I clicked on a link in comments on a mock_the_stupid entry about hotlinking and found a great write-up by a guy who basically pwned MySpace. :D (Thanks to holytoastr for posting the link. :D
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I didn't get that he knew about HotFreeLayouts.com the whole time. I got that he originally just thought his grim reaper had become something faddish on MySpace, along with the practice of hotlinking, and that he wanted to teach them some manners in the time-honored manner of hotlink victims.
Maybe it was a bit extreme but I can understand where he's coming from. Aside from the whole hotlinking thing, it is annoying to see the more clueless of the newbies happily picnicing on the freeway and then whining when they get run over. I was there too when AOL ruined The Internet As We Know It. And for that matter, before AOL came along Prodigy stabbed it in the back a few times and WebTV administered a dose of cyanide. After 15+ years of watching ignorant newcomers trash the place it's easy to lose one's patience with the whole business and everyone involved with it.
It's not so much a matter of being there first. Newbies were welcomed in the old days and the pre-AOL internet was a much friendlier place. The newcomers to the net -- mostly young, because before AOL and Prodigy you either had to have a corporate account or a university account or pay $/hour to get on the internet and kids had neither the connections nor the cash -- brought with them a lot of the kind of people who don't know how to behave and don't care when someone tries to clue them in, except in that it gives them a kewl new way of pissing people off 'cause now they know exactly what makes these old fogies angry, yay!! Not all of them were obnoxious assholes, not even close, but when you're measuring your newbies in the millions all of a sudden, even a five or ten percent asshole rate adds up to a metric fuckload.
I remember when Prodigy started pushing their service at people, recruiting thousands of folks who'd never been online before, then pissed them off in large batches so they left and started looking elsewhere. Most of the emmigrants came to GEnie, since at the time GEnie was the other major network that had a flat-rate pricing scheme. Most of them were nice people and in some of the areas I worked with other oldtimers to help them settle in, explain how things worked, answer questions, etc. Some of the old Prodigites called us "tech angels" and that was cool. I met a bunch of the locals once when we all went out to dinner and they were nice people. But the obnoxious minority didn't get it, didn't care, wanted things their way and were willing to stand in the middle of a product screaming and cussing until they got it. Or they popped in and disrupted what was going on, just to be annoying, because it was fun. Dealing with a flood of newbies was already exhausting, and we knew our home online was never going to be the same, but the people who delighted in pissing us off really left a bad taste in our mouths.
With WebTV you didn't even need a computer anymore. An "@webtv.com" address became a byword for ignorance and obnoxiousness (again, despite the cool people who were there -- the assholes drowned them out) and I heard at the time of sites which banned everyone from that domain just on principle.
AOL was the same but much moreso, thanks to their massive and constant ad campaign. We thought Prodigy'd been bad -- they were pikers compared to AOL. Again we got the kiddies (and the adults with emotional ages in the single digits) who saw this "free" thing and valued it about that much, who saw the net as their personal playground to shit on if they wanted. AOL made it easy with multiple screen names per account -- ban one and another one pops up to laugh at you. Ban that one and they delete it and make up a new one, all without bothering to change accounts even. Get AOL to ban the whole account (which was like pulling teeth with a tweezer) and they were back ten minutes later on one of the 30 free AOL sign-up disks they had in their drawer, since AOL got them inserted into everything from magazines to cereal boxes. AOL was giving away so many free minutes with a sign-up that it really was free so far as the snerts were concerned -- they'd sign up, have "fun" until they got banned or ran out of free minutes, then abandon the account and pull out another disk, start over again.
