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Inappropriate Applause
Remember when I said that the next time I found myself getting instantly annoyed about something, I was going to stop and try to figure out the real reasons it annoyed me?
Well, here's my first chance.
A couple of days ago I got notified that my site had been listed at hotrate.com. I ignored it because I assumed it was just another search/listings site - there are about a zillion, and they do sometimes find me, and as long as they don't list what I consider personal information or invade my privacy in other ways (like spam me), I don't care.
After all, the rule has always been that once I put it out here, I cannot and should not prevent you from linking to it. The web is public; that is both its blessing and its curse. I grind my teeth when I hear about people trying to sue other people for linking to them without permission (yes, it's happened, and fortunately the case was thrown out). You cannot stop someone from linking to your page - if you don't want them to link to it, put it in a locked directory like my stories. Linking is what the web is about.
So far so good? So, while I do not particularly like seeing this site come up in search engines, I can't stop them and have no compelling reason to do so.
But today I got another message from hotrate.com. It contained a "review" that someone had written of my site. Suddenly the whole thing really annoyed me, and as I went to check on the site, I got more annoyed.
Hotrate is a strange little scheme that purports to pay you for surfing - you become an editor of your little category and you're paid for maintaining and adding sites to that section. This is not the first such scheme; The Mining Company (which has since changed names) gets that credit.
I was suspicious of the concept to begin with. As I have explained before, I dislike taxonomic indexes because the categories are so arbitrary, and I dislike any listing of sites that depends on human idiosyncracies for its content. That's why I like automated search engines - i.e. spider lists - where the sites are collected dispassionately by machine, and you get everything. But that's the same reason that many people dislike spider lists. They don't know how to search properly, and they cry, "Too much information! Give me a human to filter this for me!" Bah. Let me be my own agent, thank you very much.
Anyway, despite that rant, I don't have an especial axe to grind with The Mining Company. I know some of its editors, and they're nice people with their hearts in the right places. If that's what they want to do with their free time, so be it.
Hotrate is a different game. Not only does it reward editors, it rewards reviewers. Yes! Get paid for making snide comments about everyone else's sites. And then - to add insult to injury - we will, by default, mail those comments to the person behind the site! Yes, that's what I got today - a notice that someone had commented on my site, and the text of the comment.
Let the record show that the comment was positive, and that they give a method for opting out of these emails. But I still fired off a message immediately to the Hotrate maintainers, asking if they would please remove my listing - a listing I did not request, create, or desire.
That was the immediate reaction. Upon thinking it through, though, I realized that what I was really unhappy about was that some Hotrate editor had decided to list my site. I feel a little betrayed, like some Ardent Reader has stabbed me in the back by listing my site. And that's just plain odd - I admit it.
I think it comes back to one of my perennial bugaboos: appropriate praise. I don't mind getting compliments; I like getting compliments. But it has to be on something I want to get compliments on. My journal is not one of those things.
Some of you don't think I take any sort of praise well, and have told me so. While I concede that you have a point, there have been compliments I accepted gracefully. The other day I got a message from someone who told me how much he liked my erotica. I was sincerely flattered and thanked him quietly ... as opposed to launching into a stream of protestations, which is my response when I feel the praise is mis-aimed.
Damn it, I get to say when you're supposed to applaud!
Strangely, that doesn't work the other way. That is, while inappropriate applause bothers me, I support the right of the audience to boo at any time. I can list many occasions where I have been surprised by praise on something I thought was below radar - not bad, I seldom write anything outright bad (and you'd never get to see it if I did), but not up to my standards. Contrariwise, I cannot offhand think of any time when I have been expecting praise and was surprised by the lack of positive response.
(I have occasionally been surprised by lack of response, but those are cases where I've written something strongly opinionated or outright inflammatory and have been surprised at the lack of rebuttal or disagreement.)
(Okay, the above is not quite true. I can think of a couple of stories in the story area that I love and would have been really disappointed if anyone had hated them. And at least one in twenty-six. But no one did.)
I do like to know people are actually reading the things I write. When I link to a story here and don't get any comments on it - as has happened - I have to remind myself that the people who read these pages are not necessarily interested in reading something that is not a journal. Or tell myself that they've read it and don't have anything to say. After all, I don't reply to most of the things I read either.
But that category - "things I write" - doesn't really include this journal. Like so many other categories I have. This journal is an exception to so many rules - the "don't talk about yourself" rule, the "don't dissect" rule, et cetera. In many ways keeping a journal is the exact opposite of my temperament. I should probably be working out these things in fiction and remaining enigmatic - I think it's good for authors to be enigmatic; Thomas Pynchon has the right idea. But I don't write enough suitable fiction. If I sneak too many of my own issues into my fiction, everyone says my stories are all about me, and they say that too much already. And in many cases my personal likes and dislikes are inappropriate for my characters.
But I'll discuss that later. This is too long already.
If you came here from Hotrate: I'm cranky and dislikable, and this is as good as it ever gets. You don't want to be here. Go read someone who's always pleasant, like Anita, or someone who is at least cranky in an entertaining way, like Kymm. Me, I'm just a bitch.
An ungrateful one, at that.
© Columbine
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