Thursday, Jan. 18, 2007

Ding, Dong, the Bitches are Gone

2:52 p.m.

PROFILE BIO E-MAIL DESIGN DIARYLAND

I just found out that trainwrecks.net has finally died. That took way longer than I expected. I guess I underestimated the number of people on the internet who would get a kick out of that kind of cruelty.

I'm a little surprised that the end was non-violent. The entire point of that site was to humiliate people, with a special focus on bloggers and forum posters who appeared to be mentally disturbed. The average person, on seeing their blog so disparaged, would probably feel the urge to punch the site owners in the face. I would expect that a crazy person who is taunted like that would want to track down the "trainwreckers" and exact a more violent revenge, and I figured that sooner or later they were going to bait a blogger who was both crazy enough and smart enough to find them and shoot them.

Along the way they also said shitty things about several perfectly nice bloggers who didn't deserve it, and it seemed like the trainwreckers were a little jealous of those people. In the comments of the Zero Boss site several self-confessed trainwrecks.net fans are defending the site by saying that anyone who puts their writing on the internet has to expect criticism and develop thicker skin. That's like saying anyone who goes out in public should be braced to be called fat, ugly, stupid, or boring to their face. In either case, it would be more reasonable to get upset than to shrug it off with a laugh. Everyone on the internet is a human being.

Of course, it's likely that the trainwreckers were a bit mentally disturbed themselves. Normal people don't go searching for strangers to insult. It's normal to politely ignore a crazy person when you stumble across one. From the way the trainwreckers crowed over any mention, however oblique, of their effect on their victims' blog entries it was obvious they derived great pleasure from hurting complete strangers. That is weird and unhealthy.

Who knows, maybe trainwrecks.net was just a big social irony experiment, since it was certainly an example of something so horrible, headed for such a disastrous end, that you couldn't look away.

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