My Space, Your Space, MY Space, YOUR Space!

My father just got burned for leaving a critical comment on a popular photo site. You know, one of the sites where you upload your photos for others to comment on? Yeah.

I sympathize with him. I was chased off of deviantart.com (before it was a smut-site) for commenting on a poem. ...Slightly different case, since my comment was re-writing the poem... but I don't want to get into details.

The result was that I was mobbed by the person's followers, as was my father for his comments. ...And, coincidentally, my wife was just telling me about a friend of hers was mobbed for a negative review on Amazon.com.

My thought for the day is that perhaps what causes this behaviour (besides the basic law that people are stupid and obnoxious) is a sense of space and ownership. ...When we leave comments on a person's page, it's on their page... it's in their space. We're pissing on their lawn.

I wonder if these events would occur as frequently if it became a habit for critiques to be posted on our own pages. For example, if I had created a post in my own space, linking to the bad example of poetry, and added my own comments... would that have saved me from being mobbed?

Hmmmn. ...I'm not sure it would have, in my case. ...Yeah, as I think about it, the other person would still have seen my post, and he/she would have posted about it, and then the same flock would have decended upon my site.

Okay... so perhaps there's really just no room for critique in Web 2.0.

People are stupid and obnoxious!