I find myself commenting a lot on how stupid Digg is. Not the concept itself, which is basically Slashdot evolved and on steroids. The problem is that the average posters are morons.

It is a well established fact that the louder you are, in general, the lower your intelligence is. It so happens that smart people tend to be introverts. They put their thoughts in writing, and if need be, they will write substantial essays/blogposts on subjects near and dear to them. But their thoughts are always secondary to whatever their passion is, whether that is coding, poetry, health-care, TV, science, sailing, art, Star Trek, the Simpsons, Apple fanboyism, etc., etc. Introverts are unlikely to leave inane comments floating around the Internet (except when they’re drunk.)

In contrast, since most people are extroverts, there are, by sheer statistics, more stupid people in this particular group. You know the type. The folks who are always jibber-jabbering away about nothing in particular. You know, obsession over American Idol, or defending the profligate behavior of Paris Hilton. Sometimes you can’t help but wonder if they’re hopelessly narcissistic and just like the way their voice sounds. Yap, yap, yap. Sound and fury signifying nothing.

These are the folks who leave their stupid spoor droppings on Digg, with undescriptive titles and pointless descriptions that say “title says it all.” They’re the ones who leave the ignorant, ill-informed, rude, and contentious comments, the ones that are patronizing, the ones that ineptly describe some well-known cyberspace phenomenon, apparently unaware that there are lots of people who have been on the Internet way before 2006. I mean, you can feel the neurons in your brain apoptosing if you read too many of these comments. And these are the ones that aren’t dug down into oblivion!

So why do I subject myself to it?

I blame RSS.

No, seriously, RSS has been a godsend. Instead of having to keep a bloated bookmark file of my favorite blogs, I can just load them up into my RSS viewer. Instead of clicking on every bookmark one-by-one, seeing if someone has updated, I can just watch the ever-flowing stream of posts scrolling down my screen, like an intelligible version of the display on “The Matrix”

What this convenience gives me is that I have a lot more time to read random blogs. I’m following something like 450 sites or so, and it still takes far less time to skim through the headlines and teasers than it would be to click and check maybe 20-30 blog sites.

So I’m pretty easy when it comes to adding someone to my RSS feed roll. It’s easier for me to branch out, read blog posts from people who have clearly different sensibilities and opinions from me. I have even added 1 or 2 intelligent conservative sites (just this close from being a complete oxymoron), partly because they articulate their opinions smartly, and partly because it always pays to see what the other side is thinking. And this is the rationale for keeping Digg in the list, no matter what sorts of nonsense happens to come by.

But, seriously, headlines matter. If the headline is unhelpful or, worse, badly-written, as in, me-no-speak-English-good (or any other language for that matter), there’s no way I’m going to read the teaser, much less the article. (Although I must say, one of my other pet peeves are sites that only give you teasers. I rarely add sites like these to my RSS feed list, unless they’re simply impossibly brilliant.) Digg is by far the worst offender in this regard. I can scroll through an entire page of Digg postings and not find anything of interest.

The signal-to-noise ratio is discouraging.

And yet Digg offers a window into the brains of 13-24 year old gaming nerds, a perspective that I otherwise wouldn’t be exposed to, so I always hesitate whenever I see a really stupid post that makes me want to just expunge this idiocy from my consciousness.

Anyway, the above expository rant was provoked by this particular post on Digg: NoFollow Just Isn’t Cool. Allegedly written by an SEO schiester, it details why this comment spam deterrent is “unfair,” citing a bizarre interpretation of the nature of free speech, and an even more bizarre interpretation of when reciprocity is expected.

Now, I admit, I don’t know why I respond to this kind of drek, but, well, I guess I’m just not one of the smart ones I was talking about, tending to lean more towards the morons of the world. Whatever. May God have mercy on my soul.

But I’ll actually take this post seriously. For those who aren’t in the know, the nofollow attribute is an attempt by Google to prevent the gaming of their PageRank system, which factors in how many links a particular site has pointing to it, in order to calculate how popular a site is, and which ultimately determines how close to the top the site appears when a particular search query is entered.

Thanks to brilliant solutions like Akismet, which is setup by default in Wordpress, the scourge of comment spam is nowhere near as bad as e-mail spam, but machine intelligence will never outdo human intelligence, and enough comment spam comes by that even the typical blogger who posts for the benefit of two or three people gets bothered by advertisements for Cialis or Russian mail-order brides. It’s all probability, I guess. Bother enough people for enough time, and a few are bound to actually want to buy things from you.

Personally, I think spammers should be classified as unlawful combatants and interned at Gitmo, but that’s just me, and you spammers out there should be thankful that I’m essentially unelectable to public office. Because you scum would be on the top my agenda, and certainly on the top my mafia hit list.

But I digress.

But what the technique really entails is posting spam comments all over the place, loading up as many unique URLs with links to your shady prescription drug selling site, so that the Googlebot awards you hella points and gives you a massive PageRank. And when someone types in “Viagra” into Google, your site will be on the front page for all the sad impotent bastards in the world to see.

So what Google did was suggest the nofollow attribute. Googlebot ignores any links that have this attribute tag, and thereby awards no points, and thereby fails to inflate said PageRank. Some sad fucks still keep trying despite the fact that Wordpress adds this tag by default, but it’s decreased the utility of the so-called Googlebomb.

Now, I have no problem with this. For one thing, it’s your site. While I’m a strong proponent of freedom of speech, technically, a blog is not a public commons, not the way that a courthouse or a town square is. It’s a private (virtual) location that the owner graciously opens up to people who he/she expects will abide by common courtesy. It’s like any place of business. The owner can always reserve the right to deny service or even access. So if you’re acting like an asshole, there’s nothing in the U.S. Constitution that gives you a right to continue doing so.

Now given this framework, I find it extremely offensive that someone should assume that because they posted to my blog, I owe them a link. Fuck you. I didn’t ask you to comment. Hell, as far as I’m concerned, I’m giving you the privilege to add your own thoughts to my site. There are no rights involved here. I’ll delete your shit if it’s ignorant, offensive, or otherwise worthless, and that’s too bad for you. The hell I’m going to give you any Googlejuice.

The organic way to gain page rank is to impress a blogger so much that they add you to their blogroll. Or at least maybe put a link in their blog post pointing to you. These links are supposed to be followed by Googlebot. And this provides more realistic data about how much other people actually find your site interesting.

And if you think about it, the reciprocal mechanism for sharing thoughts was not supposed to be primarily through comments. Comments are really more suited to responses that don’t warrant an actual blog post. And obviously, for people who don’t have blogs, this is the only way to go. (Come on, who doesn’t have a blog these days?) But people who have blogs? The mechanism that was supposed be used was the trackback. So when you saw a blog post that you wanted to respond to at length, instead of posting a little comment, you would write an entry in your blog and add a link pointing to the blogpost you are referring to.

But sadly, spammers fucked that up long ago, and trackbacks pretty much went by the wayside. Thank you for that, goddamn spammers. Way to go.

Bottom line: no one owes you anything on the blogosphere. If you’re doing something expecting some kind of reward, or return, you’re just deluding yourself.