A Frustrated Trent Reznor Decides To 'Tune Out' Social Media
This story was written by Tameka Kee.
Setting up MySpace pages and Ning accounts has become standard procedure for new music artists, but rock band Nine Inch Nails and frontman Trent Reznor were experimenting with social media marketing (blogs, forums and even alternate reality games) well before it became the norm. But now Reznor says he's "tuning out" of social media because of anonymous commenters spewing "hate and good old fashioned blatant racism"among other things.
Reznor's withdrawl comes just days after Michael Arrington pulled the plug on TechCrunch's official FriendFeed account (via ParisLemon), partly because of a massive influx of comments riddled with personal attacks. And the problem of comment trollsor readers that leave blatantly disrespectful, threatening or off-topic commentsis even plaguing the White House, since the Obama Administration is still struggling to figure out how (or whether) to allow comments on the Whitehouse.gov blog at all (via Wired).
Reznor said the band would continue to run its site NIN.com, since operating outside the label infrastructure, testing digital distribution, and engaging with fans as directly as possible had been "an interesting experiment over the last couple of years or so". But as for Twitter, Facebook and other mainstream social networks, Reznor said that free-for-all, un-moderated environments were "doing more harm than good in the bigger picture ... Idiots rule." (Hat tip to Seth Simonds for first spotting Reznor's blog post).
Photo Credit: Edvill
By Tameka Kee