manton, i listened to your podcast from this week, first time listener, first time caller.

i think much of the discourse on the open web basically amounts to spam.

trying to get a lift in their online notoriety by siphoning it from you, so the more you have, the more you attract. and the more you interact the more they indict and convict you. ;-)

i didn’t understand it when i first got that kind of spam, but it got ridiculous after a while. people who thought they could make fortunes by taking over stuff that by design couldn’t make any money at all. ;-)

in other words the open world attracts a lot of greed, implemented by spamming you with vitriol.

if steve jobs had actively participated like you and i did, he would have attracted the most vitriolic spam ever.

the trick if you can handle it is to be scarce online, do your work in private. but i can’t do that myself. so a fair amount of my effort online goes into avoiding this kind of spamming. it comes at a cost. e.g. no more mail lists, gave that up a few years ago. and i spent four years just writing software for myself, without publishing or promoting any of it, and i actually liked that a lot.

who knows what’s next. but you’re a nice person who really cares. and i expect you may not hear that enough, so i wanted to say it.

keep on truckin…