AngryJerk.net’s response to “Angry? Why rant sites may do you more harm than good“
“Who the fuck is Nathalie Nahai?”
-Pretty much everyone
To answer the first question on your mind, Nathalie Nahai is the self-proclaimed “web psychologist“, which roughly translates to “the person misguided companies come to for internet marketing strategies”.
To answer the second question on your mind, the purpose of this article is a rebuttal to her article from 2013, which claims that rant sites only serve to make the reader feel worse. Unlike Miss Web Psychologist, I actually have a real-life job with real-life responsibilities that don’t involve sitting around on my ass all day. Since Maddox’s time in LA has turned him into a stereotypical Californian (and I can’t watch his videos without seeing an Armenian used car salesman trying to front like he’s tough tbh), NinjaPirate has moved on, and pretty much every other rant site I know of except for one or two called it quits, I guess that leaves me to speak up for text-based ranters everywhere. Contrary to popular belief, obnoxious douchebags on YouTube or corporate-sponsored ad-ridden list-formatted content aggregators (READ: PLAGIARISTS) do NOT represent internet ranting. If I catch any of my shit being “aggregated” on some BuzzFeed knock-off I’m going to personally pay a visit to their office and show them exactly why I’m called Angry_Jerk. Ranting’s not dead, it’s just lost its head.
Now, for my response.
First of all, fuck you Nathalie. Exactly who are you to make assumptions of myself and my readers? As somebody who not only runs a rant site but enjoys reading online rants, your words and that bogus study (we’ll get to that in a moment) hold no representation of me. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. If you asked anyone who knows me in real life, they would tell you that I’m a generally kind and happy person. They’ll also tell you that I’m a no-bullshit kind of guy, a personality trait that was forged from being involved with rant sites as both a reader and a writer. That trait only serves to advance me in my current career path and has gotten me pretty damn far for being a community college dropout.
As a “web psychologist”, surely you would understand the therapeutic importance of someone reading about a relatable experience, or reading something that shares or promotes their own point of view? Hell, the media does this exact thing. The news is pretty much just a circlejerk of opinionated assholes pushing their point of view onto an audience that already holds similar views while also stating that something kind of happened. People need the comfort that comes with knowing that someone else sees it their way. Spend five minutes on Reddit if you want to see this in action.
Surely any reputable “web psychologist” would also know the therapeutic importance of anonymity when it comes to sharing a negative or uncomfortable experience? And yet, your wording belies your disdain for this concept:
“Beyond their questionable entertainment value, it would appear that rant sites do indeed serve a purpose when it comes to venting and creating a sense of shared experience. What’s unfortunate is the fact that these sites are, ironically, more likely to make you feel worse in the long term. And with most users posting anonymously, the resulting vitriol is likely to be much more toxic that what you’d expect were users posting with their real identity.“
Of course people aren’t going to post rants with their real names. In a society full of crybaby bitches, we’re taught that it’s okay to vent and let it out, except if it goes against the mainstream. It’s okay to be different, so long as you’re just like everybody else. The internet is a public venue, anything you say is put out there for the world to see. There’s a reason doctor-patient confidentiality exists. Sometimes we just don’t want people to know things about us, but we want to get those things off our chests. Do I really have to explain to you why someone wouldn’t want their real name attached to an angry internet post? Just what kind of “web psychologist” are you anyway? What area of psychology do you hold your degree in, Nathalie? I searched your website, but I found no reference to any kind of psychology accreditation, or any accreditation for that matter. From what I ascertained, your expertise appears to be in internet marketing. Please correct me if I’m wrong on this. Congratulations on being another cookie-cutter marketing consultant who thinks they have the internet all figured out.
The biggest and most glaring issue is with the study that Nathalie cites, “Anger on the Internet: The Perceived Value of Rant-Sites”. The study, done by a Ryan C. Martin and three chicks (who to be fair he was probably sleeping with) was so haphazard and sloppy that it could barely pass for a high school mid-term report let alone a serious academic work. If I was a high school teacher and one of my students handed this shit in to me I’d literally snap my wrist marking the paper with an F. If I was the dean at this university I’d have expelled every last one of these morons and watched as my school’s median GPA went up by like 2.16.
