Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Don't feed the trolls

David,
I think the link under "Johathan" is incorrect; it took me to a login screen on Jonathan's MT installation. Is it a trackback link perhaps?

...edN

Orlowski goes to a bar down the street from us in San Francisco. He's vulgar, he's racist and he's out to get the \A-list Bloggers/. Those are his own words.

He also has BIGTIME women issues, ask sometime. Ask him what he calls the women in technology? Ring a bell Andy O? Didn't think I heard all that from my table?

Tina.

I like Kevin's idea too, but I don't see it happening.

How about a free service where anyone can create a URL that will redirect a person to the (negative) link you want people to see. Instead of linking to Orlowski you'd link to www.badkarma.com/orlowski (or whatever) and then be redirected to him. This would solve the google issue, wouldn't it?

Would anyone use such a thing? Pretty easy to set up if so.

I've already posted my comments on Way.nu (in my experience, Andy-O is not alone among his peers, he's just more famous), but on this subtext subject of positive vs negative links, it's worth noting the Tarot and classical Astrology consider polarity issues nonesensical: All communication is implicitly double-edged.

If we drag a chauvenist racist into the spotlight, it does not matter if you intended to bring them to fame or shame, they'll always get a measure of both. I believe this ancient insight makes good sense and bears historical consideration too: We see those who may have praised a Hitler or a Mussilini or a Hussain created their own anti-reputation network among the anti-fascist observers, and those who would intend to condemn these tyrrants end up inspiring neo-fascists. On one hand, by railing against Hitler we make him out to be a master tyrannt, and by idolizing him, the neoNazis turn the historical tragedy of the man (who was, after all, quite human) into a sad comic parody.

The polarity of the link is irrelevent because the only useful polarity is in the eyes of the beholder --- it's same reason the War on Drugs is a joke to those targetted by its propaganda, and why Madonna's "What the F--- do you think you're doing" is now the only Madonna track in my MP3 collection.

This is a really important point David. I have come up against the challenge of pointing to something I disagreed with and by doing so increasing their exposure a number of times and struggled with how to deal with it.

It's encouraging to see you and Euan both being aware of the ecology whole-system effects of your blog links and also being thoughtfully willing to be responsible for the effects your links might have.

I don't have any problem linking to something I dislike, if it's the subject of what I'm writing about. If linkage moves a post up the ranks, so what? Like Andrew's rant, it doesn't really matter. It's just one opinion in a zillion. Why complicate straightforward linkage with a conditional variation only a few of us understand? I think we've already done that with trackback, by the way. Call me dumb, but I still don't get it.

I link to plenty of stuff I dislike. But, as Adina said above: Don't feed the trolls. If AO is being hateful about my friends in order to get links, I'd rather not encourage him. And I'd rather not spread his odium.

If the A-list bloggers are serious about fair play, they'd do something about the monocultural blogrolling down the right or left margins of their main pages. I did a study of the average PageRank of these blogs, and it's extremely high.

Either support what Orlowski is trying to do, or delete your gratuitous blogrolls, or expand them to include a diversity of perspectives, or help me overthrow PageRank.

Take your pick, but please look at the big picture before you dump on Orlowski. You A-list bloggers, together with Google, are skewing the Web and it's making a lot of us madder than hell.

"No, I'm not putting in a link to Orlowski's piece." You'll dedicate two paragraphs to it but not provide a link? Beside the silliness of that contradiction, it sounds as if you're taking Orlowsky (and perhaps yourself) too seriously.

I've written up a post on opinionated linking, at http://www.crystalflame.net/archives/000055.html