Site Re-Organization

Looking for the Halls of Eternal Disbelief? The current version is over at http://web.newsguy.com/commonsense/rabble.html. If I'm allowed to, I might end up leaving the original copy of said page here, as a mirror page. It is, after all, the very first webpage I ever wrote, and as strange as it may sound (given the unpleasant subject matter) I am somewhat attached to the old thing. But clearly, I do have to redirect the bulk of my traffic to the Halls elsewhere, to the new location at Newsguy. Redirect pages are being set up at locations where I know Google and Yahoo deposit people in the Halls, because to hear the people at Google talk about the subject, this is the only way to get the new copy of the Halls come up in their rankings, and supplant the Internet Trash copy.

Why am I going through this kind of hassle, and possibly endangering this site, which, as far as I know, the owner of Internet Trash may now end up deleting out of sheer spite? Not because I want to, to be sure. You can't beat Internet Trash's price (free) and the ads put on pages on this server are completely non-objectionable. They don't blow up in the visitor's face, and create difficulties for him as he tries to navigate the site, like pop-up ads do, and they are in consistently good taste. Unlike every other free webspace provider I know of, Internet Trash does not exercise prior restraint. You can talk like a normal person of your pages without fear that you'll lose your site because you let a bad word slip in, or because somebody felt that it wasn't Politically Correct enough. The only thing that you aren't allowed to put on this server is pornographic material, and even at that - there's a sister site, Internet Dump, where you can post that material. All that you have to do is create a warning page on your Internet trash site wherever you link to your Internet Dump page, telling the visitor that he's about the visit an adult server, and telling him what to expect if he goes there.

These are all good things, and at one time raised the possibility that Internet Trash might do what no other free webspace provider had ever done - become a literary presence online. As anybody who saw Usenet in action before its precipitous decline during the 1990s will tell you, in the midst of all of the crap, all of the insanity, and all of the ranting, backstabbing unpleasantness, there were some communities of writers who were doing very interesting things with the medium. For the most part, these were things that couldn't be done on the web. Why? Not because of technical limitations, to be sure. On purely technological terms, the Web is infinitely superior to Usenet in almost every imaginable way. But as anybody who has ever written will tell you, you can't really write if you're censoring yourself. Writing must be spontaneous, or it just doesn't happen at all.

Internet Trash, despite its strange name, had the potential to become a gathering place for these onetime members of the writer's circles on Usenet, just by the fact of its promise of free expression. The problem with posting on Usenet, aside from the fact that one is effectively public domaining anything one posts there, is that the lowest common denominator will always prevail there, because the visitor ends up having to wade through mountains of trash to find the few gems that remain. The Web allows the reader to bypass the garbage because each writer can choose the sites he links to. Find a site that you like, follow the links from it, and more often than not you'll find other sites that you like. Wading is no longer an issue. This is the promise of the Web, and the reason why it does not have to go the way of Usenet.

Internet Trash stood to reap rich rewards. What went wrong?

What went wrong from the beginning was that the owner didn't seem very motivated. One need only look at the help forum from 1999 on, and see that questions almost never got answered. The same can be said of letters to the help desk. Notice that one can no longer register for an account at Internet Trash, and that sites are being irreversibly deleted for inactivity. This has placed Internet Trash in a slow death spiral, as it is constantly losing members, but never gaining any. This is not the action of somebody who wants to build a company.

A suspicion voiced offline is that Internet Trash was never anything more than a resume building exercise for somebody struggling with an irrational reality of the new economy - the abundance of personnel managers who will refuse to hire anybody for any entry level job until he has 2-5 years of experience. (See if you can spot the hidden logical flaw). While one can easily sympathise with somebody who wants to get out of such an absurd catch 22 situation, and even salute his ability to show such initiative, one is left with the uncomfortable question of just how much dedication the owner of the temporary start-up will show to his potentially hapless customers. This becomes especially true on the Internet which developed an unfortunate overreliance on free services, and never developed any collective sense of who it was that the industry was supposed to be serving. Which is to say, any real sense of professionalism.

