Your days of being mean, are dead

Jason Calacanis is the most disliked web 2.0 celebrity.

This is the great connector of Silicon Valley only a decade ago. He founded Weblogs Inc, sold it to AOL for $25m and launched a new semantic web-search engine, Mahalo. He's achieved more than 95% of the web celebrities on the list. He should be loved.

But for all his great achievements, his online ego precedes him.

There was a time when you could be mean on the internet. It was fun. You could log in, indulge your ego, argue about movies and get into heated scraps. Now you can't. Now you have to act like you're in a room full of people.

Technology doesn't matter anymore. Maybe it never did. If you say mean things on the internet, you're a mean person. If you rave about yourself, you're are narcissist. And never, ever, trade personal insults.

It goes beyond this. Would you desperately prove someone is wrong online when you would normally agree to disagree? Would you post an anonymous comment when you wouldn't mumble it under your breath? And would you ever join a mob and attack someone you didn't know?

These are symptoms of thinking the internet is a place. It isn't, not anymore. Only spell checkers still capitalise the I in internet.

Comments

[Jason Calacanis]

i wouldn't read into an anonymous voting system with a handful of votes. i've got a whole crew of wacky folks who follow me around the internet to trash me--that's the result of over a decade of speaking your mind. :-)

however, you point is correct that the anonymous blogosphere/interwebs are filled with bad behavior. Part of the reason I retired from blogging and moved to emailing is because i was spending so much time dealing with trolls and not so much time with the people who were friends, family, and fans.

over 30k folks on twitter follow me, and the mailing list is reaching 5,000 subscribers in five weeks....that's the real test in my mind: how many folks will invite you into your email box/twitter.

of course, it's not a popularity contest... for me, I get to go to almost any city in the world and have friends there to have a great meal with--what could be better than that?

[David Cushman]

Good to see Jason joining the conversation about ditto.net! Proving P2PR works.

Jason, there's no shame in being down the bottom end of that list; the people around you are hardly nonentities - you provoke a response where so many get forgotten.

congrats!