Why Most of the Internet Sucks

Take a look at the above image.

Now, if you posted that somewhere, what would you tag it with to help people searching for it to find it?

Well according to the 24 karat douchebag who posted this image, apparently people who put 'Blood', 'bedroom', 'condo', 'painting', 'typography' and 'woman' (among others) into a search engine are actually looking for a picture of a cake with the Old Spice guy on it.

Just look at that tag list. I challenge you to find five that have anything to do with the actual picture.

This kind of thing pisses me off more than it has any right to. What you have here is some idiot who's so desperate for his stupid picture to be seen by as many people as possible that he's just shotgunned popular tags. It doesn't matter that they have nothing to do with the picture, because people are going to see it whether they want to or not.

The worst part is everyone has this idea, which means labeling and tagging content is now effectively pointless. No matter what you search for, you're going to get inundated with completely irrelevant crap that has nothing to do with what you're looking for.

Kids, I know you like looking at your stats and seeing the huge audience your crappy image has reached is a rush... but you're making that meaningless as well. 20,000 hits doesn't mean your lolcat is super popular, it means 20,000 people have landed on it, said "What the fuck is this shit?" and left.

Sure, if I put some meta-data keywords on this blog like "Twilight", "True Blood" and "Justin Beiber" I could probably triple my traffic overnight...but I guarantee every single one of those new hits would land here, read about a sentence and a half, get pissed at me and leave.

Ok, I could be completely wrong here, but for me, the satisfaction of getting a large number of pageviews comes from knowing you've created some quality content that people are enjoying. I don't see how anyone could get any satisfaction by artificially inflating their hit count by tricking people to a page they have no interest in.

But, like so many things today, it's all just about making that number bigger, isn't it?