Why are people so strangely rude on the internet? My favorite blog, In Spite of Years of Silence, has gone on a temporary hiatus (i should just not try to use words i know i can't spell) as a result of a fight with one of her readers. From what I can gather the reader likes reading weblogs via usenet news because he's on a dialup and it saves time not having to wait for the pages to load. He posted something on a comment like "please please please set up an RSS feed to make life easier for people who read your site on news". According to a later commenter, this is apparently somewhat easy on blogger pro, but i certainly wouldn't have known that and can imagine feeling rather put upon by some random person insisting i do something for them when i'm just keeping a website for my own fun, especially if i were having a tough day or something. I don't know what happens at this point, but Sarah apparently said no, and the reader responded, probably with a rude angry email, but at the very least with this rather obnoxious post. Sarah obviously gets pretty annoyed and the result is her not wanting to have a website read by random people who expect things of her and say mean things if she's not fulfilling their needs. I dunno, its like Adams schmooze all over again... Why do people suddenly become terribly rude when they're writing emails to strangers? If this encounter had happened in real life this guy probably would have asked more nicely and Sarah might have responded differently and we could all just be happy and read each others postings. Civility is nice, and although we haven't had much of it for much of history, let's please not lose it again.