Epinions

Epinions.com nauseates me. You write a polished, well-crafted view of a product and within the hour some jerk lacking the ability to spell (or capitalize letters) comes up like a remora, permanently attaching their useless comment demanding more information or condescendingly offering unsolicited advice to improve your OWN opinion. The same remoras are hypocritically responsible for the great circle jerk of mindless smiley and exclamation point filled praise, no matter how miserably pathetic their contributions are, for every damn thing their kind writes.

Ratings wind up meaning nothing in the grade-inflated atmosphere unless you dare rate honestly, in which case "Helpful" or "Somewhat Helpful" are taken as grave pistols-at-dawn insults in a standardless, slutty milieu where 99.9% of users rate "Very Helpful" in the deepest trash pit of epinions, the Writer's Corner. Anyone who loves the English language will shudder at the parade of ignorance, vanity, and obscenity found therein.

To top it all off, talentless writers bash anonymous raters and ascribe evil motives (i.e., a low rating given to a "Gay Pride write off" article was dismissed as narrow-minded homophobia even though the piece contained discredited statistics and took the position that writing sidewalk slogans at a Vermont (!) college campus in 2003 was a daringly defiant act to be proud of) rather than reflect on the remote possibility that their writing was mediocre at best. Thank God I bailed out of epinions before being pulled down by the slimy tentacles of moisturizing lip gloss reviewing hordes and swallowed up in the green mucous swamp left by people who define their entire existence by homosexuality, or more accurately, lecturing about homosexuality to a world that no longer gives a crap about something we thought was meant to be private, not thrust in our face (and imagination) on a daily basis.