Enough about James Kim, already
This is going to be an unpopular post, and I could honestly care less about that.
Shortly after Thanksgiving, an editor from C-Net, James Kim and his family, got lost driving from Washington back to California. They were missing since 11/25. Earlier this week, a rescue party found James' wife and two children. A few days later, they found his body. He had gone to search for help and died in the process. He's a hero - no doubt about that.
But there's more to the story than that. There's a side of the story that has nearly nothing to do with the unfortunate circumstances that befell the Kim family. That side is the illustration that community-driven news sites like Digg.com aren't really news sites at all: they're echo-chamber aggregators. When the Kims went missing, the blogosphere/echo-chamber went wild. Every self-aggrandizing blogger everywhere seems to have written a distress signal about the Kims, and then kept on writing about it.
"Kim's Still Missing!" "No News Yet in Kim Case!" "What Do The Holy Grail and The Kim Family Have In Common? Read to Find Out!"
It's likely that none of those were real post titles, but they're pretty much the point of all of them. I can't count the number of tech sites that not only posted an initial story about James Kim and his family, but kept posting follow up stories, even when there wasn't anything to follow up with.
And then there's Digg. Digg is an aggregation site - it aggregates news from tons of different sites on the Internet, and users can vote on what makes it to the front page. And there's the first problem - people are fucking stupid. Digg quickly became a cespool of nothing but Kim stories. Nearly every 10th story that made it to the front page (or that "got Dugg") was about James Kim and his family, and the fact that nothing new was happening.
Until something happened.
And then it got worse.
Look. I don't feel like talking about this anymore. There comes a point in time when the echo-chamber collapses in upon itself. When the only things being said are echos, the only thing that can be echoed are echos.
So, come on people. What happened to the Kims sucks, that's not up for discussion, but there's a fuckton of other things to talk about. Let's talk about them.
Oh, and I've disabled comments on this post. I don't give a fuck what anyone has to say about this.