Cranky Geek #1

Remember when the internet was made up of smart people?

Ok, I don’t want to come across as an elitist snob here, but back in the day if you wanted to get online, you actually had to understand how a computer worked. Today, you call the cable guy and everything is set up for you.

On the one hand, this is a good thing. On the other, it means the internet is slowly filling up with dumb people.

The ‘barrier to entry’ has been completely taken away. Back when I started my first website, I was given some free webspace and a user name and password to an FTP site. If you wanted a website, you needed to at least have a basic grasp of HTML. Today, you can get yourself a blog or a myspace page with a simple username and password.

So what’s the big deal? Why is this a problem?

Well, a few things started me thinking about this.

The first was a story I read recently. Some guy started a business website and simply hotlinked a bunch of images from someone else’s site. The guy who actually owned and hosted the images removed them from his own site, thereby ‘breaking’ the links the leecher had on his site.

Can you guess what happened next?

The leecher fired off an angry email demanding the guy put these images back up because ‘it was hurting his business, and unless he put the images back up, he’d sue.’

That’s right, this guy was using someone else’s copyrighted work without permission, was using up someone else’s bandwidth by not even hosting them himself…and believes he can sue the legal owner of these images for not letting him steal his work and bandwidth.

That’s like someone stealing my car every day to go to work, using the gas I put in the car…then threatening to call the police because I bought a new car, which his stolen key won’t work with.

The second thing is forums…and I mean any forum.

Back in the day, if I was having computer problems I could go to a forum, post a request for help and in a few hours receive a few highly useful and grammatically correct answers. That’s what forums used to be for. Communal help, debate and discussion. Suprisingly, back in the day, if you disagreed with someone on a forum, they’d rationally and calmly put forward their viewpoint and why they believed they where right…not call you a fag and tell you your mother is really good at sucking dick.

Don’t get me wrong, there have always been a few assholes…but they never used to be the majority.

A few weeks ago, my combo drive wouldn’t read DVD’s. I posted a request for help on a tech-support forum, asking if anyone had had similar issues with the same drive and if they came up with a fix. I got the following replies:

“Lolz! Ur drive SUX! LITE-ON is ASS! Buy a new one!”

“Just bin it.”

“Liteon RULEZ, go suk a dick, Sony whore!”

Etc, etc, etc.

After a few days I got a reply from someone telling me that combo drives use two different laser systems, so it’s possible for a combo drive to read CDs but not DVDs…but not before my thread was hijacked by people arguing whether my particular type of drive sucked or not…including a good few messages where the forum trolls called each other ‘fagz’ and explained in detail what they’d do to each other’s mothers.

Oh, and for some reason this has given rise to the phenomenon where people believe the length of time they’ve belonged to a particular forum is directly proportional to how much they know. It doesn’t matter if the new guy cut his teeth on a Sinclair ZX, has built more computers than he can count and works as a professional systems analyst. The 14 year old whose only experience with computers is fitting an extra half gig of memory in his mom’s computer (on the third try because he bought the wrong type the first two times) obviously knows more because he signed up for the forum 6 months before the other guy.

Then we come to the people who really should know better. This story had me shaking my head:

I read a story written by a web designer who was approached by a fairly major company wanting a new website. They said they wanted a video on the first page of their site in DVD quality, but didn’t want it to stream and the load time must be zero. When the web designer pointed out that it was just plain impossible to do that he was told “Well, if you and your team are too incompetent to make it happen, we’ll take our business elsewhere!”

This is exactly what I’m talking about. If you can’t grasp the fact that it’s not possible to get a 500mb movie file to completely download and start playing on a computer with zero load time…you have no business running a website. That’s like me going to Boeing and saying “I want you to design a plane for me. it must carry at least 5000 passengers, break mach 2, but it must use no fuel whatsoever and be absolutely indestructible. You will do this for $17.50 cents, and if you’re too stupid to make this happen, I’ll take my business elsewhere!”

In other words “I have absolutely no idea how any of this works, so I’m just going to demand certain things from you, and call you stupid if you can’t make it happen, even if you’d need to break the laws of physics to make it work.”

Sigh…

We’ve moved directly from people who know their stuff to people who think downloading illegal music from Bittorrent makes them a hacker, setting up a plug and play wireless router makes them a hardware god, that they can demand a site be taken down because they find it offensive…and who for some reason believe that talking in ‘1337 5P34K’ is actually impressive.

Newsflash, people…the ability to swap letters for numbers and other letters that look like the original letters does not make you a 133T H4XX0R…it makes you a tool. You’re like the ex-private schoolboy living in a subdivision who thinks wearing really baggy pants and listening saying ‘dawg’ a lot makes them ‘Gangsta’.

However, I think the worst hit part of the online world is the online gaming community.

Back when I got into gaming, only geeks played games. If you wanted a Doom deathmatch or a round of Duke Nukem 3D, it wasn’t plug and play. You had to set up a host, swap IP addresses, configure baud rates etc. It wasn’t as simple as signing up with EA online and putting in a username and password. People played the game to play the game, not to see how many people they could annoy.

Today, for example, I decided to give Battlefield 2142 a spin.

I logged in, joined a server, and the very first thing I see is someone firing rockets at their own team, interspersed with the odd “LOLZ ur a FAG!” thrown in for good measure. Then, I got called a ‘noob camper’ for protecting a control point. Then I got accused of being a ‘hacker’ because…you know, I actually shot someone.

Yep, stand out in the open, silhouetted against the sky while firing wildly in all directions, giving away your position to anyone within a few miles…and then you’re actually surprised that you’re dead because someone actually aimed and shot you from cover…that guy must be a hacker, right? After all, you’ve had 10 minutes of online gaming experience and you’re a Gaming God among ants.

To use a better analogy, we’ve gone from a fun board game with friends, to playing with people who tip the board over and run away laughing, scream ‘cheater’ every time someone else rolls a six and cries foul despite the fact they don’t actually know the rules.

I remember playing online shooters when the only time someone shot a member of their own team was by accident, For example I remember playing an online shooter in 1996 (Dark Forces 2 I think), and I accidentally shot a member of my own team. The conversation went like this:

“Shit, my bad, sorry.”

“np, my fault, I ran into your line of fire…damn lag.”

That was it. In a similar situation today, you’d get:

“U fucken n00b! Stop TKing u fag!”

“STFU Fag!”

“U STFU!”

“Tell ur mom she was shit when I was fuckin her last nite!”

“Fuck u, asshole, ur mom’s sucked my dick!”

…and so on and so on.

Again, there where always assholes on online games…but they weren’t the majority.

For example (From Wikipedia about Dark Forces 2):

“When a player dies online, his weapons and ammunition are stored in a "pack" which appears where died. Many players insisted on leaving these packs so that respawned players could immediately reload and be fully ready to compete. The focus, then, was not on which player could luckily pick up the biggest gun. Instead, the JK community stripped its combat of meaningless advantages. Players allowed each other to load before combat started, and similarly between each kill. Games to small numbers of points (e.g. 5 or 10) could last upward of an hour, while constantly progressing at a furious pace.”

What? Sportsmanship and trying to extract the maximum enjoyment out of a game? Nothing like today when getting the most kills through fair means or foul is usually the primary focus. Who cares if you’re using an anti-tank weapon on a single enemy taking out half of your own team in the process…a kill’s a kill!

I know I sound like a typical cranky geek, and there are some big benefits for computers, the internet and gaming finding themselves firmly in the mainstream. I suppose I just miss the days of intelligent people on the internet…back when the barrier to entry was more than just a checkbook and a phone call to the local ISP.