No longer Plurking

To Clarify: The following is not meant to criticize or insult Pink Porcupine, JediRN, Neagle, SarahB, or anyone else on Plurk that I might have ever met in the real world, and thus consider to be a friend. Instead, it's meant to insult the system/software of Plurk itself, and the ridiculous social dynamics it creates.

Several months back, I promised a follow up post to share whether or not I found Plurk to be worth it, and my conclusion is it's not. But that's not really why I posted what follows. It's not really because the signal to noise ratio just wasn't acceptable, either, though that's my biggest beef with the system.

I posted this because of people who randomly logged on to my plurk stream and told me "dissenters should go fuck themselves". I posted this because of plurkers who asked my wife if she needed a good groping. I posted this because I'd been annoyed, even bordering on offended, on Plurk numerous times, and had no recourse that wouldn't have cost me the all-precious Karma points I needed to use the higher features. It's like social blackmail, and I'm not willing to put up with it any more.

None of those things were done (to me or Sarah) by anyone I've ever met in the real world.


Also, to those who think I intended "lesbian", "housewife", and "knitter" to be derogatory terms (which, I know, sounds a might silly, but it's something that I was told). Nope, not at all. But things were poorly phrased, and I see why you thought that was my intent. What you're not understanding is context: I'm a housewife. Well, househusband. I see nothing wrong with that, and clearly don't mean it to be derogatory. My wife crochets - which from my layman's POV is pretty much the same thing as knitting. Again, obviously, that's not meant as derogatory, either. So, please, trust me when I say that "lesbian" wasn't meant as derogatory. Your sexual orientation (and gender) is irrelevant, what matters is whether or not you were hitting on my wife. Had it been a bunch of horny hetero guys hitting on my wife, I would have been just as angry.

All that said, here's the original post, with only a couple minor edits for clarity, including a recent addition of the word "never" that got erroneously omitted in my earlier post.

Not that anyone who reads this blog ever used Plurk to contact me [apparently, that assumption wasn't accurate], but I'm now telling you not to do so.

That system is lame. So lame, neither I nor my wife are using it any more.

Plurk is sort of a social networking site. Really, it's more like an instant messenger. Now, I don't have much use for MySpace, and IMing for anything other than work has only gotten me into trouble. So that's 2 strikes against Plurk in the first place. Worse, Plurk doesn't IM as well as a real IM, and you just get innundated with garbage messages from horny lesbian knitters* that are friends of a friend of yours.

It's also a little like blogging and email. Except you only have like 100 letters per post, so saying anything meaningful is hard. There's little reason to Plurk if you already Blog, which, you might have noticed, I do.

And it's nothing but junk. Someone will post "good morning" and "good night" every day, and it will get responded to by 36 people, but because there's a chance (unlikely, but possible) that there might be substance in there somewhere (you know how people go off topic), you feel obligated to scroll through it and double check. Every time. Every day. Twice a day. From two different posters. Dumb. Till you get sick of that, and start ignoring those posts. But as soon as you do that, someone will wander off topic, and use yesterday's "good morning" thread to invite you to tonight's party, and you miss it because you weren't thorough enough. Dumb. It's like opting in to random junk mail 10 times a day. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.

About the only good thing I have to say about Plurk is that it seems devoid of flamewars. It's a very polite community.

Probably, that politeness is because of the Karma system. You start plurk with next to no permissions or options, and have to "earn" them via plurking. That's really just a popularity contest - the more people who follow or respond to you, the more Karma you get. That unlocks emoticons and lets you change your "Plurk buddy" from the headless ham-dog to something more cthulhoid, modronesque, or perhaps the 23-eyed walleye. Actually, that last bit is almost cool.

Unfortunately, you not only lose Karma if you're "unfriended", you also lose Karma any day that you don't post and any day that no one responds to you. So, if you get sick, go out of town for the weekend, or, say, take a couple weeks off to write a novel, your Plurk Karma all goes away, and you're left feeling unloved and unnecessarily restricted.

If I skip out on this place for 24 hours, at least blogger and google don't feel the need to penalize me. There's something unsporting and egocentric about the way Plurk works.

Sure you can get Karma back, but at a much slower rate than you lost it - and the best solution seems to be spam-plurking everyone you know to provoke spam responses. Doesn't that sound like fun?

Let's face it, Plurk just sucks.

The only reason I was even using it past the first day or two was because my wife was** on Plurk. I could reach her via it rather than calling her office. Using that messaging tool meant huge amounts of wasted time wading through the plurkstream. It had stopped being fun months ago.

She said "I think I'm done with Plurk" and my response was "Thank you, thank you, thank you! Oh, have I ever been waiting for you to say that!"


*: About the horny lesbians - cause I know you're going to ask - they're just not as exciting as horny lesbians sound in theory. Many are Dr Who fans, which is cool, but most are also housewives (wouldn't have guessed there were so many lesbian housewives out there) and knitters. While they get a little flirtatiously playful which each other, they mostly talk about yarn. I've been told everyone at ravelry is also on plurk. So while Plurk offers nothing that MySpace, Facebook, Blogs, IMs, Forums, or eMail doesn't already give you, apparently it does offer something Ravelry doesn't. What that is, I don't know. I've NEVER been on Ravelry - but I'm guessing it lacks any micro-blogging / IM features.

**: Since she no longer shares an office with her boss, and even teleworks twice a week, the need for Plurk has gone down... pretty much gone away. She got sick of it because she felt that people had used her - asked her to "friend" them so their Karma would go up, and then never, ever, responded to a single thing she wrote. But she couldn't 'retaliate' by unfriending them, because then they'd unfriend her and she'd lose Karma too. Yeah, plurk sucks. Did I mention that?