Over the last few days, I’ve been evaluating different software and hosting environments for a client, and I’ve found an interesting paradox about the net audience and its darlings. To put it bluntly, they over-rate anything they like and over-state any negative feedback, so that you feel all “excluded middles” have been eliminated. I can’t find any correlations to gender, age, political outlook, sexual orientation, intelligence or personality type, so I’m going to chalk it up to the medium.
In the blogosphere, or the internet, or even in a large group of people, you have to shout to be heard. Since volume of voice doesn’t count for much anymore, what matters then is how “interesting” what you’re saying appears to be. It has to be either freaky, or extremely righteous. We’ll all eavesdrop on a conversation about that threesome gone wrong, or the time you really showed a tailgater how much of a screwup he was! Freaky or forceful. It reminds me of the speeches of politicians and CEOs at that hideous barbecue every company seems to have to kick off its new initiative.
The internet audience is a victim of this shouting. They can’t make themselves louder, so they make themselves more extreme, and then others compete with this, to the point that you might as well not bother rating something 2 out of 5 stars, because the people rating it 0 or 6 are going to command the audience.
I have plenty of examples of this. For example, Firefox the much-loved browser, is bloatware that has made itself distinguished to me for its frequent crashes, mostly but not completely standards-compliant rendering of code, and hogging of memory. It is not very reliable software. In fact, Internet Explorer is more reliable, but it has a fatal flaw in its ActiveX-supporting security model. Luckily there is a alternative to both that is smaller, faster, and a balance between standards-compliance and coding practices from 1996-2006.
On the other hand, throughout most of the internet you will find Microsoft demonized, to the point that people will not admit that for almost all daily tasks Internet Explorer is a better browser, or that for almost all daily office tasks Microsoft Office is the superior choice, or that for the average user who isn’t fascinated by the guts of their computer, Windows XP is the best desktop operating system choice. Microsoft makes its share of failures, but even Honda does that, so I’m inclined to chalk it up to being a large corporation more than any inherent “evil” (unless you think wanting to make money by dominating others is evil, but that seems to be designed into our economic system).
It is emotionally gratifying to become a fanboi or hater. It gives you the feeling of power, since you have made a strong choice and slammed home that point by not giving the product a 2 out of 5 but a 0 because it’s awful or a 6 because you believe in the company. From now on, this blog is going to avoid the tendency to over-state or over-rate, because it is counterproductive to informing users about technology.