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Fri, Mar 21, 2008 15:13 EDT

Hardcore Facebook Fans Join Apple and Linux Boosters as the Most Vicious

Topic: Applications

Blog: Web 2.0 Advisor

Current Rating: 5 Comments: 3

I used to think Apple and Linux fanboys detested the business press most, perhaps due to what they perceive as a lack of understanding about their technologies of choice.

But after watching the video of last week’s excruciatingly painful keynote between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and BusinessWeek reporter Sarah Lacy at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, it led me to believe that Facebook fans have happily joined the ranks of technology’s most venomous fans.

If you haven’t heard, here’s what happened. For Zuckberberg’s keynote appearance, the conference organizers decided that a Q&A format would be better than a speech. By the end of the discussion (you can see the full video on Justin Smith's blog here), the fans in the audience, many of whom were Facebook application developers, felt that Lacy had become too chummy with the young CEO. They started cackling at her to "ask something interesting!"

It gave way to a mob mentality of faceless Facebook fanboys screaming at her, and the talk spiraled out of control.

While Lacy’s questions were at times remarkably self-indulgent (or sometimes not questions at all), and it was annoying how she repeatedly went out of her way to note that she had spent time with Zuckerberg to write a book about him, the Facebook fans' behavior at this incident seemed over the top. Moreover, it revealed the friction between journalists who cover technology, and hardcore enthusiasts who read their stories and watch their interviews.

This friction has played out on the web during the past few years as both the trade and mainstream press opened up their sites to user-generated content. Up to now, it's been especially vicious in the world of the Linux operating system and Apple products.

Here's a couple examples that should elucidate the point:

On CIO.com last summer, a freelancer wrote a story called Eight Reasons Not To Use Linux in the Enterprise. The resulting comment thread by Linux aficionados descended into character assassination, with personalized critiques of the author and his sources. Essentially, they contended he was nothing but a Microsoft lackey who hated open-source.

Apple fans have also gotten into the fun more recently with the iPhone for business announcement. Wall Street Journal reporter Ben Worthen wrote an interesting blog post in the wake of the iPhone SDK launch after he interviewed a Forrester Research analyst that raised some interesting questions about the iPhone as a device suitable for business. Of course, the fanboys argued ridiculously, Worthen must have been on the payroll of BlackBerry maker Research in Motion.

The Facebook Q&A, to me, was like watching these types of comment threads play out in person.

In my mind, there’s a few reasons for this rocky relationship between the media and the fanboys.

One is spineless web-rage. The ability for fanboys to post anonymously, or, in this case, to shout like mongrels from the middle of a conference venue, has allowed them to cross the line into being downright disrespectful while hiding behind their strength in numbers.

Secondly, collective intelligence (as spawned by user generated content and social technologies) and the mob mentality aren’t one and the same, and these fanboys have frequently opted for the latter. They go after the messenger rather than the actual facts. If the journalist says or writes something that displeases them or is construed as slighting their technology (or hero) of choice in any sort of way, they lose it (and usually go over the top, because you can tell they enjoy the sport of it).

The last issue: a great many business journalists, often concerned

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Average (2 votes)
5
 
 
Fri, Mar 21, 2008 23:39 EDT
Anonymous user
Posted by: Tom
Rating: 90

I believe Linux is "the best" for a variety of reasons and advocate for my favorite flavors on a regular basis (e.g. Ubuntu which is Linux for those who fear the Penguin) What I don't do is deride Microsoft (their operating systems have kept me employed for years) nor do I attack people who dislike Linux or post negative things about it.

Rather than rant at and about people who rant, why not simply ask them to behave civilly? If they refuse, technology is available to filter them in cyberspace and in meatspace, nice police officers are always helpful with the unruly.

 
Sat, Mar 22, 2008 1:22 EDT
Anonymous user
Posted by: Rodney Rumford
Rating: 10

I think the real issue was they had the wrong person for the interview. Very Unfortunate. Seriously, you have a chance to interview the CEO of the hottest tech company in the valley and you don't ask hard questions? Blown opportunity.

I think that she should have been better prepared and asked more pertinent questions. If you see the interview she did after the train wreck, she still maintains that SHE did nothing wrong.

The funny thing is, the crowd got hostile because they had a hunger for knowledge about technology and what is coming. They lost their patience when she never got past the self serving chit-chat.

As a side note: no one is anonymous on twitter. ;)

You can see more on my thoughts on this as well as the video clip of her post interview here:
http://facereviews.com/2008/03/09/zuckerberg-interviewer-denies-train-wreck-shes-clueless/

Cheers!

Rodney Rumford
Editor: FaceReviews.com

 
Sat, Mar 29, 2008 5:02 EDT
Anonymous user
Posted by: slgr
Rating:

I think your interpretation of things is somewhat mistaken. I think the real trend is that technology people of all sorts hate whitewashing, they hate obfuscation, they hate vague misinformation, and they hate the superficial. With all the articles and events you cite, it's pretty clear.
With the reasons to not use Linux article, there was far too much generalization and no nuance. As an example, I used to work in IT and the entity I was employed by essentially paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in license costs to make XP behave more like linux: They paid to get software analogous to a linux package manager, such as apt or emerge to maintains software on their linux boxes, and it took them at least a year to even figure out how to get it set up and working. They also had to expend the energy to redo the users on every system so that there was effective user privilege escalation... essentially a ton of time to make a poor analogue of sudo. Then there were tons of little things. As an example,(I'll admit I don't know if there's some sort of alternative way to do this) changing from one print server to another that ran maybe 30 printers on 3 floors, they had each printer manually added via wizard to the new server. Time consuming and tedious. And I'd bet money with linux you could have just copied a config file from the old one to the new one. So essentially, when I have experiences such as that, only brushing the surface, and then I read an article that overgeneralize about 'linux' instead of pointing out issues with specific distros (such as how annoying yum is on Fedora), it's annoying.

Much the same way, people from a community of some kind don't like lowest common denominator reporting. They're used to being able to change the community with their voices, being taken seriously, and given some respect. The Larry King treatment isn't going to pass muster with them. So when Facebook guy gets interviewed, the people there don't want their questions wasted.

Apple, too, is often subject to a lot of mischaracterization. I meet professional people fairy often who hear about macs and then start talking about problems from the days of Mac OS 8 or sometimes oven Mac OS 7 like the same problems are still around. The worst part is that some people come up with mac issues that have never existed.

It is my opinion that better informed individuals from respective communities, be they the Linux community, the Facebook community, or the Apple community, often get subjected to stupid mischaracterizations by a broader society that doesn't really understand things at the same level they do, and these mischaracterizations only create impetus for a sense of needing to inform of the truth. And, unfortunately, there are 2 layers of truth, One is that there are often simplification, near falsehoods, and misstatements up the wazoo in mainstream articles relating to Mac, the Internet, and Linux. It is one thing to correct them. But the second layer of truth is that the reason there are so many poor articles on these topics is that the individuals who write on them are often not qualified enough, competent enough, or knowledgeable enough to do so accurately. I hardly think it should come as a surprise that people become more radicalized and pissed over time after time of being subjected to the phenomenon.

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C.G. Lynch chronicles what matters (and what doesn't) in the world of social networking, Web 2.0 and consumer applications.

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