Three Cheers for Twonks

By Ian, on September 27th, 2006

The Inquirer, curmudgeon central at the best of times, isn’t entirely pleased about the arrival of the read/write web, social media or the whole ‘letting ordinary people onto the internet’ thing. Yesterday’s article — ‘Web 2.0 is for complete twonks’ — is a masterpiece of spite and elitism, which left me chuckling even as it raised my gall. Here’s a sample:

The grand social experiment that is sites like Digg and Wikipedia star[t]ed out with simple and noble ideals, in that order, but have steadily decreased in quality and competence to become a running joke, and home to the dregs of the internet. They are the domain of the disenfranchised stupid, the virtual corner bar for the loud portion of the ignorant set, and are quickly drowning out any voices of reason that try and counter the stupidity. Welcome to Web 2.0, short may it reign.

Needless to say, the evidence given is slight. The main problem with digg, apparently, is that two of Charlie Demerjian’s (the author’s) articles were removed after being reported as lame. Despite having received lots of intelligent comments, the author says this means that people who use digg are mainly “the disenfranchised stupid”. Since he thinks that they are “dumber than rocks”, it’s not entirely surprising that his articles annoyed loyal digg users, is it? I would suggest that he stops submitting his anti-digg stories to the service, unless this is some sort of elaborate trolling. Perhaps Netscape or reddit users might be a little more receptive?

Wikipedia is tarred with the same brush. Needless to say, though, no examples or other evidence are given to support the accusation.

I don’t think that even the proudest champion of Web 2.0 would claim that either of these sites are without problems. A lot of them are admitted by their owners, and have been covered here in earlier posts. The thing is, they are also quite good as they are, and are continuously evolving to become better.

We are in a period of experimentation — mistakes and false-starts are inevitable. The Inquirer’s comments are the equivalent of telling Edison to stop messing about with this electricity thing when his first light bulb popped.