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It's great as long as you're the guy making the tweets, videos, and status updates that hundreds of thousands of folks read, admire, and share. But if you're so
by DanielBMarkham 16y ago
It's great as long as you're the guy making the tweets, videos, and status updates that hundreds of thousands of folks read, admire, and share. But if you're some poor slob who did something stupid and are on the receiving end of a viral attack? It deeply sucks in a way that having crowds mad at you has never sucked before.
You don't get stuff for free. Yes, it's better, but cliques of hundreds of thousands of people thinking in sync is pretty freaking scary too, if you ask me. Have we all forgotten how mobs act?
- zedshaw 16y agoThis is why people who say "ignore the trolls" are idiots. The internet makes trolling permanent and a mob affair. Your best strategy now is to fight back with your own better words, pranks, and trolling or else everyone simply assumes your silence means the mob is right. Trust me on this, I am probably one of a handful of people who has been on the receiving end of a massive hateful mob and managed to kick the living shit out of them with just a blog and some hilarious jokes.
- mobileman 16y agoZed, I want to have your babies.
- reso 16y agoI agree the distributed group-think is a huge problem on the internet. However, if you do some analysis, I think you'll find that twitter-fueled public lynchings are an order of magnitude less frequent than twitter-fueled viral awesomeness. Something this article glazes over is that, while we have the infrastructure for mass information virality, actually making something go viral is still very difficult. This is just as true for videos of assholes doing stupid things as it is for releasing web-apps.