FIRST!!11!: An Observational Analysis

Please excuse the obnoxiousness of naming my first blog entry "FIRST!!11!". I find a lot of things funny and the strange phenomenon of internet lurkers needing to declare posts and comments on posts as "first" is one of those things.

My favourite place to check out the best of the "FIRST!!"s is on The Onion's AV Club (http://www.avclub.com/). It usually represents the eternal struggle between people who enjoy posting "first" and those who resent people for posting "first". Are both sides totally wasting their time? Absolutely. But I'm going to do them one better, I am going to blog about it.

So there's the firsties. Psychologically there's something a little bit satisfying about staking a claim on something. Its the same as leaving your name in wet cement, or being the first of your friends to see a movie and then spoiling the ending for everyone. Alternatively people could get a much greater satisfaction from discovering a cure for cancer, or figuring out how to end social injustices, but that stuff is hard, and odds are smarter people are already working on those problems. So give some kids the internet, and they get to carve their own little niche. Its obnoxious, but harmless.

But there's the anti-firsties. People who get upset by the saturations of every single comment section on the avclub starting with a "first". Many of these people will fight back against the firsts and attempt to make the first comment before any firsties get to do so, or simply heckling at the firsties. The first kind is the most impressive because to write an intelligent comment before any firsties are able to hammer "first!" into their keyboard is pretty fucking amazing. This is of course why it is so rare (and depressing... how long have you been waiting for a new article?). The angrier kind is the retaliators of the "first". Some of these are just as obnoxious as the firsties since they demand "Ban FIRSTIE! OMFG!" because no one has every been able to get around being banned from a website before. Worse yet are people that give long existential commentary about how pathetic the life of a firstie must be. Ignoring the fact that longwinded existential commentaries on internet posting might be the saddest shit ever...

But don't worry, the absolute saddest shit ever is blogging about it.