As a long-time dweller of the internet, having found my footing back in the more burgeoning days of the mid-90s — the era where every website looked like a MySpace page and owning a domain name was a badge of honour — I find the more recent and modern ‘traditions’ of the ‘net vexing at best, thoroughly obnoxious at worst. I’m well aware that times change and as one of the old guard whose time has been and gone, I’m becoming somewhat of a staunch defender of obsolete traditions. This is a given, and I’m sure I can be forgiven by others who remember the fledgling era with fond — cynics may say rose-tinted — memories.

Admittedly, I’ve been guilty of many antics in my younger days — one which I still remember fondly is a website featuring Cheezburger-esque commentary, intentionally terrible HTML, and festooned with dozens of animated GIFs, featuring various flags of the world ablaze. “burn italy but save all the pizzas!!!!”, it proudly proclaimed, among many other offbeat messages. I received a lot of hate-mail over that site (largely from irate Americans), which was of course the sole intention of this misbegotten project. Of course, this is laughably tame by today’s standards, but highly offensive to some and the cause of much ill-will in the earlier, protoplasmic time before Blogger, YouTube and the rise of the mighty Google.

But I digress.

While hardly innocent of heinous breaches of etiquette myself, there is one thing — admittedly small — which stands head and shoulders above the others in terms of absurdity and devoted following among the mouth-breathing masses, and frustrates me to no end. That is to say, the tradition of racing to be the first commenter on a freshly-minted post on a popular website or blog, and ostensibly proclaiming one’s apparent superiority for attaining the hallowed top spot by proclaiming simply, “first”. As if this inane practice wasn’t bad enough, following hot on the heels are usually the obligatory nay-sayers who deride and shun the first-poster for this harmless yet inexplicably annoying offense — whom I can certainly side with, though I find their methods futile — and as if by cue, the yes-men follow suit with claims that the embittered critics are merely “jealous” that they weren’t somehow skilled — or fortunate — enough to beat the first-poster to the punch, sometimes even congratulating the miscreant who began the brewing storm.

This often fills as much as two or three screens worth of comments, the back-and-forth commentary predictably droll, like parrots regurgitating the same tired arguments ad nauseum, both sides so obstinate — so righteous — that they could never bend, or even simply agree to disagree (an unfortunate trend in almost any internet-based arguments or ‘debates’). Worse, envious late-comers will often proudly proclaim numbers aside from the first — “second” is disagreeably common, as are many of the numbers that follow, as is “last comment!!!!11″ in systems both highly-popular, yet limited in the number of comments that can be supported per post. The most bizarre spin-off I’ve observed thus far has been “first reply”, which is to say, the first person to reply to the first poster in a comment thread. Asinine doesn’t begin to do this practice justice.

And that leads me to simply ask: Why? What distinction, what honour or respect can be gleaned by staring at a screen with raw eyes, finger poised hesitantly above a mouse button, awaiting the moment to dive in and claim this apparently most prodigious of prizes? Am I simply too old — too stuck in the past to understand — or are peoples lives truly so shallow, so lacking in meaning and purpose that they glean some spurious sense of self-worth from the electronic era’s equivalent of “Kilroy was here”?

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