I was working for Simutronics at the time, in their online RPGs. Our help queue went from immediate response to literally days. A lot of it was just newbies being clueless, as newbies are, but a huge chunk of it was dealing with snerts and the trouble they caused. I was on the front lines, putting in longer hours (in my spare time -- I had a day job to pay the bills and this was supposed to be "for fun") dealing with people who were pissed off or obnoxious or both, while no development was getting done because we were all answering assists and then we got complaints because of that. Our games were friendly places where you knew everyone or at least knew everyone's name. You knew immediately if a new person came in because a name popped up that you didn't recognize and just about every newbie had someone come up and offer to show them around and give them equipment and teach them how the game worked, just spontaneously, because there were enough friendly, helpful people in the game (who were willing to pay $6/hour plus toll charges to help someone else) to do it. Each type of monster genned in one room and we shared them, two or three or eight or ten people standing around taking turns at the kill, keeping track of who was next and letting new hunters join the end of the line with no complaints.
All that changed when the net exploded. It became a rude place where everything was for memeME!! and even most of the nicer people were out for themselves first. People paying $20/month were much louder about wanting to be waited on hand and foot than the $6/hour people ever were, and people paying nothing at all were assholes, period.
And every time we find some sort of equilibrium, something new comes along to trash it again. Things were bad enough with Prodigy until WebTV came along and a whole new level of ignorance was achieved by people who were online without even knowing how to turn on a computer. We got used to them and then found another level of obnoxiousness when AOL gave the net away for free to a horde of people who'd never appreciate it and treated it and everyone on it as though it were as disposable as an AOL sign-up disk. Then the local ISPs popped up and started dumping people directly onto the net, whereas at least the old services had kept most of them sort of corralled, or at least made it a bit difficult to find the access to the "outdoors." MySpace is targetted specifically at teenagers, from which the largest part (although of course not all) of the snerts have always been drawn, and clearly makes no attempt to teach them what's what or how to treat their new toy or the other people in the playground. It's just one more round and when you've seen so many it's very easy to lose your perspective.
It's not just about who was there first. It's about behavior and attitude, and entitlement which rejects any personal responsibility. It's about expecting that everything should be handed to you for free and that your needs and wants come ahead of everyone else's and feeling like you clearly deserve anything you can take or badger or whine out of someone. It's about that five or ten percent who spoiled the whole thing with their attitude of "Gimme that and that and that while I lie here like an ignorant blob and do nothing to learn how this works or how to fit in."
No, what Jason did wasn't nice. But I understand it, and the part of me that still resents losing my home to the vandals thinks it was funny. If that makes me an awful person then I guess it does. :/
But it's only relevance to how obnoxious and entitled they are is in relation to their demands to him that he fix the problem. They thought they were complaining to the correct person. How he, you, or anyone else who has been around since the early days feels about the rude newcomers is completely irrelevant.
One second he's deriding the Myspacers for their lack of net savvy and laughing at their demands that he fix it, the next he's criticising them for not being smart enough to know that the background they were using was hotlinked via the company they chose to use. Can't have it both ways.
In this case, who cares that Myspacers are vandals and whiners? Truth is, he's looking down his nose at those kids and absolutely doesn't care how much trouble he might have caused them over what he did. They didn't do anything wrong.
Beyond this whole line, I actually don't care whether someone finds my behavior reprehensible. I changed a file on my server; this isn't like it's the 1920s and I'm burning down an apartment building I own that has squatters in it.
This story has gotten a lot of interest because of Digg, and because of that, I've gotten called things like reprehensible, things like "hero", and thoughts about the goatse picture ranging from "sending pornography to children" to "chose an incredibly mundane photo like goatse when he could have done something worse.".
I go into detail on all this on the blog entry after the linked one above. It's titled "The Ass-Termath". Read it, or don't.
People can second-guess me all they want, and the issues raised in the weblog entry are, to me, more interesting than what imagine I chose and how it flowed from ignorance or greed or whatever. Ultimately, though, I had a great time and that's what matters to me. Excelsior!
Because people were speculating on my thought process, and I figured some actual input would be nice. Plus, some people were saying nice things about me and I thought I'd drop in.
Did you prefer to keep me as an abstract, gingerly deciding my motivations and position in the moral scale, without the inconvenience of me hearing about it?
