but it's myspace!
according to slashdot, hitwise says myspace overtook yahoo mail as the internet's most popular site. today, slashdot summed up the tons of responses they received to the original post in a waste-no-time review. it's informative (and encouraging to see that many people--albeit slashdot readers--recognize the social evils associated with the site)
"Reader caitsith01 speaks for many with an evaluation of MySpace as "for the most part intensely narcissistic and inane," and writes "People are presented with a tool for publishing absolutely anything, about any topic they choose. Instead of presenting thoughtful, creative or otherwise valuable content, the vast majority elect to pointlessly ramble about themselves in minute detail or engage in endless back and forth with other users about nothing in particular. Which is fine, but it shouldn't have the legitimacy of other web content. [...] Perhaps it's time to move past the blog hype and to consider some method for differentiating personal diaries (i.e., what used to be a personal homepage), social chit chat (i.e., what used to be a bulletin board, IRC, or IM activity), and publications with actual content. Right now the net is awash with an ever-expanding tide of rubbish and there is very little to assist in finding the few really interesting and high quality publications among the garbage. Ultimately it's depressing that, given the ability to communicate our ideas to anyone on earth, most of us can't come up with anything better than pictures of ourselves drinking too much and mass-produced but ineffectual rebelliousness."
"Reader caitsith01 speaks for many with an evaluation of MySpace as "for the most part intensely narcissistic and inane," and writes "People are presented with a tool for publishing absolutely anything, about any topic they choose. Instead of presenting thoughtful, creative or otherwise valuable content, the vast majority elect to pointlessly ramble about themselves in minute detail or engage in endless back and forth with other users about nothing in particular. Which is fine, but it shouldn't have the legitimacy of other web content. [...] Perhaps it's time to move past the blog hype and to consider some method for differentiating personal diaries (i.e., what used to be a personal homepage), social chit chat (i.e., what used to be a bulletin board, IRC, or IM activity), and publications with actual content. Right now the net is awash with an ever-expanding tide of rubbish and there is very little to assist in finding the few really interesting and high quality publications among the garbage. Ultimately it's depressing that, given the ability to communicate our ideas to anyone on earth, most of us can't come up with anything better than pictures of ourselves drinking too much and mass-produced but ineffectual rebelliousness."
posted by dave at 11:31 PM
1 Comments:
Low-value content on the internet is of no concern because it is easy to avoid reading it. All that matters is the highest value content is good -- the max function, not the mean function.
To quote Paul Graham, "Those in the print media who dismiss the writing online because of its low average quality are missing an important point: no one reads the average blog. In the old world of channels, it meant something to talk about average quality, because that's what you were getting whether you liked it or not. But now you can read any writer you want. So the average quality of writing online isn't what the print media are competing against. They're competing against the best writing online."
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