There is a viable metaphor that could have been used in the case of a free provider like Internet Trash. Think of your local TV station. You're not paying for the programs, right? So, how are people making their money? Through the sale of advertising. Think of the webspace provider as being the TV station and the webmasters as being the on-air talent. To be sure, the talent isn't usually that great, but neither is the outlay, at 1/4 cent per Meg, plus connect charges. A one-man ISP won't be turning an NBC-like profit, but he should be turning a reasonable profit if he has managed to attract a few popular sites.

But Rob, the owner of Internet Trash, never really made the effort. If he wanted to make his business boom, he should have been out there, online, mingling with the writers in those dying groups, raising consciousness about his service, and drawing in the better writers. He never did that. He should also have considered the possibility of doing as Bravenet did, and allowing more than one site per customer. One need only look at the Halls to see why. Elsewhere online, I have written pages of philosophy, science, fiction, cooking ... almost all of them more pleasant reading than what you see in the Halls, and almost none of them have ever been on this server. The reason why should be obvious. These are interests through which I meet people and the last thing I want to do as I meet a new friend is introduce him to my dirty laundry. These unpleasant matters are things I need to discuss online, just to keep certain trolls from dragging my name through the dirt in a very persistent way, but I don't want to mix them with the more serious material, and that which is just fun. I suspect that I'm not along in this.

A few years back, I would have been delighted to set up a second page at Internet Trash for the more enjoyable material. But, I couldn't do that, and since this was the only place where I could set up pages like the "Fred Cherry Story", the nastiness ended up here and the good stuff went elsewhere. By means of this simple managerial error, Rob insured that his ISP, which could have shown such promise, was relegated to the role of being the place where people put up the crap they couldn't post anywhere else, and didn't want to associate their other writings with. The quality of what was to be seen here suffered, and one expects, Rob's advertising revenue in the process, which was a shame.

Were these the only problems, though, I would close this article by saying "and what a shame that Internet Trash is not living up to its potential, and let's hope that Rob turns it around". But, these aren't the only problems. Internet Trash's technical performance has always been an issue. The server has usually been slow, even for all-text, small sized pages like mine, and, unfortunately, down often enough to pose a real nuisance for visitors. This has caused search engines to drop listings, webring memberships to be lost, and links deleted. Polite requests for maintenance, something that should be a given at any ISP, have been responded to with abusive, unprofessional rants. But the worst part, and really the most disappointing, is that in practice the promise of uncensored web hosting has turned out to be so much corporate hype.

I found this out late in 2002 when somebody named "Tara Ball" wrote in with a complaint that a page I had up about her was "slanderous, untrue and defamation of character", which was annoyingly amusing because the page consisted of little more than a series of letters we had exchanged (and which I had held onto) and the impressions I was being left with. Two of Tara's friends (Jamie Slater and Dustin Smith) then wrote in with trumped up complaints of their own. Dustin, in particular, had the chutzpah to issue the "slander" charge against a page which consisted of a letter of his downloaded directly from the Burning Man New York list archives!

I pointed out to Rob that I could document every claim I made on those pages, that I had held onto the letters, and offered to send him copies and have my primary ISP vouch for the genuineness of these letters. Even better, in a sad sense, Tara's friends had lied about the contents of the pages they wanted censored. Jamie Slater tried to get past this uncomfortable reality by claiming that I had rewritten the pages after the complaints came in. This, as I pointed out to Rob (in more polite terms) was a shameless, baldfaced lie. All that he would have to do to confirm this would be for him to check his logs and see that I had not updated those pages. An even easier solution would have been for him to check the cached copies of those pages on any of a number of search engines - Google comes to mind. Obviously, I can't change what's on the cached copy before it's refreshed, and that takes a while.

