Boredom.I am far from being perfect and I am perfectly aware of my often pointless rambles. There is however a trend that worries me, a flagellum I’d dare call it, that makes me wonder why are we wasting our time with nonsense?

If you are a social media user, if you are a member of StumbleUpon, Mixx, digg or any other similar network, I am sure you get a number of “shouts” each day. You vote because this is the “social” thing to do. After all, those who send you the shouts reciprocate… Or do they? Whether they reciprocate or not, is not the matter now. The matter is what they send.

From all the sites you have to vote on, from all the sites you push forward in an act of kindness, how many are truly relevant and how many deserve your thumbs up?

How do web pages with three or four lines of content, cluttered with Google Ads, banners and commercial crap, get so popular? Why do we make it possible for mediocrity to “steal our thunder?”

Are those who create such pages inapt of writing something better or are they simply lazy? I cannot really link to examples of what I am talking about, because I don’t want to offend anyone, but those who send such links already know what I mean.

To become a top stumbler all you have to do is to “discover” new sites, new articles, new pictures and videos every day. To be “active” as they say. There are no guidelines of quality. It doesn’t matter what you discover. Just use the Stumble toolbar and keep Stumble “active.” Of course, there are some “don’t promote your own site” rules (as if Stumble really knows which is your website or how many you own) and “don’t spam.” How do you know when you “spam” anyway? There is no real objective definition of “spam.” For SEO haters any SEO article submitted to Stumble, digg or anywhere else is spam. SEO haters don’t even bother to read such articles. They will always “thumb down” anything that even “smells” like SEO.

Scrapper websites that get the maximum number of votes at Stumble are spam too, but no one seems to notice that. Scrapper sites are generated with software like AutoBlogged and other automatic content generators.

Sometimes we “vote” for an image, probably stolen or bought from a high-profile photography site, an image that is surrounded by ads. Somehow we manage to ignore that that image was only submitted to Stumble to drive traffic to a site. How is this valuable for the community?

Last but not least… the pointless discoveries. Here I will give examples, because I “thumbed up” the nonsense and I am as guilty as everyone else. For example: Cut and paste one line of code to make any website editable. I can see the “fun” in this, but I fail to understand the point. Judge for yourself:

Of course you can’t actually edit the actual web page but you can edit the page as you see it on your screen.

Now why on earth would you want to do that? I mean… how bored are you? Can’t you find something better to do online?

Luckily, the authors of the article tell us the “real purpose” of such a tool:

This is one of the ways scammers create fake screenshots, fake Adsense & affiliate earnings and even fake Paypal transactions.

I could give you many other examples of pointless online activities, but wouldn’t be a “waste of time” creating such a list? Instead of occupying my time with such activities, I’ll tell you what to do if you are truly bored of voting for nonsense.

I don’t want to make a list of “offline” activities you could get involved into. I suppose it’s pretty clear that Web boredom can be effectively fought outdoors.

To make a long story short: let’s do something less for the sites that promote rubbish and something more for meaningful resources. No matter how bored we are, let’s no longer push forward the scrapper sites and all those who negatively impact quality online.

PerformancingAds