web communities
It’s Not the Thought That Counts
Fishsticks and croissants
Would it surprise you to know I’ve invented a way to keep the Antarctic cold in the face of climate change? A “cash cab” style alarm clock radio game show? A better way to study medicine? Web conferencing? (that last bit is kind of real.)
The Halfbakery website became quite popular in the early days of the web, and I was a steady contributor (and remain a member) with more than five hundred ideas to date. You’d post your half-baked notions as long as they had some basis in fact (and sometimes, tongue in cheek, not), and discuss them with your fellow bakers.
The site took pains to warn folks that whatever they posted would become public knowledge, but it was the fun and the absurdity of the discussions that made the site a unique experience. You got fish sticks for stinky ideas and croissants for popular ones. The site steadily refused any attempts at monetization and remains a haven from advertising, though, like most of the rest of the web, it has deteriorated to frequent ranting discussions about politics.
As you would expect, occasionally we’d get somewhat nutty (or is the correct expression, nuttier) contributors who would go to great pains to veil their ideas and drop hints of being on the cusp of perpetual motion, if they could only tell us — but alas, they cannot, the idea is simply too valuable, too precious and too risky to share. We’d get fly-by-nighters as well, who would post their world-changing invention, get zero reaction or universal stinkingdom, and disappear forever.
The most interesting aspect of the site’s subculture is the notion of ideas that should be marked for deletion or [m-f-d]. As an attempt to steer the conversation away from rants, it ultimately failed, but it nonetheless created some useful frameworks for thinking about “world changing ideas” for the aspiring Don Quixote in all of us.
Here are some of the more interesting ones: (full list here)
WIBNI: Wouldn’t It Be Nice If. If we could all just get along, we could end war in our lifetime. If only rich people didn’t want to get richer. Such ideas could often have a basis in popular news (e.g. let’s use genetic engineering to wipe out disease), but the author would have no specific knowledge or qualification to offer more than trite commentary on the subject. Conversely, an idea about using RNA to deliver vaccines with some specifics (prior to it being common knowledge) would work.
WTCTTISITMWIBNIIWR: “Wasn’t that cool, that thing I saw in the movie? Wouldn’t it be neat if it were real?” The Halfbakery did not tolerate fanboys; such ideas would be ridiculed quickly and mercilessly.
And of course, the ever present “advocacy”, which is reserved for commentary masquerading as an idea, solely for the purpose of advocating or trolling on the hot topic of the day, be it guns, vaccines, Trump, climate change, and the rest of the spillover from our daily lives into this, nominally pristine, but ultimately polluted, like the rest of us, community.
Oh, I’ve been as guilty of such ideas as any other — it seems we cannot avoid getting into these kinds of arguments online, and those of us who write are probably more prone to it than others, thinking our rants and insults so eloquent, in the moment at least. We type our comment out, then revel in the sarcasm dripping witticism — how clever was that last trolling remark? Let me share it with a friend.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all do without that?
