Today I celebrate my 10th anniversary as an internet denizen. This same day back in 1996, I got myself my very first internet plan for around 300 pesos a month. This package gave me 3 hours worth of internet time, 2 email addresses and 2MB of disk space to use as a sandbox for my fledgling HTML skillz.
The internet culture of 1996 was pretty much uniform in composition. Almost everybody was into IRC; everybody had their own stupid Geocities homepage; and everybody’s, mine included, favorite internet activity was downloading high resolution Pamela Anderson photos and using it as their desktop wallpaper. This, if I may, add was a very painful process which is about as enjoyable as covering a picture from a magazine with typewriting paper and moving it about an inch per minute, little by little revealing a portion of the picture.
Now it’s 2006 and the internet has gone a long way. The Internet is no longer homogeneous. In fact, it now consist of hundreds of variying quintessences and dozens of subcultures. Blogging alone has a plethora of subcultures waiting for us to explore and make fun of. (Actually we already did: here and here) This time, we’re going to turn our discerning gaze towards the people who make blogs so goddamn successful—the readers.
Now I don’t have enough the time, let alone, the patience to describe all the types of people who view blogs for you so instead, I will do my best to make this a passable article and attempt to divide people who read blogs into three main categories.
Man Blog type readers can be best described as highly cultural and intellectual—highbrows if you please. Man Blog type readers are usually in their mid 20’s to early 30’s making them somewhat the content connoiseurs of the intarwebs.
These people have spent a good part of their adolescence beating off to articles from somethingawful and have , more or less, developed a keen judgment on whether or not your blog’s content is worthy of their time.
Write about how your girlfriend broke up with you and these readers will call you a “fagort”; post what you think is a funny youtube video on your blog and they will again write “fagot” on your comment box; this time in big red letters.
Try posting what you think is a funny picture forwarded to you on your blog and these readers will systematically take away whatever desire to ever blog again remains in you by saying “Hellloooooo! 1997 called and it wants the goatse guy’s picture back you stupet fagort!”
Why don’t you post a picture of a hollywood celebrity you find hot on your blog and give these readers more reason to call you a fagort? Nevermind the fact that the average Man Blog type reader is a 30 something virgin still living with his parents, they have an uncanny ability to spot or cobble up hideous physical flaws in the most beautiful of women.
Also, bear in mind that writing about music does not work if you are targetting this demographic because these readers have, most probably, heard of whatever awesome band you’re thinking of writing about years before you did.
We’ve discussed pundits before and this group of people are not much different. These bleeding heart critics will jump at every chance they could get to cram shitloads of their political bullshit into everyone’s throats.
These people, like the Man Blog type readers are very hard to please as their political beliefs have been tempered through years of reading and posting combative politcal topics over at bulletin boards like pinoyexchange
Fortunately for the rest of us, these types of readers are either ignorant, all-rhetoric losers or just bad tempered kids who developed an anti-oppression political belief system because they were made fun of a lot because they peed sitting down.
Morans make up the individual atoms of the internet’s vast ocean of stupidity. Of the three types of blog readers, they are the easiest to please.
You could go on posting some really boring shit on your blog like how you think Super Saiyan Son Gokou is sexy, post a picture of your dog or whatever the fuck you mediocre bloggers post to pollute the internet with your lameess—It’s all the same to the Morans; they’d still comment on how “nice” your post is and how “you should visit their blog.”
Sadly, 70% of the internet is made up of these morans and the feeling of quasi-appreciation that owners of lame blogs get from these people and the misguided tolerance these types of readers have towards lameness are the primary reasons for the proliferation of substandard content on today’s blogosphere.
Mike "Fucking" Villar
"a Manila-based blogger made famous by his Atrocities of Friendster series, a regular feature he publishes on his blog where he mercilessly criticizes and mocks pictures of ugly people he stumbles upon on popular social networking site, Friendster. Although a lot of people are offended by what he writes, long-time readers of his blog regard him as a brilliant satire writer."
-Taken from my WikiBios page
