Boring Internet [[www.boringinternet.co.uk]] The rest of the internet is a waste of time.

The A-Z of Why the Internet is Shit

G is for ...

Gaia Online

Another unfortunate scourge on the internet, this one is a pretty rampant one with millions of members. Gaia Online is what seems at first glance to be a kind of web-based MMORPG - this is what suckered me into it at some point in late 2003. That term may also be vaguely correct, at an enormous stretch, because instead Gaia Online proves to be just a massive, massive forum with a couple of site features to make it vaguely like a game. And by massive, I mean massive. Like, as of June last year, it has over a billion posts total.

The premise of the website is simple enough, and there are some slightly redeeming qualities. You have an anime-style character - though it doesn't do anything, and without money you're stuck with your plain and crappy avatar's appearance when you first join. There are items and such you can buy in the game - but you need money. There are a couple of minigames to score items by - but getting items through them is an incredibly long and tedious process, and playing those minigames requires money.

I think we can see from this that the need for money is what ruins the game.

The reason? Well, remember that fucking massive forum I mentioned a couple of paragraphs back? The way you get money is by posting on this forum.

Rather than playing any kind of cool MMORPG, like you might think at first, or interacting with people and making friends, in Gaia Online you get thrown into the world's biggest forum, surrounded by legions of crazies all more interested in getting money to spend on their avatars than actual human interactions. What fun there may have been in coalescing with people and having fun is lost mostly because everyone is simply too concerned with posting as much as they possibly can to score the tiny amount of money you attain for posts. This continues forever and exponentially as more users join, because what you also find out whilst playing Gaia Online is that all the decent items you may want are massively fucking expensive - so then you spend more and more time on a forum full of pre-teen and young teenage idiots spamming the place with shit in order to garner a lacklustre reward. Throw in the fact that some of these are children with no lives, or such bad lives they can't see themselves getting a partner in them, and you're surrounded by waves of people wanting to 'do the dirty' over Gaia, in desperate hope it's something like real life maybe, and that they won't be caught and banned. Which they won't, as when you have millions of members posting billions of posts, it's very hard to police the potentially considerable number that bring more shame to the regular oddities that populate the place.

Gaia Online: For taking the concept of forums, designed for social interaction, and making them completely not about interaction but furthering you own personal repetoire of pictures, and being infested with cybersex-obsessed, teenage kids, you must delete your site and all its contents from the web forever. You have twenty-four hours to comply.

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	The A-Z of Why the Internet is Shit G is for ... Gaia Online Another unfortunate scourge on the internet, this one is a pretty rampant one with millions of members. Gaia Online is what seems at first glance to be a kind of web-based MMORPG - this is what suckered me into it at some point in late 2003. That term may also be vaguely correct, at an enormous stretch, because instead Gaia Online proves to be just a massive, massive forum with a couple of site features to make it vaguely like a game. And by massive, I mean massive. Like, as of June last year, it has over a billion posts total. The premise of the website is simple enough, and there are some slightly redeeming qualities. You have an anime-style character - though it doesn't do anything, and without money you're stuck with your plain and crappy avatar's appearance when you first join. There are items and such you can buy in the game - but you need money. There are a couple of minigames to score items by - but getting items through them is an incredibly long and tedious process, and playing those minigames requires money. I think we can see from this that the need for money is what ruins the game. The reason? Well, remember that fucking massive forum I mentioned a couple of paragraphs back? The way you get money is by posting on this forum. Rather than playing any kind of cool MMORPG, like you might think at first, or interacting with people and making friends, in Gaia Online you get thrown into the world's biggest forum, surrounded by legions of crazies all more interested in getting money to spend on their avatars than actual human interactions. What fun there may have been in coalescing with people and having fun is lost mostly because everyone is simply too concerned with posting as much as they possibly can to score the tiny amount of money you attain for posts. This continues forever and exponentially as more users join, because what you also find out whilst playing Gaia Online is that all the decent items you may want are massively fucking expensive - so then you spend more and more time on a forum full of pre-teen and young teenage idiots spamming the place with shit in order to garner a lacklustre reward. Throw in the fact that some of these are children with no lives, or such bad lives they can't see themselves getting a partner in them, and you're surrounded by waves of people wanting to 'do the dirty' over Gaia, in desperate hope it's something like real life maybe, and that they won't be caught and banned. Which they won't, as when you have millions of members posting billions of posts, it's very hard to police the potentially considerable number that bring more shame to the regular oddities that populate the place. Gaia Online: For taking the concept of forums, designed for social interaction, and making them completely not about interaction but furthering you own personal repetoire of pictures, and being infested with cybersex-obsessed, teenage kids, you must delete your site and all its contents from the web forever. You have twenty-four hours to comply.