In case you hadn’t noticed, I don’t update this site as often as some may like. The reason for this is simple, I’m absolutely exhausted. I’m not going to go into the exact specifics of “Who said what”, it’s been a slow, gradual process that’s finally manifested itself to a boiling point.

Although I enjoy building and designing website structures and templates, the vast majority of the “Get Rick Quick” and “I don’t care about facts” mindsets people convey incited me to think twice about entering this profession. The lack of knowledge in these circles is astounding. Some ignoramuses who don’t know the first thing about coding websites and designing databases think terms like dofollow and “Off Page Optimization” are legitimate. Other fools still believe Visible PageRank is an accurate measurement tool in anything. And some decide to defend these positions vigorously.

Unbelievable!

If I can take away one thing from posting on “forum debates” and elsewhere however, it’s that conversing with people that have next to no experience on website building and a lackluster understanding on simple concepts like HTML structure is an absolute time-waster.

It’s not about “agreeing with everything I say” or “using only my methods”, doing so for the sole purpose of agreeing with someone doesn’t have any logic to it. But when their views are challenged with hard evidence and facts, they choose to either make personal attacks, bury their heads in the sand and mumble “Blah, blah, blah”, or continue to follow the words of self-proclaimed experts and listen to their gospel like sheep. Seriously, it’s like debating with four year olds.

If you want the state of the industry summed up in a nutshell, heed this quote from Adam Senour (one of the few people online that I still hold a great deal of respect for):

One person starts lie that sounds good.
People believe lie that sounds good.
People promote lie that sounds good as ultimate solution.
If someone comes along and either questions lie or argues that lie is not ultimate solution, people must resort to aspect of lie that sounds most applicable to question.
If no applicable aspect of lie can be found, resort to randomly-selected training-binderesque aspect of lie that has nothing to do with actual problem in attempt to confuse.

In other words, lie, and when called out, create intentionally vague environment.

So the bottom-line here is basically, it’s pointless trying to educate people that refuse to listen or want to be helped. I’ll still continue my WordPress business I started a few months back, and I’ll be happy to answer genuine newbie questions on my forums. However when it comes to forum discussions or other forms of debates on Web Development tactics, SEO, or whatever else, I’m done trying to otherwise “help”. I’m tired of explaining things in a vacuum.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 15th, 2010 at 9:31 pm and is filed under Online Communities, Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.