

In Defense of Idiot Masses - unalone
http://marinich.tumblr.com/post/237233145/in-defense-of-idiot-masses

======
getgambit
"I want professional journalists to get stuck in the flood of everyday people
so that they’re forced to be brilliant just to stand out. A lot of
professionals have gotten away with being lax and amateur because they had no
competition; now they’ve got to pick up their game."

Unfortunately, no one in professional journalism seems to know yet -how- to
"pick up their game", and in the meantime, it's just easier to resent the
everyday people. It'll be nice to see what, if anything, emerges.

------
andreyf
_I’ve tried Twitter three times and closed my account every time;_

Why does Author care enough to close a twitter account, not once, but three
times? This seems strange to me.

 _I threw a hissy fit when the blog service I use added social features._

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? This entire post seems to care a little too much over things completely
unimportant...

~~~
unalone
> Why does Author care enough to close a twitter account, not once, but three
> times? This seems strange to me.

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.

------
teeja
Most US newspapers also haven't been long on the analysis, history and
erudition that lets us make wise choices. And they were conspicuously quiet
about a lot of significant questions during the Bush years. Who can you trust?
I tuned into The Guardian a lot.

In that sense, US papers made their own bad situation worse. They chose
poorly. Too damn bad - for us all.

My reaction to Twitter being mentioned in the same paragraph as journalism is
that we're in trouble. Any evolutionary biologist will tell you that the facts
aren't part of the social provinces.

~~~
unalone
> My reaction to Twitter being mentioned in the same paragraph as journalism
> is that we're in trouble. Any evolutionary biologist will tell you that the
> facts aren't part of the social provinces.

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.

------
NathanKP
My humble opinion:

Nice blog design, decent point, pathetic use of profanity.

~~~
unalone
I only used "fuck" twice and "shit" three times. Tough crowd.

~~~
NathanKP
It might just be my personal preference. Personally I hate it when somebody
has a great blog design and great content but then they drop the f-bomb in
there.

Nothing personal, and I do agree with the point of your article, I just don't
like the profanity usage.

~~~
unalone
Fair enough. I try not to overuse it—I treat it like any ordinary language—but
I'm not averse to using it specifically.

------
DanielBMarkham
Interesting format for this article.

Introduction. Careful analysis of a commentary and observation. Lots of hand-
waving and profanity. Back to the analysis. More profanity during a rebuttal.
Drawing the analysis into a thread. Some toss-away scatology at the end.
Coming to some sort of a conclusion.

I'm not sure I like it, but I really enjoyed reading the format when the
author actually was getting to a point. Too many times once the "fucks" begin
the author goes somewhere out on the deep end and never comes back. This
looked like it had been rewritten a bit.

Having said that about the format, the content was mediocre. Maybe I've read
so much commentary I'm swimming in it, but it just seemed to restate the
obvious. Perhaps others got more out it.

I'm really interested to see if this style takes off, however. It might have
some potential. Not a rant, but not exactly analysis either. Sort of a
controlled rant.

~~~
unalone
It was actually a Hacker News comment that I wrote; the thread was deleted
before I posted it, so I revamped it a little bit and published it, just in
case it'd be something worthwhile of discussion.

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.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I was just thinking that I'd like to write another well-researched and
thoughtful piece for my blog but just can't seem to get excited about anything
enough to start one.

I'd like to see more from you, if you write any. I liked the edgy tone
combined with the careful analysis and think you could make it into a nice
style.

A couple of times in the last week a comment has made me interested enough in
a reply. There was a good thread this past week on the limits of quality in
software. Is total quality always a good idea? I thought about blogging about
it but taking the time to work up a good narrative and then cross-checking and
rewriting several times is a major pain in the ass. So kudos for following up
on this.

~~~
unalone
You could always subscribe (whoo, self-promotion!), but the stuff I'm
interested in's a bit out there sometimes. I'm also trying to avoid the edge
as best as I can. I wrote one thing in May that was submitted here without my
wanting it to be, and a prominent blogger decided to freak out and rant about
it. I'm trying to figure out how not to trip off stuff like that. Glad you
liked this, though: That's what counts.

EDIT: I just looked and these are the most-tracked posts from the last month,
if that gives any idea of content:

<http://marinich.tumblr.com/post/200996589/talentless>,
<http://marinich.tumblr.com/post/216821123/make-great-shit>,
<http://marinich.tumblr.com/post/220489097/art-school-blues>. So, as I said,
it's a bit of a potpourri.

------
kalendae
"I don’t know why people go looking for idiots so they can jerk themselves off
over them. That’s a fetish I’ve never had."

but the fetish of looking for the people who go looking for idiots, now that's
apparently very appropriate to jerk yourself over?

~~~
unalone
I don't see why not. It's similar to my political beliefs, where I an
extremely distasteful of people with extremist beliefs.

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.

------
joblessjunkie
This author has a really mean, nasty attitude.

~~~
unalone
Elaborate.

