Yesterday I launched Salon Futura #6 on the world. Like any publisher, I watched keenly for online reaction to my new baby, and a few people were very kind about it. Thank you, folks. But honestly I didn’t expect much reaction. You see, I hadn’t set out to offend anyone.

What did get a lot of reaction from teh intrawebs yesterday? Well, some ignorant prat wrote a long blog post about nihilism in modern fantasy, which served mainly to demonstrate his lack of knowledge of fantasy’s history, his lack of breadth of reading in modern fantasy (I suspect he’s never read a book by a woman in his life) and probably his lack of understanding of nihilism (though I’ll leave that to people with philosophy degrees to deal with). As journalism it was, to put it bluntly, a foetid heap of steaming dingo’s kidneys. So of course my little corner of teh intrawebs went apeshit over it.

(I’m not going to link directly to it because it doesn’t deserve the traffic, but if you really must read it please go there via Joe Abercrombie’s extremely funny rebuttal.)

Also yesterday evening a fair amount of my bandwidth was eaten up by people talking about Martin Amis. Because, you know, Martin Amis has behaved like a dickhead. Again. Just like he has been doing on a very regular basis for as long as I can remember. He does it because it allows him to indulge his passion for looking down his nose at the rest of humanity, and because it gets him an awful lot of attention.

Earlier today Jonathan McCalmont described the Internet as “home to the pornography of rage.” He has a point. Not only do we monkeys seem incapable of resisting it, but also, just as with other forms of pornography, some people profit massively from it.

Now of course there are things that are worthy of the Internet getting worked up about. For example, when some idiot Rethuglican politician tries to pass a law making it legal to kill people he disapproves of, I can see people getting justifiably upset, especially if they happen to live in a part of the world affected by the proposed law.

But this Pavlovian reaction to online idiocy seems self-defeating to me. The initial reaction to the fantasy article appeared to come from PR people in the publishing business. I can understand that. They want their authors to be talked about, and there’s nothing like a good flame war to get people talking. But ultimately the result of this passion for controversy is more eyeballs for bad journalism, more fame and fortune for people like Martin Amis, more advertising revenue for hate rags like the Daily Malice, and less attention for anything that might possibly be worth reading.

The best way to deal with people who are behaving like idiots is to ignore them, because that denies them the oxygen of publicity that they crave.

Do not feed the trolls.

Just in case you are not suspicious enough about the news that you read, here’s a potential cautionary tale about reporting of news from foreign countries. Most of you will doubtless be aware of the case earlier this week in which some Google executives were found guilty by an Italian court in a case involving an uploaded video of a boy being bullied. But how much of the reporting was done by people who neither speak Italian nor understand the Italian legal system? Indeed, how much of the reporting was based on Google’s own press release? Here’s an Italian view of the case from Marco Cantu.

The first thing to note is that Google was found not guilty of the charge of “defamation”. That means, as I understand it, that they were not held responsible for the content of the video.

Secondly, the Google press release states that they removed the video, “within hours of being notified by the Italian police”. That’s true. But TechCrunch says, “Google removed the video within hours of being notified of its existence”; and the BBC says, “Google’s lawyers said that the video was removed as soon as it was brought to its attention.” According to Marco, these statements are not true. He says that it took several weeks of complaints by users of the site and charities before anything was done, and Google only acted when the police became involved.

Finally there is the question as to what Google’s staff have been found guilty of. The charge with a guilty verdict is a “privacy violation”. What this means is apparently not clear. According to Marco the judge has thus far only issued a verdict. He has given no reasoning behind it, but it could simply turn on a technicality such as whether the Google site warned users that uploading pictures of minors without permission is a crime in Italy. If that is the case then the sentence does seem draconian, and will probably get reduced on appeal.

The whole case does seem to be very messy, and Italy’s Internet laws appear to be rather odd (see Crooked Timber), but we should maybe suspend our outrage until the judge has explained his decision, and always be very careful about what we read in the media.

There are many reasons why I don’t run Emerald City any more, but one of those that makes me glad of it is that I no longer feel any pressure to be a top-ranked web site in my field. Competition is all very well, but what you think you have to do to be successful can sometimes be ugly. Over the past week I have seen a bunch of editorial decisions that have brought this home to me very clearly. Here they are.

