My Little Ode to the Self-Indulgent Folks in the Blogosphere

[bludragon]

Every time I witness someone do or say something so ignorant or offensive I have to grit my teeth to avoid hitting them, I recite the following phrase to myself:

We are all born innocent, and there is just as much bad information in the world as good. Given the odds, most people are just as likely to turn out completely backward as not.

The

Comments

[heratyck]

Hello :-)

LOL I was just talking to someone the other day about how odd it feels when someone friends you without ever saying anything...

Journals that have little or no consideration for the readers eyes are offensive as well... Words over a busy tiled image background make me want to weep... :-) Which is one of the major reasons I tend to steer clear of myspace... So many of the blogs on there are "visually disruptive"... Not only that, but sometimes when they have multiple songs or videos playing, it will just kill mozilla...

[bludragon]

Yes. MySpace is a primary offender. I think it's because it's the first platform to hit the masses which actually makes it both easy and desirable to mess with CSS. (of all things.)

I think these easy-to-make "vanity sites" are the single biggest draw of MySpace, perhaps as much as the actual networking. Personally, I liked Friendster better precisely because it disallowed this rubbish and focused on the whole purpose of joining such a community-- to meet people.

Speaking of Firefox, I guess you've also had trouble with streaming content on the browser...

[steapie]

I think you're involved with too much online drama. :\

~Steapie

[bludragon]

Heh. Steapie, you are the last person on Earth I expected to hear that statement from. ;-)

Most of these things happened to me over a very long period of time. Remember I've been a member of LJ since 1999, and have been fiddling around this newfangled Internet thing since 1994.

[steapie]

Gee...thanks. :P

[bludragon]

You're right about one or six--on their own they're not so bad. But as you say, context makes the difference.

Friending someone and then talking to them is different than friending someone offhand without ever introducing yourself. Most of the time the latter case are looking for a bigger friend's list for its own sake. This is especially common on MySpace.

I hear you on cyberstalking, and people who don't know how to make anything but negative comments are certainly no fun to have around. Having said that, I've almost never found cyberstalking to be a real problem. I've talked to a lot of people who lacked basic social skills, and most of them at least mean well even if they didn't know how to approach someone.

The specific example that brought up #2 was from my experiences of offhand rejection by people who made snap assumptions without checking any facts. But "Taking it outside" (carrying over from public to private forum) is another example that should be added to the list. Good idea.