Sorry. Look, I'm not some internet-expert-person like you and Angie, all I know is that you were justifiably angered by the bandwidth stealing and retaliated. But that when you subsequently discovered you'd retaliated against the wrong set of people [annoying little Eb twats or not] you failed to correct the error. That's where you register on my moral scale.
And unless it says so somewhere that I missed seeing it, HotFreeLayouts got off virtually scott-free. [pun intended]
Maybe it was a bit extreme but I can understand where he's coming from. Aside from the whole hotlinking thing, it is annoying to see the more clueless of the newbies happily picnicing on the freeway and then whining when they get run over. I was there too when AOL ruined The Internet As We Know It. And for that matter, before AOL came along Prodigy stabbed it in the back a few times and WebTV administered a dose of cyanide. After 15+ years of watching ignorant newcomers trash the place it's easy to lose one's patience with the whole business and everyone involved with it.
It's not so much a matter of being there first. Newbies were welcomed in the old days and the pre-AOL internet was a much friendlier place. The newcomers to the net -- mostly young, because before AOL and Prodigy you either had to have a corporate account or a university account or pay $/hour to get on the internet and kids had neither the connections nor the cash -- brought with them a lot of the kind of people who don't know how to behave and don't care when someone tries to clue them in, except in that it gives them a kewl new way of pissing people off 'cause now they know exactly what makes these old fogies angry, yay!! Not all of them were obnoxious assholes, not even close, but when you're measuring your newbies in the millions all of a sudden, even a five or ten percent asshole rate adds up to a metric fuckload.
I remember when Prodigy started pushing their service at people, recruiting thousands of folks who'd never been online before, then pissed them off in large batches so they left and started looking elsewhere. Most of the emmigrants came to GEnie, since at the time GEnie was the other major network that had a flat-rate pricing scheme. Most of them were nice people and in some of the areas I worked with other oldtimers to help them settle in, explain how things worked, answer questions, etc. Some of the old Prodigites called us "tech angels" and that was cool. I met a bunch of the locals once when we all went out to dinner and they were nice people. But the obnoxious minority didn't get it, didn't care, wanted things their way and were willing to stand in the middle of a product screaming and cussing until they got it. Or they popped in and disrupted what was going on, just to be annoying, because it was fun. Dealing with a flood of newbies was already exhausting, and we knew our home online was never going to be the same, but the people who delighted in pissing us off really left a bad taste in our mouths.
With WebTV you didn't even need a computer anymore. An "@webtv.com" address became a byword for ignorance and obnoxiousness (again, despite the cool people who were there -- the assholes drowned them out) and I heard at the time of sites which banned everyone from that domain just on principle.
AOL was the same but much moreso, thanks to their massive and constant ad campaign. We thought Prodigy'd been bad -- they were pikers compared to AOL. Again we got the kiddies (and the adults with emotional ages in the single digits) who saw this "free" thing and valued it about that much, who saw the net as their personal playground to shit on if they wanted. AOL made it easy with multiple screen names per account -- ban one and another one pops up to laugh at you. Ban that one and they delete it and make up a new one, all without bothering to change accounts even. Get AOL to ban the whole account (which was like pulling teeth with a tweezer) and they were back ten minutes later on one of the 30 free AOL sign-up disks they had in their drawer, since AOL got them inserted into everything from magazines to cereal boxes. AOL was giving away so many free minutes with a sign-up that it really was free so far as the snerts were concerned -- they'd sign up, have "fun" until they got banned or ran out of free minutes, then abandon the account and pull out another disk, start over again.
[Continued on Next Rock...]
