The Most Irritating Online Personalities

I know that I always try to be polite, smile at everyone and never be rude to people that surround me online (and offline, of course) simply because I think people should be civil everywhere and always. But I have decided that it is time for some negative talk because you can not always keep all the bad thoughts to yourself only and sometimes they should be shared - if only for the sake of your own mental health.

Actually lately I’ve been finding myself shouting at my laptop way too frequently because while I won’t shout at the person I talk to on IM or email at this very moment, I feel my laptop will survive some shouting and screaming at it - and this is exactly what I’ve been doing more and more frequently lately. So I wanted to share my list of the most irritating people on the web and hopefully hear from you about who makes you want to stay away from the web from time to time. Besides, maybe some of the personalities will recognize themselves in this or that category - and at least somewhat change their behavior.

Hackers and spammers

I have joined the two groups into one here because they happen to only irritate me when they work together. Unlike many people, I have learned to be quite comfortable with tons of spam that I get in my email inboxes every day but there are other forms of spam that are way more difficult to tolerate.

I am talking about blog comment spamming. Only last weekend we have finally found a suitable solution by installing IntenseDebate on Profy - and before that we tried to survive up to 80 thousand attacks from spammers per minute with them trying to submit their spammy comments. I spent lengthy time (sometimes as much as 2 hours per day) cleaning such spam comments away but this is not the worst thing about them: every reader who was subscribed to comments from the posts that got hacked on Profy, eventually received such spam comments in their inboxes. Believe me, it feels terrible to know that you send spam to your very own beloved readers.

Very recently one of my good friends had all his blogs hacked in another manner: instead of submitting spam comments, these people hacked many of his posts and submitted various links directly to the texts of the posts which resulted in decrease of Google page ranks for his blogs. It took him 5 days to clean everything away and these were the days he had no work done at all. And who knows how long it will take Google to return the page ranks he deserved.

Honestly, I do understand that for some people this is their regular work they simply need to do to make their living but the number of hours web publishers like me and my friend spend fighting against these hackers simply seems to be unfair and if everything that I wished to them actually happened, I guess I’d just have to feel terribly guilty because it must be just too cruel.

Social media consultants with 60 thousand Twitter followers

We’ve talked already about how funny it is to live and work in the internet industry: this industry seems to be so simple that everyone can be an expert, a guru, or a maven. It now looks that every third person who follows you on Twitter will be some kind of marketing maven or at least social media consultant judging by their profiles.

These people have not been very noticeable for some time but eventually it just became too evident and to a certain extent irritating so I am adding them to this list eve: they are probably pretty harmless but it does not make them less irritating.

I know that some people do deserve all these titles but I really believe such titles when they are used by other people referring to the “experts” while self-proclaimed gurus don’t really seem to be too convincing to me. Besides, if the only thing they teach is how to get 60 thousand Twitter followers (which is what they usually send automatically to everyone who follows them), I really don’t think this type of knowledge is so valuable that one can describe oneself an “expert” only because of knowing these small Twitter tips and tricks.

People without names

This is a whole new problem with people everywhere around eagerly adopting names of the brands they promote instead of their own names - and calling themselves nothing but these brand names. And you know what, it is pretty difficult to talk to a person calling this person Mr. Debt Consolidation or Mrs. Real Estate Florida.

Unfortunately we see such people everywhere on Twitter and in blog comments with them shamelessly promoting their brands and doing pretty much nothing else. Of course there’s nothing wrong in promoting something online but there should be some limits to this and people should at least try to stay human when they have conversations online.

These are the personalities that seem to be very irritating to me personally and while the first type (hackers, I mean) can already be prosecuted in many countries, I think that if (or when) we have some kind of internet police, there should be at least some fines for all these wrongdoings - and maybe eventually the internet will become a better place for knowledge and conversation - not only shameless self-promotion.