Goodbye and thanks for the fish

By now you must be thinking: “Gosh, Batman them internet folks sure are a bunch of goons”. While this is mostly true, not all that comes from the darkest reaches of the internet is perverted, sick and/or disgusting.

Indeed! Also good and creative things can be found in these massive internet communities. An example is Something Awful. A website that likes to make other people feel stupid and generally takes itself is not too serious. Established in a time when the internet was still “newish” and talk of web 2.0 was still years away, it’s members have been at the forefront of many internet scandals. But we already discussed those.

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans it caused the website to go off line, because the servers were located there. After a back up went on line, the owner of Something Awful set up a PayPal account where people could donate for the survivors of the hurricane. He donated $3,000 himself and promised free merchandise for everyone who donated more then $10.

In little more then a day the community gathered a whopping $27,695.41. However PayPal, in all it’s “wisdom”, froze the account. The reason given was suspicion of fraud (probably because PayPal never had an account gain money so fast) and the only way to get unfrozen was to show proof of shipping, which was of course impossible with the money being donations. Eventually PayPal stated that it was willing to donate the money United Way of America. Something Awful however disagreed wanting the money to be donated to the Red Cross, instead of the, in there eyes, corrupt United Way of America. PayPal could not do this due to business affiliation and returned the money to everyone, minus taxes and exchange rate of course.. Sad.

Goon City just after the thread started

I also promised an example of creativity (and sheer awesomeness). Take a look at Goon City. It started as a thread on the Something Awful forums, with one guy making a single house and grew into a very detailed city, needing Google Maps to view properly. All of it is custom made. Of course it is filled with internet meme’s, internet celebrities or just things that look cool from various movies, series and comics. People are still adding to it every day.

The online hordes

Far beyond the safe borders of the ‘civilised’ internet lurks a dark force. A horde, hiding in the shadows of the internet. Luckily for everyone else, they squabble amongst themselves for most of the time.

But every now and then, something catches the attention of these men and (some.. or.. none) women. Perhaps a website about real dolls, people who dress up as animals or a community that takes itself too serious. Once targeted, the hordes start to mobilise and sweep like Genghis Khan towards it. A horde so massive that the internet trembles.

Seriously though, this post is about the power of massive online communities.
But what is a massive online community you ask? Most of the time it is (obviously) a large group of people, who share a common interest. Most of these communities are mostly harmless and focus on discussion, with perhaps some light flaming.

However, some communities have a more.. broader interest. A notorious example is the so called 4chan board. Originally a place to discuss anime and television programmes, it has now become one of the largest communities in the world (Ranked around 1000 on Alexa, but sometimes reaches 50). The thing with this community is that you can post anonymously, coupled with little to no moderation. This has lead to the creation of many internet meme’s (meme’s are catchphrases or images that spread around the web quickly) such as lolcats and the famous Rickroll. Rickroll was all about making people click on a link that lead to a youtube movie of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”. Most active internet users have been rickroll’d atleast once or twice.

A good example of the power of a community like 4 chan is when an anonymous user suggested to do something against the Church of Scientology. This message resulted, according to Scientology, in 6,000 threatening phone calls and a storm of emails (most of them containing Rickrolls).

The most famous and recent example is perhaps the hacking of Sarah Palin’s Yahoo! mail account by a 4chan user. Who subsequently went to brag about it on the 4chan board, even posting pictures and the accounts password. This made worldwide news.

Of course it is not all shock and drama in these communities, in my next post I will show a few examples of creativity and innovation that came from the online masses.

When things go wrong..