¶But if I don’t know you, I honestly don’t care what you think, esp if it’s negative and has less than ten syllables total.
¶This is frustrating to me. I don’t know Dave Winer, and he certainly doesn’t know me. I’ve read his blog for years, though, and as a hobbyist developer, I’ve got nothing but respect and admiration for him and his foundational contributions to web publishing, distribution, and interoperability. I understand his main point here — he doesn’t care about spam comments and doesn’t want them associated with his content.
¶What frustrates me is the way he framed spammers as a subset of people he doesn’t know. He doesn’t care what spammers think, but he also doesn’t care what I think. This is the technorati attitude that has frustrated me since I started tinkering in web dev twenty plus years ago. I’ve now worked on Daystream in my spare time for over a decade. I have no formal education in software or web development. I’m a lawyer for crying out loud. I do this for fun and for my own personal growth and satisfaction. Mostly at night and on the weekends. I have no aspirations or even hopes of being viewed as relevant on the topics of web content publishing, distribution, and interoperability. Dave’s post tells me I have the right mindset on that. It’s a reminder that the technorati (the people, not the website) still exists and clearly remains a closed group that “[doesn’t] care what [outsiders] think.”
¶I’ll follow Dave’s lead and blame the spammers for this. They got us here, not him.