03-26 The internet is full of dumbasses, right?
We all knew that. Have a look at Digg sometime if your IQ can handle it. And I'm not going to sit here and say that I really think that someone is planning to kill Kathy Sierra. I'm a card-carrying Something Awful member. But I also know that "all in good fun" can become "all in bad fun" real fast, and from there occasionally reach "are we even having fun at all anymore?" If these guys are joking around, where's the joke? What's the catch? They should be ashamed, and I might be the only one to say this, but they probably already are.
Robert Scoble, C.K., et. al seem to agree that we have a "culture" issue to fix. Am I overly cynical to think that's being overly optimistic? Sounds to me like we have a group of idiots inexplicably connected to A-listers doing dumb (and hurtful) stuff that takes the cake over other dumb stuff you see in the blogosphere. I think if there's a "cultural" issue it's the implication that we even have a culture. What do we have?
So what do we do to "fix the culture?" Nothing. There is no meta-solution, no bud to nip it in. We let Kathy Sierra fix her issue, which crossed over from Comment-Deletion-land into Legal-Issue-ville. And we continue to delete our crap comments, ignore trolls, and give this whole fire as little oxygen as possible.
But I do hope that Kathy Sierra recovers from the totally undeserved pain she's been caused. This is the bad side of the internet coin for sure -- but the happy side is that we get to interact with people like her, people whose books populate our shelves and who had influence on us. I hope that she doesn't forget about that part.
Robert Scoble, C.K., et. al seem to agree that we have a "culture" issue to fix. Am I overly cynical to think that's being overly optimistic? Sounds to me like we have a group of idiots inexplicably connected to A-listers doing dumb (and hurtful) stuff that takes the cake over other dumb stuff you see in the blogosphere. I think if there's a "cultural" issue it's the implication that we even have a culture. What do we have?
- A bunch of people behind a wall of perceived anonymity interacting too closely with other people behind other walls, and they think they're invincible and beyond their meatspace morals.
- A bunch of people in geographically disparate areas and who are not alike, converging on certain places for shared superficial reasons (say, programming) and clashing.
So what do we do to "fix the culture?" Nothing. There is no meta-solution, no bud to nip it in. We let Kathy Sierra fix her issue, which crossed over from Comment-Deletion-land into Legal-Issue-ville. And we continue to delete our crap comments, ignore trolls, and give this whole fire as little oxygen as possible.
But I do hope that Kathy Sierra recovers from the totally undeserved pain she's been caused. This is the bad side of the internet coin for sure -- but the happy side is that we get to interact with people like her, people whose books populate our shelves and who had influence on us. I hope that she doesn't forget about that part.
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