Month: October 2010

Have you ever been in situations where it’s so completely easy and totally funny to totally pwn someone with magnificently witty comebacks or one liners?

(Off topic, I wonder whether people consider my sometimes liberal use of superlatives as a symptom of pretentiousness or just a way of making fun of pretentiousness. Hmm, nevermind.).

From mIRC to forums to blogs and now Twitter, there are always people online that are just, for lack of better words, easy targets.

A shallow example of easy targets:

1. Normal looking people who post their own pictures online, saying something self-deprecating but don’t mean it. Obviously an attempt to fish for compliments.

2. Normal looking people who post their own pictures online, saying something self-praising and really mean it. Obviously an attempt to fish for compliments.

3. Normal looking people who don’t know that they are normal looking who complain about other people’s looks. Obviously delusional.

4. Normal looking people who know that they are normal looking who complain about other people’s looks. Obviously asking for it.

And ladies and gentlemen, that is probably how the highly entertaining phenomenon of “flaming” came about, thanks to these easy targets. Flaming is an art; it is precise and subtle, it is witty and they often elude the easy targets until much later (okay, I really meant 5 minutes but that’s an eternity on the Internet). It is an exercise in futility and has no other reasons of existence besides irritating an easy target.

True flamers generally have a kind of camaraderie. They know one when they see one. Although they may flame each other at any given opportunity, if they met each other in real life, they might just give each other a good solid pat on the backs and become good friends. True flamers have inate respect for each other.

Easy targets, however, are not flamers (although some may delude themselves into thinking they are). They merely have unintentionally set themselves up as flame baits. So when flamed, naturally they would want to retaliate but instead of responding with the smooth, suave way of a flamer, they disintegrate into “trolls”. An anti-thesis to flamers, trolls are Master of the Obvious, off topic and crass. Their only method of irritation is just saying really rude, blunt and irrelevant things to incite an emotion. They are often anonymous too. They may aspire to be flamers but simply do no possess the intellect to be so.

There are easy targets that devolve into trolls, and then there are those that devolve into self-professed “victims”. Cyber melodrama, I guess you can call it. These are the people who can’t handle flames despite putting themselves in the middle of the cross-hair in the first place. And the worst thing about “victims”? They can’t differentiate flamers from trolls.

# – We didn’t start the flamewar video :D

The easy access to the world wide web also means that a lot more individuals are now online. And with that, the onset of the deterioration of harmless but stimulating online arguments or flames, if you preferred. Simply because there are many more people now and not all of them can see or appreciate the substance behind a flame. You can still see some of the funny stuff on sites such as Yahoo Answers, Youtube and 4chan, but they are far and few. Anything remotely worthy would now instantly become viral.

Guess what I’m trying to say is this: It’s totally not fun to totally pwn someone with magnificently witty comebacks or one liners anymore. Because, it’s apparently a form of bullying now. Because, more often than not, it’s hurtful to people eventhough the intention was only to irritate.

The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it. – Dale Carnegie

So long, funny flamewars. Rest in peace.