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I was working for Simutronics at the time, in their online RPGs. Our help queue went from immediate response to literally days. A lot of it was just newbies being clueless, as newbies are, but a huge chunk of it was dealing with snerts and the trouble they caused. I was on the front lines, putting in longer hours (in my spare time -- I had a day job to pay the bills and this was supposed to be "for fun") dealing with people who were pissed off or obnoxious or both, while no development was getting done because we were all answering assists and then we got complaints because of that. Our games were friendly places where you knew everyone or at least knew everyone's name. You knew immediately if a new person came in because a name popped up that you didn't recognize and just about every newbie had someone come up and offer to show them around and give them equipment and teach them how the game worked, just spontaneously, because there were enough friendly, helpful people in the game (who were willing to pay $6/hour plus toll charges to help someone else) to do it. Each type of monster genned in one room and we shared them, two or three or eight or ten people standing around taking turns at the kill, keeping track of who was next and letting new hunters join the end of the line with no complaints.
All that changed when the net exploded. It became a rude place where everything was for memeME!! and even most of the nicer people were out for themselves first. People paying $20/month were much louder about wanting to be waited on hand and foot than the $6/hour people ever were, and people paying nothing at all were assholes, period.
And every time we find some sort of equilibrium, something new comes along to trash it again. Things were bad enough with Prodigy until WebTV came along and a whole new level of ignorance was achieved by people who were online without even knowing how to turn on a computer. We got used to them and then found another level of obnoxiousness when AOL gave the net away for free to a horde of people who'd never appreciate it and treated it and everyone on it as though it were as disposable as an AOL sign-up disk. Then the local ISPs popped up and started dumping people directly onto the net, whereas at least the old services had kept most of them sort of corralled, or at least made it a bit difficult to find the access to the "outdoors." MySpace is targetted specifically at teenagers, from which the largest part (although of course not all) of the snerts have always been drawn, and clearly makes no attempt to teach them what's what or how to treat their new toy or the other people in the playground. It's just one more round and when you've seen so many it's very easy to lose your perspective.
It's not just about who was there first. It's about behavior and attitude, and entitlement which rejects any personal responsibility. It's about expecting that everything should be handed to you for free and that your needs and wants come ahead of everyone else's and feeling like you clearly deserve anything you can take or badger or whine out of someone. It's about that five or ten percent who spoiled the whole thing with their attitude of "Gimme that and that and that while I lie here like an ignorant blob and do nothing to learn how this works or how to fit in."
No, what Jason did wasn't nice. But I understand it, and the part of me that still resents losing my home to the vandals thinks it was funny. If that makes me an awful person then I guess it does. :/
Angie
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One second he's deriding the Myspacers for their lack of net savvy and laughing at their demands that he fix it, the next he's criticising them for not being smart enough to know that the background they were using was hotlinked via the company they chose to use. Can't have it both ways.
In this case, who cares that Myspacers are vandals and whiners? Truth is, he's looking down his nose at those kids and absolutely doesn't care how much trouble he might have caused them over what he did. They didn't do anything wrong.
Reply
This story has gotten a lot of interest because of Digg, and because of that, I've gotten called things like reprehensible, things like "hero", and thoughts about the goatse picture ranging from "sending pornography to children" to "chose an incredibly mundane photo like goatse when he could have done something worse.".
I go into detail on all this on the blog entry after the linked one above. It's titled "The Ass-Termath". Read it, or don't.
People can second-guess me all they want, and the issues raised in the weblog entry are, to me, more interesting than what imagine I chose and how it flowed from ignorance or greed or whatever. Ultimately, though, I had a great time and that's what matters to me. Excelsior!
- Jason Scott
Reply
*boggle-eyed*
Then....then...why are you here?
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Did you prefer to keep me as an abstract, gingerly deciding my motivations and position in the moral scale, without the inconvenience of me hearing about it?
Reply
Sorry. Look, I'm not some internet-expert-person like you and Angie, all I know is that you were justifiably angered by the bandwidth stealing and retaliated. But that when you subsequently discovered you'd retaliated against the wrong set of people [annoying little Eb twats or not] you failed to correct the error. That's where you register on my moral scale.
And unless it says so somewhere that I missed seeing it, HotFreeLayouts got off virtually scott-free. [pun intended]
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Nobody called for strawman attacks. I simply came in and said what my thinking was. Hooray. Enjoy your evening.
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