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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Thank you so much for that link! His story is hilarious (and informative - the best kind!). I loved the airplane analogy which I find to be sooooo true. At work, I am constantly surprised by the level of tech ignorance by people only a few years older than me - and I know I'm clueless about stuff my nephews take for granted.
The thought of all these pseudo goth kids opening their homepage on myspace to the ginormous Goatse pic is just too funny.
The other eyerolling part of that post is the comments from some folks with the inevitable 'the children! wail' for using 'that pornographic' picture! Best pwn was the comment 'you found Goatse erotic??? ewww! What kind of pornography do you watch!' ROFL - I hate when people use the term pornography when they actually mean something more like disgusting.
I read that last night and to tell ya the truth, I found Scott's attitude of superiority over the 'myspacers' and his action in what he chose to replace the original pic with, reprehensible.
At first I was reading it and it looked like a heap of people had stolen his bandwidth and I'm thinking, okay yeah, that's wrong of them. But when it became clear that the fault lay with HotFreeLayouts and that he knew that, I changed my mind. If it was clear from the outset who did the wrong thing, what kind of person penalizes the group who used it in good faith?
He has a huge amount of tech know-how and chose to use it to [quite likely] get hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent people into all sorts of trouble over the porn pic on their Myspace backgrounds simply because he has a superiority complex???
Meh. That, 'I was here first' attitude sucks in any context.
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
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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
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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.
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The thought of all these pseudo goth kids opening their homepage on myspace to the ginormous Goatse pic is just too funny.
The other eyerolling part of that post is the comments from some folks with the inevitable 'the children! wail' for using 'that pornographic' picture! Best pwn was the comment 'you found Goatse erotic??? ewww! What kind of pornography do you watch!' ROFL - I hate when people use the term pornography when they actually mean something more like disgusting.
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And yeah, it's always annoying when someone seems to think that pornography = ick-sexbodyparts-gross. [eyeroll] Attitude much...? :P
Angie
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I read that last night and to tell ya the truth, I found Scott's attitude of superiority over the 'myspacers' and his action in what he chose to replace the original pic with, reprehensible.
At first I was reading it and it looked like a heap of people had stolen his bandwidth and I'm thinking, okay yeah, that's wrong of them. But when it became clear that the fault lay with HotFreeLayouts and that he knew that, I changed my mind. If it was clear from the outset who did the wrong thing, what kind of person penalizes the group who used it in good faith?
He has a huge amount of tech know-how and chose to use it to [quite likely] get hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent people into all sorts of trouble over the porn pic on their Myspace backgrounds simply because he has a superiority complex???
Meh. That, 'I was here first' attitude sucks in any context.
Reply
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 ( ... )
Reply
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 ( ... )
Reply
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
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