Sick Chirpse reports on footballer-turned-boxer Curtis Woodhouse tracking down a Twitter troll. The short of the story is some twonk on Twitter had a go at Woodhouse, and Woodhouse then asked his followers for the troll’s address. There then followed a bit of to-and-fro, with original twonk getting increasingly cagey and boxer bloke showing his grown-up, professional sportsperson demeanour with such lovely outbursts as

i cant wait!! im give him a right pasting!! [sic]

and

right Jimbob im here !!!!! someone tell me what number he lives at, or do I have to knock on every door #itsshowtime [sic]

—that second one, complete with a picture of the street where increasingly frightened twonk lived.

The episode is spreading round Twitter and the web, with people generally on the side of Woodhouse. How great, they argue, that some stupid little troll got what was coming to him. Personally, I find the entire episode despicable and chilling.

I hate Twitter trolls as much as the next person, and I’ve also experienced several runs of prank phone calls, including one lovely soul who’d ring up daily and rant down the phone about what a wanker I was and how everything I do was shit. (Presumably, they weren’t an Apple fan, nor, clearly, a fan of my writing.) But the Twitter mob mentality is worse. If someone’s making a genuine threat, make a complaint to the proper authorities; but if someone’s just being a dick, don’t form a little online posse and have a boxer drive to the troll’s house, to, in the boxer’s own words

give him a right pasting!! [sic]

Sometimes the internet is a thing of pure magic—one of those inventions that is almost as revolutionary as penicillin or the car. But this skirmish also shows that it can be an enabler of the worst of humanity, where bullies bully, and the bullied become just as bad as the aggressors, while an audience looks on, baying for the most explosive outcome. It’s not funny—it’s just sickening.

Stuart Dredge has written about the recent online row about paying journalists. The short of the story is Nate Thayer was asked to repurpose an article for The Atlantic for no money, and countless toys were rapidly thrown out of countless prams by countless writers, bloggers and people who just really like throwing toys out of prams.

Dredge is calmer than most, and argues against the commonplace default position these days that people should always be paid for writing.

My wife and I have a site called Apps Playground, about children’s apps, which is profitable (to the tune of £20-£30 of App Store affiliate fees a month, once hosting costs are deducted) as long as you don’t factor in the time we spend writing it. So we’re writing for free, but it’s our own thing.

If someone – say a big technology site like TechCrunch or Mashable – asked me to write the kind of stuff I do for The Guardian for them for free, would I? Obviously no. If they asked me to do a guest piece for free in my role as Apps Playground co-founder, with a link to the site? Obviously yes. Different hats.

On the surface, this looks similar to the regular ‘write for us in return for exposure’ offer every seasoned writer I know gets from publications on a fairly regular basis. As Dredge notes, writing for free is about the trade-off—whether or not you will potentially see more overall long-term value/income in return for giving away some of your time.

That said, this is looking at things from an individual’s viewpoint rather than a wider context. When publications—especially online—trend towards unsustainable rates (or in many cases, no rates), everyone’s individual one-off potentially leads to a situation where no-one gets paid. As someone who’s almost entirely a professional writer these days, that scares the shit out of me. Having been doing this gig for well over a decade now, with (so far) precisely no editors hunting me down and repeatedly punching me in the face while yelling about inaccurate use of interrobangs, I like to think I’m doing a pretty good job of things. But even so, it’s hard to see how it’s possible in the long term to compete against free, if that’s the way things go.

Dredge notes:

Perhaps, too, there are simply too many journalists, and new digital economics mean we’ll have to work harder and scrap smarter to stay in the game. There’s an interesting parallel with musicians here, I think, which is probably a separate article in itself.

He may well be right. Perhaps the entire creative sector is moving towards an end point where the vast majority of those within it—even those who’d previously had long and healthy careers—simply won’t be able to survive. Writing, music, and other creative endeavours could become little more than hobbyist pastimes, filling an hour in an evening before the creator goes to bed, ready for another day doing a ‘proper’ job, whatever that might be. That doesn’t so much horrify me as make me incredibly sad. If we cannot find a place and see value in creative tasks, I think we’ll be poorer for it and publications/other outlets will increasingly become unfocussed; however, perhaps with more people having a voice, diversity will flourish, great new creators will break through, and people will start once again thinking about paying directly to read, watch or hear more work from them, rather than waiting until they’ve a spare evening to craft something new.

Update: Gary Marshall adds his thoughts.

It’s no secret Twitter has a client-hostile approach. Recent terms restrict any one app to a ‘token limit’ of 100,000 users. Naturally, this limit doesn’t take into account pirated versions of paid apps or those that are abandoned by users who move on to something else. The Guardian’s written about the impact of this policy: Android app Falcon had to hike its price to stay on Google Play and Windows 8 Tweetro was pulled; elsewhere, well-regarded client Tweetbot arrived on the Mac with a $20 price-tag, solely because of Twitter’s arbitrary limits.

I’m still unsure why Twitter hasn’t banned third-party clients outright, although perhaps doing so would unleash the kind of negative PR the service wants to avoid. Better to have the clients gradually and slowly die, until the point where Twitter can proudly note that 99 per cent of people on the service are using official clients anyway, and so killing off those few clients clinging on is no big deal. The thing is, what, in the long run, will be an official Twitter client?

The latest update on the TweetDeck blog has announced that along with pulling Facebook support, the AIR, iOS and Android versions of TweetDeck have been canned. Instead, you’re encouraged to use the web app or Chrome app (which adds notifications). The post states:

We think these web and Chrome apps provide the best TweetDeck experience yet, and that they are the apps in which you’ll want to see us add new capabilities first, followed closely by our Mac and PC apps.

