluff content to boost Tumblarity and I was avoiding longform because it was dropping my score. Even now it irritates me that by blog is being "ranked" by such an arbitrary metric, and I wish there was an option to disable it and remove myself from the rankings.

I think it's a compliment to Tumblr that I got as upset as it was. Most sites are shitty enough that I don't notice when something's bad on it; Tumblr was such a perfect site that the addition seriously worsened it. It's still very good, but it's not what it once was; I was also upset because the Tumblr staff had seemed to share my design philosophy up to that point, and when they added that feature it confirmed the accusations facing them that they cared more about socialite frivolity than they did about the integrity of their design.

They aren't by default, I agree. I don't think we'll ever have a world of fact-checkers and I'm glad we never will.

But I think it's likely that we'll see groups of passionate writers who strive for accuracy in their writing, not because it's an organization but because it's their individual style. Just like the world of tech blogging has led to these ecospheres, where there's the TechCrunch/Mashable crowd and then the Gruber/Kottke/Mann crowd, and each one has a different approach that different sorts of people like.

I'm still in the process of getting a new site launched; it's also been a handful of months since I wrote anything—my last blog, which was submitted a lot here, went offline in June—so I'm still trying to pick up what I'd developed then. My plan is to split the site into drafted articles and more polished releases, but that's not ready yet. I'm hoping within a week I'll have that.

I don't think I'll be submitting it much to Hacker News, though. Even writing this much felt unnatural to me; I'm not deep enough into the stuff Hacker News is to write much that'd be of interest to the community. Hopefully I'll come up with a few things, though.

Think of it as my being against negativity. I'm okay with everything but people who put other people down. And smug assholes can defend themselves well; idiots can't, so I defend them instead.

EDIT: I don't think that's quite a cohesive answer, so let me elaborate. I like productive criticism. I've spent a lot of time here criticizing Twitter in the past, especially when it was first growing, because I really don't see the use in it myself beyond for publicity purposes. I don't write shortform very often, so why Twitter was better than a communal blogging system struck me as odd. Similarly, I criticize a lot here and very willingly throw myself into arguments.

Where I draw the line is when people make blanket statements against people they don't know. I understand that's a paradoxical concept, but there's no better way to put it. I also dislike smugness. So criticizing, say, Robert Scoble for being very overearnestly wrong and overreaching when he writes a silly article, that's fine. What wouldn't be fine is making a statement like "Scoble shouldn't ever write again," because it implies that just because somebody's wrong about something should mean they shouldn't try again. I prefer criticism that encourages people to try again, criticism that's potentially constructive.

So I support the masses, even when they're dumb, and I'll go out of my way to criticize people who've got the antiquated attitude that having somebody stupid on the Internet somehow brings the whole Internet down. That's a negativity I can do without; I'd like to see that converted into more earnest criticism in the hopes that those masses become enlightened rather than ticked off that people they don't know are putting them down.

I see it in real life, on occasion, when I meet people who're big into 4chan and Reddit, and it makes me want to hit them. I lost that smugness when I met Internet People in real life and realized they were people, not degenerates; other people carry that smugness over and act like what they type online allows them to spit on other people who care about other things more. Those other people don't care enough to respond, so I provide my viewpoint in the hopes that it'll quell things.