You may have owned the playing field because you were an athlete. You may have owned the student council because you were more popular. You may have owned the hallways and sidewalks because you were big and intimidating. Well, welcome to our world.
Things like athleticism, popularity, and physical prowess mean nothing here. We place no value on them ... or what car you drive, the size of your bank account, what you do for a living or where you went to school.
Allow us to introduce you to the concept of a "meritocracy" - the closest thing to a form of self-government we have. In The United Meritocratic nation-states of the Internet, those who can do, rule. Those who wish to rule, learn. Everyone else watches from the stands.
You may posses everything in the off-line world. We don't care. You come to the Internet penniless, lacking the only thing of real value here: knowledge.
"Who cares? The Internet isn't real anyway!" This attitude is universally unacceptable. The Internet is real. Real people live behind those handles and screen names. Real machines allow it to exist. It's real enough to change government policy, real enough to feed the world's hungry, and even, for some of us, real enough to earn us a paycheck. Using your own definition, how "real" is your job? Your stock portfolio? Your political party? What is the meaning of "real", anyway?
Do I sound arrogant? Sure ... to you. Because you probably don't get it yet.
If 4chan is the asshole of the Internet, then Encyclopædia Dramatica is the crap that crusts up around it. If you're still reading at all, then you probably already know that. At any rate, I like the Encyclopædia, the same way I like all humor sites, with the added bonus that when I come across some weird
INTERNETS joke that I don't get, I know where I can look for an entertaining explanation. I don't like the barrage of pop-ups and porn ads, but given it's hosted material and reputation, ED can't attract real advertising. For not unrelated reasons, ED also churns through bandwidth like fa/tg/uys through meatbread.
And of course, ED is not a naturally occurring function of the Internet, people do have to pay for its hosting. These issues have collided. Encyclopædia Dramatica is preparing the shut down for lack of hosting money.
Now, I didn't post any links, either to the site or the host's blog asking for donations, for Toady's sake, and because you can Google it if you want, but most importantly because I'm certainly not urging anyone to throw down money. I'm sure as Hell not sending a dime to keep the lulzwiki online. Given the clientele, it's equally possible the whole thing is a moneymaking scam, but I believe it all the same.
So I'll be damned if it costs me anything just to see a shitty website. Yet I do believe in the preservation of all information, the more amusingly presented the better, so I think it'd be to the Internet's detriment if the Encyclopædia was gone. Anyway, I just think it's an interesting turn of events, and I wonder if anyone else does.
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Topic: Serious Business is not profitable business - unfunded lulz (Read 8270 times)