My dark side

I’ve discovered that I have a dark side, my own personal Mr. Hyde.  The magic potion which changes me from mild-mannered webmaster to seething and calculating revenge expert is carried by teenagers—angry, dramatic, text-messaging, bitching teenagers.

A few years ago, Nancy and I made the mistake of starting a “fan site” for a “celebrity” (and I use the term loosely).  We had no particular interest in this celebrity, but knew she’d be having a brief moment in the spotlight and thought we’d try to take advantage of that.  Our original plan had just been to throw together a quick but thorough site so search engines would consider us “an authority site”, but eventually the site became our pet project and we decorated and enhanced it with all the bells and whistles we could pay for.  We still didn’t care for the “celebrity”, but wanted to see if we could make a truly great website.

We did make a truly great website, and people flocked to it by the thousands.  People also incessantly stole content from our site, taking everything from entire text passages I’d written, to our entire photo gallery.  In every case the thieves were teenagers, and if you asked them to stop stealing your hard work, they’d just laugh and say it was “public domain” because it was “on the Internet”.  Many a night I lay awake fantasizing about flying to Australia to strangle other people’s rude and obnoxious brats who were taking credit for my hard (and in many case, expensive) work.  We were able to cut down on some of that sort of theft by using anti-hotlinking code, banning the IPs of troublemakers, etc., but we then started to find even bigger headaches on our message board.  Teenagers by and large insist on writing in text messaging abbreviations, which are impossible for non-English speakers to read, and are pretty much impossible for me to read as well.  They don’t even all use the *same* abbreviations—they make up their own based on their perverse concepts of spelling.  If you ask them to write in “proper English”, you get called “uptight”, or even worse, a (sic) “communist Natzi”.  A large number of teenagers feel the need to lie and tell outrageous stories—if I had a nickel for every teenager who’d claimed to have suffered multiple, dramatic injuries, or the number of teenagers claiming to be millionaires with butlers, or the number of teenagers who insist they’ve had sex with their teachers, I could retire wealthy.  I just wanted to have a message board where young people could have nice conversations with other nice people, but nearly every day there’s some new person who wants to brag about how drunk they were the night before, how many people they slept with, how their gym teacher has a crush on them, etc.  If they’re not bragging, they’re angry and depressed, and talking of getting tattoos to commemorate the times in their lives when they nearly committed suicide.  They’re just so self-centered and feeling sorry for themselves, and I rarely see any of them attempt to seek out positive experiences.  I suggest they volunteer at an animal shelter during their summer vacation, but instead they paint their walls black and write bad poetry about how much their lives suck.  I just despise them!  I know I was never like that!  I know I was sensitive and took things very seriously, but I also had an interest in the world around me, and read a lot to expand my horizons.  My dreams were to travel and to go to college and to to have exciting jobs—I know I never fantasized about the days I’d be able to get into bars to get drunk.  If I was a teenager today, would I be self-centered too?  I really hope not.

In any case, that “celebrity” website is causing me so much agitation that it’s about time to close it down and move on.  It was an experiment, I learned some stuff I didn’t really want to know, and now I’ll work on some project that’s less interactive.  I’ve reached my celebrity fill, and Ellen Degeneres, this means you, too.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 01/21 at 09:28 PM

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  1. If it makes you feel better (probably not), the said website is the best community website I’ve ever been on.  I really felt/feel safe there, thanks to your hard work.

    However, I really wouldn’t shed a tear if you took it down :p

    Posted by The Minstrel  on  01/22  at  01:42 AM

  2. We learned a lot.  We met A LOT of great kids.  Let’s just steal those kids and run off to a better, less rigid place.  Please oh please oh please?!

    Posted by Fellow "Natzi"  on  01/22  at  10:07 PM
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