job spam and forced meme creation » So last night some asshole recruiter sent out a mass email to 400+ people about some Ruby on Rails position. Unfortunately, said asshole didn't know how to use BCC in his email client, thus allowing some other idiot to "Reply All" asking about the positions.
If you've ever had this happen to you before, you know what comes next -- some dickhead(s) let the guy know that he shouldn't use "Reply All" when there's a humongous list of CC'd names -- but of course, in order to let everyone know how cool/helpful/smart they are, they ALSO do it via a "Reply All." Generally things would end there (aside from the inevitable random "Please remove me from this list!" email), but NO! For some reason, people seem to think it's "fun" to continue sending emails to random strangers and have tried to turn it into some sort of mailing list. As of right now, about 13 hours after the original email, there are something like 70 replies to the thread. Why? Nobody's said anything particularly enlightening or funny, and yet it only took six mails into it for someone to declare it "epic." Hell, there's already a (soon-to-be-deleted, I'm sure) Wikipedia article [note: in the time it took me to write this, it got axed] about it, and someone expanded it into a Google Group for some reason.
Whatever, I don't care about the emails (it's not that hard to mute a conversation in Gmail), but to me, this all reeks of people trying their hardest to create some sort of meme that they can then claim to have been an original part of -- they're thinking that in six months, when everyone's referring to that dude who sent out that mass email one time, they can all say "oh yeah, I was on that list!" (I mean, someone declared it a "social phenomenon" in one of his emails, and I think he was being serious). But there's nothing particularly interesting about the whole thing -- I get ~360k results for "ruby on rails mailing list" on Google, so it's not like the world was clamoring for such a list, much less one made up of random people united by their inability to refrain from hitting "Reply All."
Update: closing in on 100 messages now, hooray. Blech, I say.
If you've ever had this happen to you before, you know what comes next -- some dickhead(s) let the guy know that he shouldn't use "Reply All" when there's a humongous list of CC'd names -- but of course, in order to let everyone know how cool/helpful/smart they are, they ALSO do it via a "Reply All." Generally things would end there (aside from the inevitable random "Please remove me from this list!" email), but NO! For some reason, people seem to think it's "fun" to continue sending emails to random strangers and have tried to turn it into some sort of mailing list. As of right now, about 13 hours after the original email, there are something like 70 replies to the thread. Why? Nobody's said anything particularly enlightening or funny, and yet it only took six mails into it for someone to declare it "epic." Hell, there's already a (soon-to-be-deleted, I'm sure) Wikipedia article [note: in the time it took me to write this, it got axed] about it, and someone expanded it into a Google Group for some reason.
Whatever, I don't care about the emails (it's not that hard to mute a conversation in Gmail), but to me, this all reeks of people trying their hardest to create some sort of meme that they can then claim to have been an original part of -- they're thinking that in six months, when everyone's referring to that dude who sent out that mass email one time, they can all say "oh yeah, I was on that list!" (I mean, someone declared it a "social phenomenon" in one of his emails, and I think he was being serious). But there's nothing particularly interesting about the whole thing -- I get ~360k results for "ruby on rails mailing list" on Google, so it's not like the world was clamoring for such a list, much less one made up of random people united by their inability to refrain from hitting "Reply All."
Update: closing in on 100 messages now, hooray. Blech, I say.