Trent Reznor Quits Web 2.0, Offers Cutting Advice To Haters

My favorite line: "...the [social media] experiment seems to have yielded a result. Idiots rule."

Is anybody surprised that, with 600K+ followers, many of whom are already self-selected as "edgy" or "alternate" that some small percentage of them wouldn't be absolutely manical raving lunatics?

Trent could probably solve some of this with technology and create a self-policing environment, in which a core group of half-sane fans could administrate/police/censor to the betterment of all - There's a reason why Wikipedia's NPOV cabal and anti-vandalism bots make it a better place.

Likewise with keeping the community small (and hopefully self selected to be at least semi-lucid) ala the HN approach is also good.

Big, uncontrolled, and lunatic is a recipe for all sorts of wackiness and cruft.

I think that's just the result of version 1.

Great piece. As far as social networking goes, this stood out:

> 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.

I saw this youtube video of an early 90s broadcast about this thing called internet, and they pretty much talked about how great it is to have a civilized conversation, without trolls.

So early on it wasn't a problem, my guess is that trolls probably didn't really appear until AOL.