On Demanding Cock

I was really happy when Dean started his site, Favrd.

He’d told me about it a few days before it went up, and I mentioned a couple trivial ideas for making it better. It was a terrific concept he’d dreamed up, and his implementation was typically exquisite and Dean-like.

Dean did his part every day, from day zero.

And, yeah, Favrd was really fun and legitimately entertaining for quite a while, considering. Then, increasingly, much less so.

The guys shoveled paraprosdokians; the ladies cooed about how much they loved intercourse; gold stars flowed; web stars were born; “books” were published; feelings were hurt. The usual. But, still. It was mostly fun.

Mostly.

So, why am I not busting a gut about this irreplaceable loss?

Well. Lots of reasons.

First, a selfish and realistic one. Up until a few months ago, I blew a lot of time reading Favrd, writing for Favrd, and re-loading Favrd to see who liked what I’d posted — or, more often than I’d like, who pretended to like what I posted in order to get noticed and scalably reciprostarred.

But, then I’d also just get so tired of the “memes” and the elections and the fucking drama. And I’d have to quit Twitter entirely for a while — yes, most of the times I’ve been on breaks from Twitter and its siblings, a) it had a lot to do with Favrd-driven stupidity, and b) all those sites went into a hosts file, so they effectively didn’t exist for weeks at a time.

And, yet? I’d get along. Somehow.

I’d just have to hear secondhand about how funny a given day’s vaginas and advice for-a-friend’s were. Oh, we laughed.

The reasons I’d inevitably come back were predictable. I missed my funny friends, and was willing to overlook the “conversations” and haha-I-see-what-you-did-there antics. And, frankly? I missed being really good at Twitter. It’s my medium. It’s poetry for cynics. I’m good at it. Deal.

But, Favrd as a medium stopped being fun for me a long time ago.

By late February of this year, I’d become so tired of the grief I got about appearing “too often” on Favrd, that I emailed Dean and begged him to take me out of the running. Frantically.

I’m exhausted by people I don’t know trying to guess, imagine, infer, or fantasize the reason that I do anything. RE Twitter and Favrd in particular, I totally understand the assumption that I’m there to appear “popular,” but that’s actually an inaccurate, complicated, and, increasingly damaging myth that I need to start addressing. I do shit because I like doing it; not because, as in this instance, a trick of the light makes me appear to be close friends with @[twitterdouche1] and @[twitterdouche2].

But, he talked me out of it. And his reasoning was sound.

In his sage and Dean-like way he basically said, “Fuck ‘em.” He said I should have fun and ignore the dicks. So I did. And I went back to having fun on my own terms.

Mostly.

But, I’ll tell you something. I don’t expect anyone to believe this and I don’t particularly care if you do, but here goes: Getting On Favrd was never my primary goal; entertaining about 25 individual icons was and still is. It’s just that Favrd was the only place I could see a page that collected that info in one place. You know?

“Cool! Colleen liked that.”
“Hey, neat; Jorn Barger.”
“Swish. Gruber.”

Truth time? I stopped reading the “Leaderboard” on Favrd six months ago. It was just too awful. Too duh. Too blllleeeeeaaaaahhh…..joke!

The original purpose of Favrd had become perverted. While it had begun as a cool kids’ bulwark against the webcocks and douchebags who were overrunning Twitter (and its less picky 3rd-party favoritizers), in the aggregate, our contributions to Favrd began to constitute their own kind of sad cargo cult.

You could see people A/B testing their formula, settling on a “style,” then posting, posting, posting, and following, following, following, and starring, starring, starring in — what? — a diverse and often successful effort at internet comedy marketing.

Admit it. It got tedious.

Pop quiz. If you weren’t on Favrd — meaning you got no vote and nobody voted on you — would you still read it as often as you did? Be fucking honest. Because, I’m telling you, I absolutely wouldn’t. Nope. If it started today with last week’s material as tinder? Jesus Christ. No fucking way.

Ephemeral popularity is unnecessary for anything other than knowing who’s ephemerally popular. There’s tons of ways to be entertained and find friends that don’t require competition and side-taking. Some even argue those are the best and most sustainable ones.

Sure, I did end up meeting a lot of super-cool people through Favrd. Although, I’m not persuaded I wouldn’t have learned about the lonelysandwiches, scottsimpsons, and amjyanes of the world through other avenues. Granted, maybe not without Twitter, but definitely somehow.

Guys. Things change. Things go away. And besides, there’s tons of places to either check your ego or find new friends; if you always cared a lot a lot about the role of Favrd in your life — and one man’s web site was your only contingency plan for handling either your ego or your new supply of acquaintances? Well. You need better contingency plans.

If you like web apps, go make them. If you like memes, go make them.

But no matter how much you love and adopt something another person has made, you’re so not entitled to be a self-righteous — and weirdly ungrateful — dick when they decide not to make it any more. That’s not how it works. Not after junior high.

Anyhoo. Thanks, Dean. You did a fucking great job and proved yourself an anti-webcock for doing that rarest of things: you built a cool and elegant platform that helps strangers make and promote good work.

How ever long things like this exist, and whether or not they have a giant impact on humanity, I really believe it’s only bootstrap projects like Favrd that can reliably keep the web interesting. I truly do. Hacer: make and do.

And, Dean? Friend? You do know what to say to anyone who gives you too much grief, right?

Sure you do: Fuck ‘em.