You helped launch the train puzzle guy (tim klein) viral for something truly cool. I don’t mind that type of viral because there is value at the onset. he did something rather unique and clever that struck a cord and inspired others.
That is certainly the exception to the rule, most things that go viral do so because they tickle the basest bottom of the human barrel, they are either lies or someone getting hurt or doing something dumb. It is more often than not the immortalization of bad choices, the butt of the worlds joke, a cross between public shaming and a laughing stock, the worst 15min of fame. look everyone a trainwreck.
We need more positive, real, inspiring viral posts! We need more of that type of news in general.
Glad Tim got his 15min in a positive way.
Fun story, bot WOW does it make me cringe that apparently what you meant by “it became a meme” is “someone took a screenshot of twitter”.
The complete loss of attribution of the creator is so frustrating, and a complete plague in 5e world today. Whenever I blog about something I always make an effort to track down the original source and link there, but I usually don’t bother linking to the place I found it, because the story is about the creator, not about me and how I got there.
I agree. Call me naive, but I find it shocking how much it happens. (Even here on the bbs, so many images are posted without any credit given. Yesterday, @DeadWritergave a three-part credit for a GIF—the source, where it was found, and where the format was converted; I felt really happy to see that, and also realized how unusual it [unfortunately] seemed.)
I suppose that as it gets easier and easier for anyone to search for images and track down sources, it will (in general) be left more and more as an exercise for the reader. Still, the social importance of giving credit where due will never go away. And the importance of being honest with ourselves about who we owe for our successes, even if posting a cool GIF is a minor success in the big scheme of things.
But if you hadn’t found it there, would you have known about it? I’d say they deserve some credit too, for having gone to the trouble to put it in front of you. (Though I’d feel reluctant about giving them credit if they didn’t credit the creator…not sure what I’d do in that case. Maybe I’d note that it was found there without attribution—which would give them some credit but also call them out for their omission.)
Thank you for the shout-out. I need the encouragement. I am not always good with attribution, thought I try.
Off-topic- but in the public eye. Part of the problem is the medium that we are using. This blog, and most others often equate first with best. A quick post, garners more views, and thus more adulation/criticism, v.s. something that is posted later on, that often seems ignored. BoingBoing’s readers are better than most at parsing through the long replies, and that is one of the reasons I post here.
Add to that, most site don’t encourage attribution. I don’t even know if BoingBoing has a distinct policy on it, beyond the prefunctery, “Note where you found it.”, as that doesn’t require that their bloggers dig deeper into the content that they are reporting on or creating.
BoingBoing has gamified interactions with the blog by adding badges that note everything from filling out a biography to posting a link that generates 1000 clicks to giving 50 likes 20 days in a row(Did you know there was a maximum number of likes?). There are no badges for, “Proper Attribution” or “Corrects Mistakes”, “mea culpa”, or “Provides reasons for edits”. All of these might improve the quality of the posts, or at the very least be inline with BoingBoing’s perceived values.
Perhaps we should bring this up, en masse, with the powers that be.
