Ah-ah-ah. Don't paraphrase me. "Dicksuckers" as an insult would be a little offensive to gay people. If you must, refer to it as "autofellatio", which has the connotations I wanted: The act of you sucking nobody off but yourself.

Perhaps I'm biased because I've garnered more attention than a lot of people online. So I can say that I knows what it's like when half the Internet seems to be aware of your presence at once, and I know firsthand that it really does not feel good. Out of the dozens of thousands of people who have read and talked about what I've written, I've cared about perhaps seven or eight of them. If I only had sixteen people reading my work but they were all people having the exact reactions I wanted, I'd trade away the rest of the thousands. I suppose I'll give them to you.

We don't need rankings to prioritize activities, Marc. Ranking is merely one of a multitude of solutions that've been created for us. Twitter gives us things we're interested in but makes us actively find who we want to pay attention to. Many web sites have a board of editors that moderate things and give them a vision. Very few use ranking and ranking alone, and the ones that do face perhaps insurmountable challenges.

Hacker News is a prime instance of this. We don't have a civil community. Half the people on this thread are bitching about it, and a quarter more, like me, are bitching at the bitchers. One in six submissions are about how we don't like things, and one in thirty are about how we don't like those changes. But there's no practice about any of them, because Hacker News has taken the extreme route of not even placing faces on the moderators in charge. There's no Alexis of Reddit joking and being one of the guys. The only big name is that of Paul Graham, who likes writing things so succinct you'd imagine God said them. I miss the Paul Graham of decade-old message boards, who was fine with being insecure and immature and occasionally admitting he didn't know what was going on. This whole "Greek choir" attitude he assumes about him doesn't seem very friendly, nor does his instinct to hellban anybody who says anything he doesn't approve of, without any particularly clear policy.

But TechCrunch isn't like Google or Hacker News. It is an editor-controlled site. So it's a refutation to your own point. But it's a very, very bad web site. Michael Arrington, who I'm sure isn't as bad as some of us make him out to be, is nonetheless a poor writer and poorer editor. The best TC stories are merely breaking stories without comment; any attempts at journalism they make show themselves to really know less about their subject than any sophomore journalism student. (I must admit I'm sad that journalism is dying, not because I'll miss the papers but because I do suspect that most bloggers aren't aware of the writing and ethics policies established that made the best journalism so good.)

It's not evil. It is, however, pointless. When a seventeen-year-old flirts with CEOs and "spreads his name" and launches a pointless website that has a pointless merger and starts writing for a blog that's a fairly pointless title, then you have to wonder if the morals this community teaches aren't in fact somewhat wrongheaded. And we have our own members here who very publicly care less about writing good things and making good sites and more about pimping themselves out. Not everybody here is like that, but we tolerate those that are. I believe we ought to be a little more upfront about the autofellatio crowd, and let them know that as tasty as I suppose your own dick must be, you're only servicing yourself and not in the best way you could. There's more to be done. I want us to talk more about the more.