The inference is clear: the web is where Twitter wants you to be for TweetDeck, because it’s there where Twitter can control its client and roll out updates whenever it wishes, not restricted by the whims of users who might choose to not upgrade, or the vagaries of app stores.

But what of the standard Twitter client? Well, the TweetDeck announcement claims the web focus for TweetDeck is specific to usage for that product:

In many ways, doubling down on the TweetDeck web experience and discontinuing our app support is a reflection of where our TweetDeck power-users are going. Over the past few years, we’ve seen a steady trend towards people using TweetDeck on their computers and Twitter on their mobile devices.

The post also notes an “increased investment” in Twitter for mobile, most obviously with enhanced search and photo filters, but I wonder if this is a short-term solution. Twitter wants the ability to control its products and update them whenever it wants. Right now, third-party clients and the app-focussed mobile ecosystem are getting in the way. My guess is that this year will see Twitter finally pull the plug on all third-party clients, and next year will find the company pushing its web offering extremely hard. Whether users will come along for the ride is another matter.

This is an updated article. It previously did not include note that the move has been ‘faked’.

As reported by Macworld and others, The Pirate Bay has claimed it has moved to North Korea. The company’s press release states:

A week ago we could reveal that The Pirate Bay was accessed via Norway and Catalonya. The move was to ensure that these countries and regions will get attention to the issues at hand. Today we can reveal that we have been invited by the leader of the republic of Korea, to fight our battles from their network.

This is truly an ironic situation. We have been fighting for a free world, and our opponents are mostly huge corporations from the United States of America, a place where freedom and freedom of speech is said to be held high. At the same time, companies from that country is chasing a competitor from other countries, bribing police and lawmakers, threatening political parties and physically hunting people from our crew. And to our help comes a government famous in our part of the world for locking people up for their thoughts and forbidding access to information.

I’m not sure irony is the right word here. What the press release does showcase is The Pirate Bay’s ethics—or lack thereof. Sure, it’s crap that the media industry is playing hardball all of the time, but it’s also naïve to suggest The Pirate Bay is mostly used for anything other than spreading copies of copyrighted films, television, music and games. But this battle does not justify talking of moving the entire operation to a country with dire human rights records and practically zero freedoms and tolerance.

It’s a country opening up and one thing is sure, they do not care about threats like others do.

No, because those internally who make threats tend to end up here.

When someone is reaching out to make things better, it’s also ones duty to grab their hand.

You get the feeling if Stalin was still alive, The Pirate Bay would have talked of taking his hand, too, had he offered a chunk of bandwidth and some lovely terms for spreading films and TV on the internet. Still, what do human rights abuses, civil liberties, persecution and freedom of expression matter? What’s really important is ensuring people still have rapid and free access to the latest Game of Thrones, regardless of which network is enabling that.

(As it happens, it looks like The Pirate Bay is talking crap, but even the justification in its PR leaves a sour taste.)

I’ve had a bunch of people alert me to Stuart Campbell’s latest gaming piece, When games aren’t expensive enough. He presents a counterpoint to the negative reaction regarding Real Racing 3’s business model, which has irked many gamers.

That app is the latest in the well-regarded (although, in my opinion, somewhat dull) mobile ‘simulator’ racing series. Instead of being sold at a premium price point, it’s gone freemium. The app throws up relatively arbitrary doorslams, which you can get past by throwing money at the game. Reviews have so far been decidedly mixed, with Eurogamer being the most scathing.

Even broadly positive Real Racing 3 reviews (such as TouchArcade’s) grumble about the freemium structure, and so it’s surprising that Campbell argues of EA’s decision:

[It], contrary to what you might think, is a good thing.

His argument, though, doesn’t make a great deal of sense to me. He rightly notes EA’s financial model is essentially designed around gouging and that Real Racing 3 will make a lot of money. But the conclusion is flawed:

their existence is mana from Heaven for the rest of us, because they provide the long-term means by which the price of games can finally come down, at the sole expense of stupid people. By having braying cheats with too much money contribute most of the funding for big-budget “free-to-play” games, the likes of EA secure the funding which lets them make normal games cheaply.

The mistake is in thinking EA has any intention of continuing with making normal games, when the company’s CFO has explicitly stated all future EA games will feature microtransactions. Even the likes of Tetris aren’t safe. A year ago, I wrote about the new iOS Tetris and how it was wrecked by microtransactions, and the upcoming Tetris Blitz appears to be far more heavily in the freemium space. When these games make money, why will EA ‘risk’ making any ‘normal’ games that are released for a fixed price and that lack gouging? And when iOS device owners regularly baulk at a new game costing a few quid, why will other companies risk not following suit? Why wouldn’t they instead gradually chip away at gaming’s soul and replace the bits that fall off with components from a cynical, hateful business model?

Cambell argues:

[Every] penny they’ll happily hand over is a penny that the rest of us don’t have to pay in order to keep a stream of videogames that cost less than a bar of chocolate coming our way until the end of time. […]

So hurray for Real Racing 3. It’s a shit game that sucks money out of dimwits and to all intents and purposes gives it to you and me, so that we can spend it on vastly more enjoyable ones that cost literally pennies. Why would you be upset about that?

But in reality, we’ll just end up with loads of crappy games and nothing to spend money on, because everyone will be obsessed with gouge-oriented freemium garbage that’s a business model first and barely a game second.