Arrington Continues his Friendfeed bashing
FriendFeed, Syphilis And The Perfection Of Online Mobs.
Mike Arrington hates Friendfeed, and he hates anyone who likes it. This post is just another in a long string of posts attacking FriendFeed because Mike doesn’t like the service.
Comparing Friendfeed to Syphilis and saying its the worse of the online mobs is ridiculous. On any given day you can find far worse comments on Youtube or Digg. Youtube is known for bad commenters, on the other hand Friendfeed has incredibly brilliant and insightful commenters (with a few bad apples). Every site has bad apples there’s no way around it.
The funny thing about this whole article is that Mike uses one incident to justify his hatred, when he got into it with Leo Laporte over the Palm Pre. Two things with using this incident:
- It’s not characteristic of Friendfeed in general. Friendfeed threads don’t have thousands of comments usually and I’d be willing to bet a lot of the people commenting on the thread don’t regularly use Friendfeed. Leo’s followers knew where he was broadcasting and they flocked to it. If this incident says anything about mobs, it’s Leo’s mob not Friendfeed’s. Again out of the millions of people who listen to Leo or know of him a few hundred bad comments is a small percentage. Bad Apples.
- It’s only one incident. Where is the rest of the proof? He doesn’t have any. Why? Because he doesn’t use the service. He never really did, and after a few bad comments towards him he deleted the account. He says comments spilled over to TechCrunch, from Friendfeed? From Twitter? He has no proof of where the stuff came from.
Sure there is an issue of mob mentality on the internet, mostly done behind the supposed anonymity of the internet, but indeed of addressing the issue on the entire internet he picks on Friendfeed.
