Blandness is for Wimps

Oh, what a sad place the world has become! With so many people producing content—books, blogs, videos, ads—you need your content to be outstanding in order to be noticed. As in, standing out of the unwashed masses of uninteresting produce.

Anger

An exceptionally popular blip on the late-1990s radar was a one-man web site by a hateful bile-spewing megalomaniac whose defining characteristic was that he drew genitalia on greeting cards: Maddox (which is surprisingly safe for browsing at work as long as you don’t visit the greeting card page). Maddox was outrageous. He would write short, sweet and unambiguous sentences like «animals are made to be eaten» and string them together to create complete articles that brought up the image of a crazed man frothing at the mouth in front of a computer in a suburban basement. It was something you would show your friends, if only to make fun of the author and publicly denounce his views. For the french equivalent of Maddox, try Odieux Connard.

Anger and fury are old. Even the bile-spewing is passé. These days, if you can’t vomit napalm from your fingertips on demand, you might as well give up and go back to posting financial advice and generic emo poetry.

Euphoria

And then, there’s endorsement. Turns out, being euphorically happy about something works as well as being maniacally angry about it.

Penny Arcade ran a short strip and news post in late 2009 about Torchlight, a Diablo-esque video game. They didn’t say the game was good, or excellent, or must-have, or 9.5/10 or any of that standardized low-power vocabulary. Tycho wrote:

Runic Games is doing the Lord’s work, in an robust and unambiguous fashion.

And I hate him for that with unrelenting passion, because of the many hours I spent playing Torchlight after that. My basic rule for video games is this: if I can level up, then I will be addicted.

There are three benefits to giving outstanding, sincere compliments, as opposed to outstanding insults.

1. Complimenting someone makes you feel better. The experience you get from quality restaurants is heavily influenced by your expectations. If you expect to have a good time, then unless something goes wrong unexpectedly, you will have a good time. And, if you expect to have a bad time, then you will have a bad time.

2. Sincere compliments help build friendships. People are always happy when you compliment them, especially if they felt insecure about that very thing. And if you help people feel better, that’s one less step to go to make friends or «online allies»

3. Outspoken, public compliments send out a message: if you’re great and you need some publicity, make sure I notice you. All publicity is good publicity, they say, but most of us would rather not be on the wrong end of the angry-rant-zooka.

Naomi Dunford

One of the best euphoria-powered blogs I read is Naomi Dunford’s IttyBiz. When she has a good experience with customer support, she doesn’t write a bland ten-word sentence about it:

I have a confession to make. I have a crush on Leo Babauta. Now, disclosing this little juicy morsel in such a public fashion is probably unwise. It shows my hand and significantly lessens the chance that he will ever allow me to guest post on his blog. It might make things awkward, us being in love and all. However, dear readers, I have promised to be honest with you and honest I will be.

Her entire blog is a temple dedicated to the idea that if you’re not outstanding, you don’t exist. Let me say that again: if you want to exist, you have to be outstanding. Does she exist? Well, do you remember René Descartes? He doubted the existence of everything, and through logical reasoning he deduced that two things existed for sure – himself (cogito ergo sum) and Naomi Dunford.

I read many blogs for their content. I read Naomi’s for the experience.

Nicollet.Net