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'You offend me, sir, with your pathetic writing'

What the f*ck is this piece even about?

FoTW It has been a while since we've had a decent Flame of the Week. This is a strong candidate who breathes life into this venerable Reg institution. It is in response to my piece Why can't we do better than these crappy torrent sites? (P2P sites are getting poisoned again – and nobody seems to care)...

What the fuck is this column even about? Did you have a deadline, realize that you hadn't written anything, and just submit some stream-of-consciousness rant? Granted, I'm not really expecting award-winning journalism (or even journalism, to be frank) from what's essentially a tech gossip rag, but, seriously, let's try to at least write about *something*, instead of the sort of shit that you write the night before your essay is due, back when you were in school.

"I signed on to a bittorent tracker and it was boring, and the files were mostly useless." OK. Well, that's fine for a blog entry, if you're a moody teenager, but, seriously, am I supposed to fucking *care* about that? Is that supposed to strike me as interesting? Relevant to my life in some way? Oooh, stop the presses! Someone on the internet is bored! You sicken me, sir. I don't know whether I hate you or myself more, knowing that I wasted precious moments of my life reading your useless rant about nothing in particular.

"I think my books should start yelling shit from your car's speakers." Yeah. Why are you writing about this here? Go do it. Or are you just throwing out ideas and waiting for someone else to implement them? That's fine, too, I guess, but, really, that belongs in said moody teenager's blog, rather than in an article.

It strikes me that you're simply trying to troll the P2P crowd, by saying that their bittorent trackers suck. OK. Well, that's a legitimate article, as long as you're willing to admit to yourself that you're not a journalist in any real sense of the word. But, hey, there's nothing wrong with that. Trolling can be fun. It's not related to journalism in any way, however. Coming up with a headline that draws pageviews is only half (if even that) the job. Sure, once you get the page views, you could probably say, "Game over. I win." But having an actual article, even if it's a huge troll, is what makes one a writer, even if one isn't necessarily a journalist.

I hate... no, I *loathe* when bloggers try to move to online news sites. If there's one thing that web 2.0 has done, it has fucked up journalism so bad that nobody can tell the difference between some dork yelling his uninformed opinions about uninteresting shit and an actual newspaper article. Sure, once in a while, you get filler crap even in the New York Times, but it's at least *interesting*. It's about topics that people care about, and has new, informed, researched opinions and insights. What the hell is your article about? Being bored? Unimpressed by illegal fire sharing sites run by scammers trying to make a quick buck? God, you're an embarrassment to anyone who's ever written anything less shallow than a blog. You offend me, sir, with your pathetic writing.

Next time, if you have nothing to say, don't write anything at all. You're a bad writer, and you should feel bad.

Matt Kracht

Spirited stuff – thanks, Matt. ®

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