anarchy online
Maybe its just me but recently the online world, from dontstayin to youtube all seems to be increasingly full of idiots.
The usefullness of any online site/network seems to go through a lifecycle…
1) cool early adopters – geeky, not enough content to be handy
2) early masses – the best bit imho, plenty of people
3) spam and flame – business/promoters/pornographers find their way onto these sites and abuse them, couple this with anonymous posters winding people up, geeks taking it all to seriously and sites rapidly become of no interest until…
4) cool kids leave and move onto the next one.
I’ve seen this happen with so many sites now, its quite odd. Even Wired news, my favourite source of all things geeky + newslike started to have this problem, until they added moderation of comments to a small degree, but still some posts are just angry bla bla bla.
What do we do? The internets is a bit sick!
Props to clickrich, I have to agree with his last post, quality information is going to become king again.
Its an almost unsolvable riddle, the beauty of the internet is it creates a way for everyone to have their say… unfortunately as with the real world, that includes idiots. The difference is the anonymity the internet brings encourages some people to say things that they most likely wouldn’t in person, thereby bizzarly skewing the debate in a more negative light.
If this is the outcome of online freedom of speech, then where do we go next… censorship? No, thats not right either. The only answer can be in accountability, surely… if you know who’s said what, then people don’t hide behind fake identities… but wait… what about the people who have something to say, but don’t want to be identifed? Whistleblowers for example, can be of immense benefit to society as a whole… and so the problem remains.
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