When Everything2 goes mainstream

It happens with those little question marks that pop up on slashdot every now and again. It happens every time everything gets mentioned in mainstream media. Slowly at first, and quicker and quicker now, everything is moving towards the day it will go mainstream.

I have this reoccurring dream every night between 10:17 and 10:22pm while playing with the word galaxy generator. I am sitting in my dentist’s office with pain in my mouth. Tonight it is a filling. I am sifting through the magazines on the stand next to my chair. I push aside an old magazine (tonight it is People), and right there is today’s Newsweek. And on the cover is Everything.

While waiting to get a tooth pulled this summer did you see the Newsweek with Shawn Fanning on the cover? He was wearing headphones and a funny smirk. This is how it appears in my dream. But with no word screaming “Napster!.” It screams “Everything!,” and Fanning is nate. Same smirk though.

Inside are the simple little diagrams swimming in a sea of text explaining how “nodes” work. Simple little diagrams showing how to “Create a User.” Tonight the little diagrams make use of lots of red arrows.

I get home after rinsing with fluoride, and “Log In.” 200 users in the “Other Users” nodelet. Between that and the flame-laden Chatterbox, I can scroll down forever and ever. Everything University gathering dust, while pop culture nodes fly through my “New Nodes” nodelet. My teeth don’t hurt as much as my head does now. I can’t take it, I find my old TV and plug it in.

Regis Philbin is making references to Everything on another stupid import gameshow. The square brackets, ignored by typography for the last century and a half become embedded in clever advertising. It’s square bracket chic. It’s insanity. It’s coming.

On a serious note, if Everything2 were to go mainstream, the editors would become critically important, as they would be forced to deal with a constant barrage of new nodes. It would probably work out for the best though, as I believe that bandwith limitations aside, E2 would handle a critical mass of users quite well, and that it could possibly approach something like the Encyclopaedia Britannica as a true reference source.

Bah! When (or rather, if) Everything2 goes "mainstream", there will be a lot of non-contributors and some active contributors.

I mean, there are a lot of people out there who probably could find E2 a valuable information source, even when they probably wouldn't contribute much into it themselves. So, these "dumb masses" would very likely to contribute few things, but make their contributions worthwhile while they're at it...

Editors will kill the worthless contributions, and at the point the newbies will learn how to behave, they'll quiet down. I know. This is how the online communities seem to evolve in general.

::WWWWolf shivers at the thought of level 2 50000-XP user...::

This for people who know how to behave - I didn't mention anything about the trolls who *don't* know how to behave...