Standing On Boxes

I’m not a fan of that Internet extremist known as a ‘fanboi’ or ‘fanboy’.

What, exactly, is a fanboy?

A person who thinks THEIR thing (whatever it may be – Linux, Microsoft something, Apple something, Video game, TV show something, sports/team something, etc.) is better than all the other similar things to such an extreme level that they spend their free (and not so free) time bashing the other things that resemble theirs (e.g. Zune vs. iPod, Mac OS X vs Windows 7, Movie A vs Movie B). Their thing obviously came down from Mount Sinai with Moses while that OTHER thing bubbled up from the depths of some hell-place.

And they always feel persecuted. Contrary to all evidence. Even when they dominate the comments section of the blogs they haunt.

And then there are the anti-thing fanboys. They hate (and that’s the only word for it) something BECAUSE of who or what it came from. People who hate ANYTHING from Apple, because it came from Apple. People who hate anything from SONY, because it’s SONY.

And they are extremely unreasonable about it. Attempting to reason with anyone of these extremist fanboys? You’ll earn a fanboy label of your own as one of their hated fanboy targets.

One thing to note is that the fanboys and fanboy-haters seem to be in direct proportion to the size of their core base. So, there are a lot more, by an order of magnitude, MS (Xbox, Zune, whatever) fanboys spewing their fanboy-hate than there are Apple fanboys engaged in the same thing. And Linux fanboys? They are out there but they seem to stick to the backwater Linux fan places.

(Yes, that is of course anecdotal. I’m only referring to the web sites/blogs I frequent.)

And it doesn’t take much to get them going.

It’s basically making all the tech blog sites unusable for those of us who either don’t hate or who live in a world where multiple THINGS have uses. (We could drag politics into it and say the political blogs are crumbling under the same effect – crazy fanboys drowning out reasoned debate.)

I don’t see it dying down any time soon. Thanks to the way a lot of ad-supported web sites work (pay-per-view/pay per click) those websites encourage the fanboys. They incite them – driving away the rest of us.