You are
bored, at home, on a lonely Sunday night. Maybe you're surfing
Slashdot and you see a small
[?] link in a
story. Maybe you are randomly surfing
IRC channels, or maybe a
friend told you (to make you into a
partner in crime). Either way, you (maybe
reluctantly) take your
first step and decide to
log on...
You like it. You create an account, read a lot of writeups, maybe go on a noding spree, chat in the chatterbox and have a good time. You go to bed when the sun rises, and call in sick when you wake up. The next day, you come back to Everything, feeling more and more at home with every passing minute.
Your writeups get better and better. You feel part of the community; when you realize that you skip showers, meals and work in order to spend time on a web site and converse with EDB, you get scared. You start writing a few nodes about everything addiction, maybe even try to convince yourself that you should quit Everything. You fail.
Your return to the real world seems impossible, and you decide to give in. After all, Everything is such a perfect place, share with others and learn from them, people are friendly and tolerant (well, most of them anyway), you can open up, tell your deepest secrets, and fear no one and nothing. This is the terminal point of your journey. This is home. Right?
Wrong. Everything is misleading. Please realize that most of Everything's Best Users are normal people; what sets them aside is their creativity, their imagination, their literary skills, their scholarship and their knowledge. And one more thing-- last, but definitely not least: They have a life. They have not taken this dangerous step of abandoning themselves to the hive mind. They have realized that Everything is not heaven, it is not a universal cure, nor is it the hippie paradise of goodness, love, peace, and sharing. Everything is a database; it is about fact, fiction and knowledge, not about sharing your secrets. Some of us are good, some are evil; this is just like the real world. Everything is a damn good web site, and a great online community; but it is just that, and it was never intended to be more.