Firstly, their sample size was, no shit, 32 people. That’s it. That’s what they based this whole thing on, that’s what Nathalie based her article on. 32 fucking people, are you serious? What kind of a sample size is that? For shits and giggles, I asked 32 people what their opinion of Nathalie Nahai was. Literally every single one of them asked me “Who the fuck is Nathalie Nahai?” By Nathalie’s own logic she’s irrelevant, and therefor her thoughts on ranting mean jack shit. Reaching a conclusion from a sample size of only 32 people is quite possibly the worst thing I’ve ever seen in any study anywhere. And the guy heading the study has a fucking PhD. Do they just give these things away like candy now? Now I’m glad I dropped out of college, apparently any retard can get certified in any field if they throw enough money at the university. My Master’s in psychology wouldn’t have meant shit when cast into the sea full of morons like Ryan C. Martin and Nathalie Nahai. Ryan Martin might possibly be a bigger fucktard than Nathalie.
The next problem with their “study” is the fact that it was a goddamn internet survey:
“To better understand the people who frequent rant Web sites, we posted an online survey on four popular sites. Participants who completed the survey were entered into a drawing for a $50.00 gift card.”
Not only was it an internet survey, but it was a raffle. Are you for fucking real, Ryan? Since you’re clearly not smart enough to understand why this is wrong, let me explain it to you. I can take a survey online, and I can be anybody I damn well want to when I take that survey. Hell, when I play Overwatch I sometimes act like a black ghetto gangsta. For all you know I could have taken your shitty survey as a 22 year old farm girl from Nebraska. I could have also clicked random shit in order to blow through the survey and make myself eligible for your giftcard raffle. In other words, the anonymous nature of the internet renders internet surveys useless for any serious study. Even moreso when you offer a monetary award for completion of the survey.
Those two things alone should completely invalidate the study to anyone with even one functioning brain cell, but I’ll raise you one more. You say this was posted on “four popular sites”. What exactly were these sites? Were they actual rant sites? Doubtful, since most rant site authors I’ve known would never have put so much as an ad on their site let alone this bullshit Ryan Martin calls a “study”. The most I ever recall was Thilo of NinjaPirate (hey bud if you’re reading this drop me a line, wanna know how you’ve been) experimenting with Google AdSense and qutting after he realized you don’t make shit. Nobody else that I can think of ever had ads on their site, and if Ryan Martin had emailed any ranter in the scene and asked them to put his survey up they’d have told him to fuck off and publicly called him on being a retard in an article twice as scathing as this one. My guess is these “popular” sites were generic Buzzfeed clones with list-style slideshow articles that require you to click through each number on the list to help them generate more ad revenue and page hits. Maybe one of them was a sub-Reddit or a Facebook page. Ryan doesn’t tell us the sites nor does he give us any evidence of their popularity. Not even a measly Alexa ranking.
Four “popular” sites, and you only got 32 responses? I know that most people nowadays tend avoid online surveys that promise them giftcards, but if you expect us to believe that posting this survey on four popular websites only yielded 32 responses then you must have gotten your PhD in smoking crack. At this point even Ricky from the Trailer Park Boys is calling you a fucking idiot and picking apart the flaws in your weak ass study. There is no way you posted this survey on even one popular website, let alone four. You could clear this up by telling me exactly what websites you posted this on. But you won’t, because you’re probably still reeling from the devastation that I inflicted upon you and your bogus study in the last two paragraphs.
So now that I’ve written an article twice the length of Nathalie’s original piece, I think it’s time to wrap this up. Nathalie, if you’re not down with rant sites then feel free to choke on a bag of shit. And stop calling yourself a “web psychologist”, you’re just an internet marketing consultant. As a former underwater ceramic technician I’m all for beefing up a job title, but “web psychologist” sounds fucking ridiculous. Do yourself a favor and stop citing studies from retards like Ryan C. Martin. Ryan, you are proof that having a PhD doesn’t mean you actually have intelligence. You just had your study completely disemboweled by a guy who dropped out of community college in his second semester. Way to display the integrity and intelligence that comes with a doctorate, dipshit.
On behalf of the entire ranting community, I give Nathalie Nahai and Ryan C. Martin a hearty FUCK YOU.
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