Paul Graham might possibly be one of the persons on this planet currently alive I have the most respect for, especially after watching his Startup School video
How to be good. As many of my regular readers are aware of I care a LOT about Ethics in the SW business. In fact one of my first stuttering words in this very blog was about
Ethics and Earnings.
Now as all great persons in this world 99.9% of the rest of the persons in this world seem to "by default" disagree with him [Paul Graham] on roughly every word that comes out of his mouth. Like all other great people he is unable to tell anything but the truth, and the truth is a dangerous thing. We have evidence of that dating all the way back to Socrates and Jesus.
I have myself experienced extreme arguments myself, as for instance when I wrote the
Adobe FLEX blogs. It seem I managed to piss of every living human being on this planet that happens to do Adobe Flex programming. And all I said was substantially argued for in a relatively grown up matter, but some of the responses I got was PURE HATE...
Paul Graham recently wrote a blog called
how to disagree and he really pinned a lot of great stuff there. As me he is probably tired of the
"monkey web" where users can attack others with what I consider being
monkey rhetorics like; "you suck", "asshole" and so on. In fact for Paul Graham this has gone so far that he doesn't even accept comments on his blog anymore like several other "rock star bloggers".
Now since I am writing this per definition I according to his rhetoric in that very essay either strongly disagree with him or I have some beautiful input to fill in the holes with. I think you can all see by now I do NOT disagree with him, at least not on these things ;)
What Paul basically have given us all (members of the human race) is a weapon to disarm the
"monkeys of the web". Since when someone comments on your stuff with "sucker", "asshole" or such you can just say; "DH0" back. And if enough people did that then sooner or later the poor guy is going to have to actually look it up in which case he might cease to using monkey rhetorics and actually become a member of the human race. So I would hereby officially encourage everyone to use the DH0-6 scale given by Paul to classify rhetoric into categories which makes it easier for others to dismiss stupid DH0-4 comments and thereby increasing the quality of the content on the thing we all love so much known as the World Wide Web.
In addition I'd like to say something more which are parts of the reasons why it is actually POSSIBLE to exercise
monkey rhetoric on the web. There are a lot of good reasons to why this is possible, but probably the most important one is that it is so easy being ANONYMOUS. If Social Media Websites came around which completely excluded the possibility of posting comments anonymously then at least the members of the human race could have a place to actually TALK instead of being puked at. Another thing is the Avatar Image Thing, have you noticed that everyone using REAL avatars are actually much nicer in their rhetoric than the ones not doing so? I have been attacked by a couple of guys over at DZone, most of them have shits for brain while some are actually intelligent and able to follow an argument, but they often seem to disagree and by grabbing one or two sentences completely out of their context they are able to find something to disagree on which makes me look bad. Now if you read all their comments regarding my writings you will pretty soon find out that when shit hits the fan it is very often
monkey rhetoric if you sum it up, or at least very far down in the DH scale. Basically comments made to hurt me instead of trying to be constructive and argue for ones point of view. The one thing they all have in common however is that they are all
100% anonymous! None of them have "real" avatars, and none of them leaves traces which can help you figure out WHO they actually ARE. I think if it was completely impossible to post anonymously that these problems plus many more would evaporate as rain in the sun.
So I hereby propose a Social Website where being anonymous is IMPOSSIBLE, and which has a rating system for rating comments and writings into DH0-6 with adequate explanation and legends for what they mean. I think this is the stuff the social web needs in order to move from a "kids club" and into a grown up media for discussing important things.
Now let the monkeys go bananas ;)