monetizing of the web

You know, the monetizing of the web has really kind of made people into dicks.

I've got a pretty thick skin, but Yuzo and I posted NooBTooB links in a few forums that were dedicated to the games that we were reviewing, saying that they might like to check out our reviews and discuss them with us, and the response was really disheartening.

There were a few people who actually watched the video and gave some feedback, but we got a large number of people who immediately screamed "self promotion" and panned us.

Now, what does this mean, exactly? I spend a lot of time on the web, and I see in big popular sites like digg, people will post a link to a story that forces you to go to THEIR blog, which in turn has AdSense ads on it, at which point you click through to the original content that they're linking to. This is dishonest, leech behavior, seeking to get some money out of content that you didn't create.

What this is doing is making the mindset that any time you promote something of your own for ANY reason, people have an immediate negative connotation. NooBTooB is 100% original content, and we're linking back to ourselves, the creators. We have zero ads anywhere on our site, of any kind. We make no money at all off NooBTooB. All we want to do is build a community, have a discussion, and find other gamers to chat with and possibly do events of some sort as we grow.

It's an interesting and difficult problem to solve, and it's tricky for me to approach, because waves of negative idiots make me want to not bother with them anymore. It's frustrating to spend a lot of time and effort on something that you think is really cool, and to have it shat on by people simply because I present it to them instead of them finding it through the "linkvine".

I assume it involves some sort of "critical mass", where you're no longer a person trying to get eyeballs, you're a shared cultural object. But it's just sad having been reading the web for the last 10 years, to watch it go from a place where people share things that they've made into a place where people are jealous about other people's attention because it's considered something that will make them money. I've got a job, I don't need a check from google adsense, I just want to make something cool that people will enjoy, and have fun doing it.