It’s a pleasure to highlight the forum post by Trent Reznor. Trent’s conclusions are something I have been advocating and pointing to forever.
1) In a drive for numbers there is a serious erosion of conversation. As Trent put it: “Idiots rule”.
2) You can’t have a beneficial discourse with anonymous participants. Anonymity is death for any online forum.
“I will be tuning out of the social networking sites because at the end of the day it’s now doing more harm than good in the bigger picture and the experiment seems to have yielded a result. Idiots rule.
I had thought a while ago about attempting to start a mainstream public forum that required real verification of it’s participants for purposes of context. The idea was to have a place where you can actually discuss whatever and have some idea of who you’re conversing with. For example, if we were discussing drumming techniques and you can see that someone participating in the discussion is a drum instructor vs. a 13 year old kid Googling answers, you’d have the proper context in which to have a potentially valid discussion. If we were discussing EDLC’s heart condition and a real cardiologist speaks up, I’d value his opinion over, say FredFuckFaceWhateverHisLastFuckingNameIs’s “opinion”. Know what I mean? Anyway, we’re in a world where the mainstream social networks want any and all people to boost user numbers for the big selloff and are not concerned with the quality of experience.”
Photo by Rob Sheridan via Nine Inch Nails Live @ The Pearl – Las Vegas, NV, 5.18.09 on Flickr
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