Kill your blog
This is the advice given by Paul Boutin in Wired (16.11, November), and here’s why:
The blogosphere, once a fresh-water oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.
To expand on that “hecklers” business:
[Y]our blog will still draw the Net’s lowest form of life: the insult commenter. Pour your heart out in a post, and some anonymous troll named r0rschach or fooback is sure to scribble beneath it, “Lame. Why don’t you just suck McCain’s ass.”
I think Boutin has missed a bit of the taxonomy: there exist trolls who insult nothing but one’s intelligence.
And as a practical matter, I haven’t had much trollage over the years; this is due, I think, to a combination of marginally-higher-than-average standards and comparatively-low visibility. Besides, while I have something of a gift for the one-liner, I’d be hard-pressed to compress this stuff into properly-sized tweets; why, the hyphens alone would do me in.
Lastly, I question the notion of “authenticity” as applied to us “amateur wordsmiths”: the very definition of “authentic” has been stretched and tortured and otherwise manipulated out of recognition, so that it might be applied to whatever phenomena are marked for approval by our cultural arbiters. Not that I give that much of a damn, really; were I suddenly to be hailed as a harbinger of the revolution to come or some such nonsense, I’d break into unseemly guffaws.
fillyjonk »
20 October 2008 · 2:44 pm
*sigh*.
“The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.”
Twenty or so years ago, weren’t there people nattering about the ever-shrinking attention span? And now they’re encouraging that?
I’m on Ravelry, which is kind of Facebook for Knitters, and I find the limitation on the level of detail that some people write about their projects, their thoughts, their art frustrating. I’d rather read a nice blog where someone takes the time to actually write more than two sentences.
The thought of having a Facebook page…something which many of my students seem to devote a great deal of time to (if what I observe while “circulating” in the computer lab while trying to encourage them to do their stats homework using the analysis package WHILE I AM IN THE ROOM rather than hauling me out of my office on office hours)…well, it kind of brings me out in hives a little.
I don’t know. I find it amusing or irritating (depending on my mood) when people like this chap opine that there are “too many blogs” or some such thing. While I realize a blog is in no way the equivalent of a book (though some of the books I’ve seen lately are even more poorly-edited than a good blog), I wonder if the same chap would wander through the Library of Congress and complain that too much paper had been printed with too many words.
I mean, it’s not like he’s PAYING to read this stuff.
I can’t say I’ve ever had a troll. (knock wood). I’ve had a few people who did a kind of weak spam, claiming my blog was “nice” and then posting some link in the comment that was probably only marginally related. But I get one of those maybe every 6 months and they’re easily enough expunged.
Gah. I’d never make it on Twitter, I can’t even COMMENT short.
fillyjonk »
20 October 2008 · 2:48 pm
an XKCD take on Twitter.
And I am not clever enough to come up with those sort of little rhymes, if that is REALLY what goes on…
Donna B. »
20 October 2008 · 4:47 pm
The most trollish commenter I have is my brother.
fillyjonk – I loved Burma Shave signs when I was a kid. They made long road trips bearable.
Patrick »
20 October 2008 · 6:32 pm
Lame. Why don’t you just suck McCain’s ass.
CGHill »
20 October 2008 · 7:01 pm
Patrick, Patrick … you’re supposed to be anonymous, remember?
Charles Pergiel »
20 October 2008 · 8:47 pm
Some people just spew. Some people are in it just to compete. Some people actually read, digest and think, before they respnd.
It might be the level of civility. Someone who claims someone else is a jerk is more likely to trigger a spewish or competitive response than someone who observes that perhaps that same someone may have made an error of judgement.
I came across a blog the other day full of ranting and raving about some politician, claiming that a video clip exposed him as the devil incarnate. I watched and listened to the clip, and I’m sorry, I just didn’t see it. But the spewers saw it and echoed the blogger a hundred times over.
I think it must be a tribal thing.
sya »
20 October 2008 · 8:49 pm
As far as I can tell, people use Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter to look up photos of their drunk redneck friends. So, no thanks.
McGehee »
20 October 2008 · 9:12 pm
If expressing oneself is the sole purpose, why bother with the computer at all? Why bother, in fact, with text in any medium? I can express a vast array of sincere sentiments with poses, gestures and verbal exclamations on any street corner in America, and probably find a lot of agreement mixed in with the idle curiosity.
If, however, the point is to express oneself according to one’s particular standard of intelligibility and style, the blog is about as up-to-date a medium as there is. At the moment.
The notion (I disdain to call it an idea) that expression is in and of itself a valuable objective, lies at, or at least very near, the root of the troll problem in the first place.
CGHill »
20 October 2008 · 9:16 pm
<beavis>
Heh-heh. You said “root.”
</beavis>
(Geez, maybe I can do this after all. And it would be a heck of a lot cheaper than writing a $100 check every year to pay for all this Web space.)
McGehee »
20 October 2008 · 10:40 pm
Sadly, the way I pronounce “root” — rhyming with “boot” rather than “foot” — would be unlikely to titillate Beavis.