Consumerist = Fail

[UPDATED] Consumerist.com begins censorship.

Ok, a little background on this. I stumbled onto consumerist.com back in April when I still worked for Sprint. They had a memo talking about a story that Consumerist put up regarding their shitty website security. Since then I have been a rather avid reader. However it seems that there’s some trouble in paradise.

Consumerist has gone on a bit of a power trip when it comes to commenting. First off, it’s only on a whim that you’re even allowed to comment. In order to get approved you basically have to comment and pray that a moderator likes your post enough to give you posting abilities. Okay, I can live with that. It seems fair.

However they have some rules that you have to follow when you post comments. Most of these I can agree with. However there are two I find annoying.

1) Don’t blame the victim. This one I semi agree with. However, in a lot of these posts, blaming the victim is warranted. Sometimes the OP (The person the story is about) has done something stupid or is at fault and the commenting public will tell them so. This can sometimes lead into…

2) “Why is this story here” posts. This comes up a lot more often nowadays. Consumerist is rather known for stories with sensationalistic titles. Such as this story. Now, if you look at that title, you’ll think one thing, but see that it’s totally something else. If you read the comments you see that a lot of people are correcting the site, which seems to be a no no, since we’re then accused of “Blaming the victim.”

Now, I agree that a post that just says “Why is this here?” is dumb. But if it they have a reason for posting that and add that in their comments, it should be perfectly fine.

It seems to boil down to “We’ll say what we want and you can too, as long as you don’t make us look bad.”

The terrible part about this whole thing? Chris gets banned from the site, and then they post his story about GM on the front page with no way of him being able to comment on it! So either they ban him and then take the story from his blog, or they ban him and decide to run a story he submitted before he was banned. Either way it’s pretty shitty.

So in the end, the site isn’t completely bad…as long as you don’t plan on posting because then 1) you’ll have to wait forever and a day before you’re deemed worthy and 2) you better not point out any flaws they may make, because they are almighty and will smite you easily.

Nice going Consumerist.

“Comment me! Comment me!”

Something I’ve noticed on the various social networks I’ve been on. Most of them seem to be all out popularity contests. Myspace is notoriously guilty for this as for every one person who doesn’t care if you comment on them or not, there are about 100 that will spam bulletins asking for comments.

That’s some ratio….

It’s different if you post a picture and someone comments on it. But putting up a pic and then asking…no…BEGGING people to comment on it is…well…pointless. Seems like an ego stroke…but when you have to beg people to comment then wouldn’t that HURT your ego?

Now, don’t get me wrong. I like getting comments on my pics or whatever, but I don’t upload them with the expectation of getting comments. I do it just to do it. If I have a nice picture of myself (which is rare) I’ll upload it and that’s that. You comment on it, great. You don’t, eh. I don’t care.