I installed the ‘WordPress.com stats’ plugin for WordPress recently. While going through the statistics, I noticed that several old posts continue to receive a number of hits regularly. For e.g. the posts on Nanyang Poly Sex Video and Old Singapore Photos continue to receive 10 – 20% of hits the blog gets daily, and these posts are almost 3 years old.
Even before I installed the plugin, I noticed on other trackers that these two posts are the all time popular. In fact two others have also been very popular of late, one of them being Edision Chen’s ‘Photo Gate’ Scandal and the other a post about certain parameters used in the Chinese search engine Baidu [百度] titled: 小龍女的 “女乃 豆頁”
What really interest me is that 3 out of 4 of these popular posts are sex-related or scandalous and it suddenly reminded me of this blog post lamenting the state of Singapore’s blogosphere which I read recently.
I do not agree with the blogger that there is something wrong with Singapore’s blogosphere. In fact, I don’t even think that the popularity of sex-related postings is a Singapore-specific phenomenon. After all, the ‘unexpected search parameters’ on Baidu which I wrote about, would indicate searches performed primarily by people in China using the Baidu search engine, followed by people who are literate in Chinese outside China. On top of which, the most popular website in Singapore may perhaps be sammyboy.com, not to mention that a lot of spam mails are usually sex-related, from women offering to undress on webcams, to drugs improving sexual abilities and increasing the size of your sex organ. It is almost certainly true that ‘The Internet is for pR0n’, a far cry from what its inventors in DARPA have envisioned.
The blogger is not accepting reality when he lament about the state of Singapore’s blogosphere with regard to the Top 10 Most Popular postings [in the last 24 hours] on ping.sg. He should acknowledge the fact that it is simply what the Internet is really about – a place where you can find such objectionable content [to some] easily and readily. Furthermore, he should accept that everyone has this peeping tom tendency [偷窥倾向], i.e. to peep into the privacy of others, and thus there is always this unexplainable excitement and interest in scandalous articles and news – especially those of celebrities. To provide such content would only be meeting the expectation and satisfying the desires of many users.
In short, while it might not be intentional, ping.sg has apparently stumbled upon a ‘gold mine’ simply by its un-moderated nature and allowing sex-related content posts to be published. Personally, I suspected that ping.sg might actually now have an increase in readership compared to the time when there was a thriving pseudo-community.
After all, while the existence of a community may bring a constant return traffic, the effect would be very much like bears catching salmons returning to the breeding ground. On the other hand, having readers of such outrageous, loud, sex-related post would be the equivalent of trawling – readers get snared regardless they liked the service provider or not. In short, it is a much, much more efficient way in ‘strip mining’ readership for income. Even though I have once proposed the complete removal of the Top 10 as the best solution to end the rampage of all objectionable content (when I was a user of ping.sg), I now believe by doing so would truly kill a portion of ping.sg’s traffic as it no longer satisfies the instant gratification for sex-related content that many readers (not necessarily of ping.sg) seek.
On hindsight, I am reminded that some participants in the ping.sg shoutbox have said all along that the attempt to curb or control these postings is not reflecting the true readership at all. After leaving for more than 6 months and looking in from outside, I must admit that they are indeed right about the this matter. Technically, ping.sg is a microcosm of the Internet and therefore the popularity of these postings merely a shadow of the general usage pattern of the Internet itself.
The Internet is for pR0n, indeed!
Disclaimer: I did not mean this post as an offense to anyone in particular or to any site. I do not want any more quarrels. Read it in the context of my response to this post.
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