entombed in the shrine of zeroes and ones

So, until recently, one of your online social circles was plagued by a complete fucktard, one that made you miss the last fucktard who wasn't that bad but who nonetheless left several years ago after receiving a lot of abuse due to being a fucktard, and then in another online social circle, you find the first guy, so you give him another chance, and, well, he's still a fucktard, and even his friends tell him, "Dude, you act like a fucktard."

And by "you", i mean "me".  Anyway, i'm tired of fucktards.  The content that i'm seeing on Google Plus reminds me a lot of good Usenet discussions, and by "a lot" i mean "sometimes it's fucking exhausting to keep up with the crap."  It doesn't have the softness of Facebook that's primarily fueled by your high school classmates and your family.  And it's even higher in nerdrage quotient than LiveJournal's peak, and it's perhaps similar in quality to Twitter but has much larger caliber because there's actually room to expand commentary.  So of course we are waiting for Google to fuck it all up because they're very eager to get on with winning the "next Microsoft" title belt.

Fucktards... why did it have to be fucktards?

Here's a cool and funny rant (Quicktime) about social networks. Thanks to kiad.

I'm >this< close to deleting my orkut account; that is, to requesting that it be deleted. I will set aside for a moment my opinion of social networks, and point out why orkut sucks as a service:

• There's no communication. There's no news page that tells you what Orkut is working on, what new features are coming, what bugs are being fixed, not even a fucking FAQ. This is key.
• The "communities" suck ass. There's no threading; if you leave, your posts become "anonymous"; only 10 entries are shown per page, and you can't change that.
• The random disappearance of accounts and communities lead many to believe that there's an active censorship vector. In itself, that's not a big deal, but because there's no established policy, and referring back to my first complaint, we can't KNOW what's going on because nobody's SAYING ANYTHING.
• orkut's First Law: You can't delete your own account. orkut's Second Law: Your account can be deleted at any time for any slight against orkut, real or imagined. Corollary via Murphy's Law: trying to diss orkut in order to get your account deleted will fail.

I used to defend orkut by saying it was a beta site. No longer; it might say "beta" on each page, but it's evident that development ceased weeks ago (probably as soon as Orkut's stupid launch party occurred). It's abandonware, folks, so do the appropriate thing: remove your personal info and abandon your account.

Tom Fawcett has created a perl script that automates the most common complaints about orkut. It demonstrates the average amount of thought that goes into the bulk of these complaints.

... is that, since it's named after the guy who created it, you can't mock it without it sounding like you're mocking the guy. It's a bit of a conundrum (i will be sure to hereafter refer to him as Orkut and to it as orkut). Right now, it's down while he fiddles about (it is, after all, a beta service). See what Warren Ellis has to say about it. See what boutell has to say about it. What do i have to say about it? Well, its "new toy" feel is slowly fading, but perhaps the current downtime will result in new features that will reinvigorate my interest. I don't really have a need for it, but it is interesting and cool to see the networks form. I did shun Friendster because it was obviously a gimmicky site and i felt its stigma outweighed LJ's; i expect that orkut will get there, too.