Anonymity and Venom 

One of the beauties of the internet is that it provides relative anonymity. One of the problems with the internet is that it provides relative anonymity. One of the beauties of the internet is that it allows you to speak your mind without consequence. When you are able to do this, you are most free to express yourself. One of the problems with the internet is that it allows you to speak your mind without consequence. When you don't have to look someone in the face, you are most likely to be at your worst.

There are examples of this everywhere. Take for example this website which I recently posted about, talking about the voters in the south. I wonder if this person would be so willing to say these things to someone from the south face to face if he or she got the chance?

Radley Balko over at The Agitator has decided to stop allowing comments on his very popular blog:

I have a full-time job and a personal life. I simply don't have time to screen comments for spam, trolls, and some of the libelous/racist/straight-out-idiocy that seems to pop up with increasing regularity. Sorry. This is a hobby. I get about a $100 a month from Blogads, and maybe $10 every two months or so in donations. I enjoy spending my free time writing. I don't enjoy spending it screening and deleting comments.

One of the reasons I've been posting less frequently is because I dread going to the computer. I dread the invective I'll inevitably be reading, and I dread spending the first ten minutes of my half hour or so of daily blogging sorting through stuff I need to delete.

I know exactly how he feels. A couple years ago I was pretty actively involved in the Winamp community. They were developing an all new version (Winamp3) with an absolutely rocking plugin architecture. I did a lot of testing for them, and developed some plugins for them which I provided to the community for free. Two of them (the Winamp3 Explorer Playlist and the Winamp3 Plugin Manager) were both in the top 10 list of plugin downloads.

I developed them in my spare time, and as it turns out the Plugin Manager was not perfect. The problem was that Winamp3 could not load plugins made for Winamp2... and there are literally thousands of Winamp2 plugins, so people were understandably upset. The Plugin Manager loaded the old plugins and allowed them to be used with Winamp3. It was a very popular idea. The problem was that any assumptions that an old plugin made about Winamp2 had to be fulfilled by the Plugin Manager. Any time one of those undocumented assumptions failed, Winamp3 would crash. For most plugins, everything worked perfectly, because they followed the plugin spec. For some it died a horrible death, because they used some undocumented feature or trick in Winamp2 I didn't know about. Usually the plugin I was trying to load crashed because it wasn't written defensively enough to handle the failure of that assumption.

There were two types of responses which I typically received:

1. You are an angel for whom all of life's wonderfulness should be given.
   
2. You are Satan reincarnate who should be stoned, drawn and quartered, and then have very bad things done unto you.

Of course, those for whom it didn't work never were willing to give me details... like say... what plugins they used which seemed to crash the software. That might have actually allowed me to fix the problem. I unfortunately could never reproduce the bug myself.

But the forum posts and the emails kept pouring in. Note to self, never include an email address in a readme file again. As a percentage of total users, the problems didn't affect a lot of people. But as a percentage of email, the number was huge, and it got to me. It burned me out so much that I just stopped developing it, and all my other plugins. Screw them! I'm doing this for free, in my spare time. I was so upset that I refused to release the source code so that others could continue on with it. In the end Winamp3 died anyway for other reasons, and they dropped the new architecture completely when they developed their latest version. I ended up washing my hands of the whole experience.

It is absolutely amazing how mean people can be when they don't have to look you in your face, or deal with an immediate response. They can just send an email and ignore the response. They can post to a forum and never check it again. It's too easy sometimes. So I feel for Radley, I know exactly what he's dealing with. I personally always try to consider the person staring at his screen when I post a blog comment or to a forum. My blog is not nearly big enough to attract these sorts of responses and so I have comments open. Sometimes I fear the day when it is.