Rob's response was a good stonewalling. "I can't just ignore these complaints", was his response. But, Rob, nobody was asking you to. All that I asked was that he examine the facts with a fair and open mind. As for the cached copy, Rob had the simplest answer Tara, Jamie and Dusty could have ever asked for. He placed a robots.txt tag that blocked the public from seeing that cached copy, burying the evidence that an injustice was done. The facts, as far as he was concerned, were beside the point.

My feeling at that point was one of pure, well-justified outrage. That very day, I set up a new site over at Newsguy which, unlike Internet Trash, seems to mean what it says when it talks about not censoring its customers. That site has gradually been replacing this one over in the search engines, with Yahoo and Google being the main holdouts - something that I'm going to make an effort to do something about this afternoon, using a few redirect meta tags, as per Google's suggestion.

If you're still wondering where I got that bizarre name for this page, "The Wounded Fish", it's a reference to something that anybody who has ever owned an aquarium has probably seen. When a fish is weakened, the other fish respond by going in for the kill, tearing pieces of flesh off of the dying creature, who may not have been dying before the attacks began. This page is much like that fish, in that now that the illusion that my provider will back me up has lost, I can now count on would-be censors coming in to take advantage of my weakened political position to tear pieces off of this page, the way its companions tore pieces of flesh off that weakened betta in my parent's fish tank.

The question that remains is what use I am to make of the rest of this site. There's a real possibility that this won't be up to me. As truthful and as fair as what you read is, I doubt that Rob is going to appreciate it, especially since I've already seen that what is true, and what is fair, means very little to Rob. I would not at all put it past him to delete this site in a fit of pique, especially since I've criticised him elsewhere and he does not have a history of responding to criticism in a very calm or mature fashion. But let's say he pleasantly surprises me, and doesn't engage in censorship. What then?

Then I would have to respond by saying that there are some things that I can't overlook. I can't overlook the fact that Rob did engage in censorship, based on nothing more than a trio of very flimsy complaints. I have to assume that anything that I put on this site is subject to summary blocking or removal for any reason, or, as in this case, for no real reason at all. That rules out this site as a location for anything that I intend to keep up permanently. The fact that the frequent outages kill one in the search engine rankings only confirms the wisdom of this decision.

What does that leave? If I am allowed to keep this site, it will become a gallery for some of the photos I'd like to show, being linked to from my site at Newsguy. Let's say I have a set of photos up there one month, and it's time to replace them - I move them over to this site, where they stay a while longer before being replaced with newer material. Why not? Whatever one might say about FTP-ing to this server, uploading by e-mail attachment is an excellent way of preserving the quality of a .gif or .jpg file.

Such a use of this site also turns what is the major problem here into a non-issue. Let's say that somebody writes in, just to be a royal pain, and claims that one of my photos was stolen from him. I know full well that even though these photos will be formally copyrighted (as in, sitting in books in the archives at the Library of Congress) making the complaint demonstrably groundless, Rob will roll over on me, refusing to do so much as give me a fair hearing. He's done it before, I'm sure that he'd do it again. But with a temporary exhibition, what's the big deal? So I retire a photo or two earlier than I planned to. No big deal, probably. And if the site goes down? It'll just be a backup resource for last month's photos. Best of all, the material is non-controversial, which means that this wounded fish will be swimming away from the shark-infested waters of online politics.

An inglorious end for what was once a very promising company, especially when you consider the fact that many of its users have downgraded their sites even more than I've downgraded this one. But really, what alternative have we been left with?

Click here to visit what's left of Internet Trash, unless you'd rather visit the new location for the Halls of Eternal Disbelief, where you'll find a copy of this page, should Rob decide to delete this site. I'm going to hold off on uploading photos to this site for a few months, and really establishing the new site at this url until I can get a sense of what Rob's response to this is going to be. There's little point to setting up pages that are going to just be knocked down again, agreed?

Those who want to be notified of updates to the Halls, are pointed in the direction of the update list for that site.