There is this prevailing school of thought that sits like an 800 pound gorilla in this sometimes juvenile schoolyard we graciously call The Web that everything is about the community. You often hear this being spouted by Web 2.0 and social media evangelists with an almost religious fervor.
This idea of The Community is cool idea. Not necessarily new one but a cool idea all the same. Trying to make us all believe that the community is always infallibly correct and good is not cool but rather borderline bullshit. While the community is generally a quiet little beast that is happy to play in its little sandbox there are times where it is whipped into a withering frenzy when it perceives that its sensibilities of what is right and wrong are being attach by outside forces.
We just saw yesterday two cases where the gorilla got pissed and the waves of condemnation began flowing like tsunami across the blogosphere. The first one was Apple’s decision that their Updater would set the default action to enable the download and installation of Safari on Windows machines. Well you would have though Microsoft was the one doing it by the reaction. It didn’t matter that; as MG Siegler pointed out, it takes less than a second to uncheck this option - no we all had to get into a tizzy over the stupid matter.
Then we had word spread that Sony was going to charge customers $50.00 for computers that had been decrapified (no useless trialware and other such bloat) in order to make up for the money they were losing as a result of selling clean machines. Once more the gorilla got its panties in a knot and Sony backtracked and said they would offer the decrapification service for free.
Well Chris Pirillo then posts on how it is all about the community and how it is always right
Sony didn’t return fire to those bloggers who attacked them for this shortsighted decision - instead, it reversed its decision to blackmail its would-be customers. Good for you, Sony - but you’re not out of the woods yet. You’re just beginning to learn a tough but extremely valuable lesson:
THE COMMUNITY IS ALWAYS RIGHT.
Give me a frikken break. The community is not always right. A lot of the times it is a mindless idiot that gets all worked up over the stupidest thing making it seem like it is earth shattering. Just look at digg.com, or the bickering that goes on over Wikipedia or any of the thousands of blogs that the moment the gorilla gets an itchy ass become as mindless as sharks in a feeding frenzy.
Just as a community can be brought together to good things it can also turn into a mob of idiots that seem to lose all sensibility or common sense. Sure corporations can be made to realize the error of their ways but equally so, innocent people can get hurt - both personally and professionally.
A community can only be valued by both the good and the bad it does and for most of the time the internet is more like that 800 pound gorilla with a severe case of gas. You never know when it will erupt.
Conversation Tags: community, VentureBeat, Chris Pirillo
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