Pardon our ranting: Yappi

Yappi is both everything that is right and everything that is wrong about the internet.

Today's rant is brought to you by the Yappi discussion about Josh Andrews's new job as the head boys basketball coach at Middletown High School.

I have to admit that I've used Yappi in the past. I've checked out how Princeton's girls basketball team was respected in the state, basketball scores around the state, who was going to be the next Princeton football coach, and info about some other GMC schools.

(Oh, by the way, for those of you who aren't from around here,Yappi is a discussion site about Ohio high school sports.)

It's a great site to get quick information from around the state. If I need to know what the best girls basketball teams are in Northern Ohio, I'm going to Yappi.

If I need to know who won the regional final in Columbus, I'm going to Yappi.

Because it's populated by people who are obsessively interested in their little sport niche (softball, Dayton boys basketball, seventh-grade girls Middletown volleyball), the smallest bit of minutia is typically on the site within minutes. The OHSAA won't have the results up that quickly because those people are putting it up as a job. The Yappi boarders are putting things up as obsessions.

And this is all for good and for ill.

These are people who aren't ever going to be able to provide the distance needed for unbiased reporting, for rational thought in most cases, for reasoned consideration of both sides of the issues.

They're going to scream for their coaching candidates, defend their favorite baseball player to the absolute death, and they're going to take anything said against their opinion as a personal attack, a slight, a reason to start a flame war and dig up their old feelings about the hatred for that stupid rival school that cheated their ninth-grade volleyball team in the county championships in 1982 because, by god, those feelings have just never died.

And it's all done anonymously.

No reason to actual cite a source, VikesRulz!!, because nobody's going to know who you really are or call you on anything in the real world. No reason to prove your 'inside information' about the new jv softball coach at your favorite school, Middies4Life87, because if you really do have that inside information, you're not supposed to be sharing it - either because you're probably an employee yourself or because some employee leaked it to you.

But of course you wouldn't be on these discussion boards if you weren't desperate to tell the whole world just how knowledgeable you are, how inside you really are, how much you love your school. So you brag about knowing inside info, you incessantly bring up the '92 football championship game whether it's relevant or not, and you flame everybody who's a little less pure of a RealMasonComet95, don't you.

Yeah, I check Yappi from time to time, but I certainly don't want to ever become a regular there.