• The Guardian ran an article on climate change by Sarah Palin;
• SF Signal published a column by a newbie writer foolish enough to think that she could take down John Scalzi by playing victim politics;
• The Bilerico Project, a supposed LGBTQ web site, ran a post so transphobic it might as well have been penned by Rush Limbaugh or Pat Robertson; and
• The BBC headlined a web post: “Should homosexuals face execution?”

Newspapers such as the Daily Malice do this sort of thing all of the time. They are past masters at evading hate crime legislation by publishing articles that are just subtle enough to evade censure by the authorities (bearing in mind that the UK’s Press Complaints Commission is about as independent of the industry it is supposed to regulate as a glove puppet is of the person with a hand up its arse) but are very clear invitations to the bigoted to foam into paroxysms of hatred and bile. I expect that sort of thing from them, but not from the outlets listed above. So what’s going on?

Pretty clearly it is not editorial policy. The Guardian does not agree with Sarah Palin on climate change. I don’t think anyone at SF Signal believes that John Scalzi is out to prevent young writers from making a career in the business. Nor do I think that anyone on the Bilerico editorial board actually believes that trans people are deluded fools who should have been dealt with more sternly by their parents. And the BBC does not support the death penalty for homosexuality.

What I suspect is happening here is that all four venues have editors who feel under pressure to compete for attention in the blogosphere. They know that controversy is good for boosting your readership numbers, and at some point in the editorial decision-making process common sense goes out of the window and the desperate quest for eyeballs takes over. After all, for a commercial site, the more visitors you get the more advertising revenue you can pull.

The rationale that is always trotted out for this is that the site in question believes in fostering “debate”. Yeah, right. But there’s debate and debate. There’s polite exchange of views, and there’s yelling at each other across the ether. And at some point the whole thing devolves into an analog of bear baiting –- some unfortunate person or group is repeatedly poked with sharp sticks in the hope that it will be goaded into a furious rage and attack its tormentors with extreme violence for the entertainment of the bloodthirsty crowd.

The trouble is that it can be very successful. When the Guardian article went online my Twitter stream quickly filled up with UK people saying things along the lines of, “OMG!!! WTF??? [link]”, so I’m pretty sure the Palin article got some stellar viewing figures, me included because I was dumb enough to click on the link. The other three posts all have huge comment threads. Controversy works.

Up to a point.

Because then you have to deal with the fallout. As far as I know, the first two instances haven’t caused much in the way of lasting outrage, though I suspect the author of the SF Signal article may be rather sad and sorry as a result. I wouldn’t have exposed a contributor to public ridicule by posting something that inept. Elsewhere, however, the Bilerico article has left much of the trans community with the feeling that Bilerico’s editors view trans people as so much worthless trash to be pilloried at will for the entertainment of the masses; and the BBC has been fighting a damage limitation campaign ever since the news of their post hit Twitter.

Competing for attention on the Internet is never easy, and the closer you get to the top of the heap the harder it becomes. But sometimes editors have to sit back and ask themselves, “Do I really want to run that?” Mistakes are all too easy to make (and I’ve made a fair few in my time). Sometimes controversy isn’t worth the trouble it brings in its wake.

Note also that I have not included any links to the articles in question. One of the best ways we can stop the controversy merchants is to not stoke the feeding frenzy. If you must link to something, link to a post that discusses the original post, not to the post itself. That gives people the opportunity to bail before giving the miscreants in question any further boost to their viewing stats.

Michael Walsh sent me a link to this article which is a set of humorous definitions of online media terms. I particularly liked this one:

Follower — n. A person who pretends to be interested in what you are doing in hopes that you will pretend to be interested in what they are doing.

(That reminds me, by the way, that Fluff Cthulhu now has a Twitter account and is looking for minions.)

The other definition that caught my eye was this one:

Google Street View — n. A service newly expanded into Great Britain that stalks hapless subjects of the Queen who vomit on their shoes after one too many pints.

If you are asking yourself, “have British newspapers sunk so low that they actually had someone trawl through Google Street View footage until they found film of someone throwing up?” the answer, sadly, is “yes, and it took them less than 24 hours to come up with the idea.”