It's an unhappy thing when you experience the growing pains of a community. The WWW is a fascinating place where we can become members of an online community that meets only through words on a screen. Still it's no less distressing when the peace of that community is inevitably disrupted when its popularity increases and causes an influx of new people. Some people aren't as interested in preserving the community, instead being more interested in proving superiority over the other participants in the online community.
Arguments have been standard on the WWW as long as I can remember. They're also most worthless when executed without tact or restraint or focus. Boardgamegeek's front page is pretty much a bad place to be these days, due to this. That's too fucking bad, it was a nice place while it lasted.
1 comment:
It's a bummer. The 'geek used to be a lot more focused. Back in the day it seemed to me like there was a certain amount of peer pressure to be on-topic and to put some thought into posts; generally you assumed that every geeklist was at least worth glancing at, which is the opposite of the case these days. Meanwhile, if you wrote something you could assume it would get read by a bunch of like-minded people; today a serious blog entry about gaming will get two or three responses while a question about whether people think cats or dogs are smarter will get a hundred. All that's not to say that OT stuff was verboten in the old days, it was just the exception rather than the rule.
On top of all that there are a few characters running around who seem to be making a concerted effort to cause disorder on the site. Some of them are well-meaning people who are just more interested in horsing around than gaming, others are people whose idea of good time are starting political arguments, some are just old-fashioned jerks, and then there's that one particular fuckwit whose only goal in life is to assert himself as contentious, pedantic bore on every single opinion-related geeklist and forum thread that he can(naturally he only posted just enough content to get an avatar, and since then he's contributed absolutely nothing of value to the site).
Still, I think things have gotten a tiny bit better in the past few weeks, so maybe there's hope after all....
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