Negativity is has its charms, but the fate of being positive and community-minded is inescapable on the Internet. In order to do anything collaboratively, that is, anything at all beyond pure consumption, the 'community' has to minimize internal dissent and make people feel good about contributing. This does not mean squashing internal critique totally, otherwise things get boring, but stabilize it on a level where it is productive, and thus, dare I say, turns positive. After all, if really you don't like it, why don't you just go somewhere else? Anyone who administered an online collaborative project has uttered this sentence more than once.
So, we have special interest communities, dog-lovers, negativity-lovers and so on. Endless solipsistic niches of like-minded people. Snubster just has a cool branding. The days of critique and negativity are over. Rather, we have interesting discussions on minor points, enabled by the fact that we basically agree with one another. There are too many options to waste your time really disagreeing with people. Felix # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
