What’s to be done about NAR and Realtor.com?

Nothing.

Stephen Colbert recently aired a segment about the “Don’t Taser Me, Bro” guy, the student who was subdued during a John Kerry speech recently.  He praised (i.e., criticized — viewers of the show will understand what I mean) the student’s peers for doing nothing to help him at the time, then going off to blog about it.

One could make a case that as a society we have become massively deficient in our ability to work together toward a common good (if we ever were any good at it — cf. Howard Zinn).  We have become a nation of amateur writers, and amateur critics of amateur writers.  If our remote ancestors were hunter-gatherers, we could quip that we have gone through the inevitable middle stages such as shopper-borrowers, and have become, inevitably, writer-commenters.

If you’re a home buyer or seller, you may neither know nor care that the folks at ActiveRain recently failed in their attempt to sell their company to Move.com, who’s parent company, Move.inc also owns Realtor.com.

Buyers don’t care.  Sellers don’t care.  But among Realtors® and other users of ActiveRain and people on the outside who wanted to write an interesting article, this upset a lot of people.  At least one lender was mad because he naturally feared that if ActiveRain were sold to a a Realtor®-heavy organization, there might be no place for content written by affiliates such as lenders.  Most of the Realtors® were upset because they don’t like Realtor.com®, and didn’t want content they’d developed being used to compete with them.  So there were a lot of threads on ActiveRain about this.

Feeling their pain, compassionate fellow bloggers of course rose to the occasion to do what compassionate fellow bloggers always do — write a post or two rubbing salt into the wounds.

Here are a couple of gems that show this incredible outpouring of sympathy toward their colleagues in action:

“As of this moment, at least 90% of the blogs on Active Rain suck because the writers never learned there’s a larger point than getting points.”

and

“I suppose I should care more than I do about the failed ransacking acquisition of Active Rain by Move.com. What’s less than zero?”

One day when she was in second grade, I had to pick my daughter up because the other kids were picking on her relentlessly.

There’s no finer sport on the Internet for most people than finding someone who’s made a mistake or is hurting for some reason, because you can use the second grade logic to reason that somehow their mistake makes you look good.

You know, if someone trips on the playground and you stop to help them get up and get them a glass of water, then you look good.

You people aren’t in second grade any more.  You should know that.

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