A bit of a tangent, but I’ve got to post this somewhere. And this is MPSIMS.
In the links you’ve provided, there seem to be a lot of threads about how everybody got upset about everyone else. And talking about how bad the board is. There seems to be a level of animosity in the Pit above and beyond anything I’ve seen.
But now, even when the Pit rules changed, it didn’t seem to get that nasty. There seems to be a level of begrudging respect that was previously missing. And, on the rest of the board, it seems that the community itself has matured.
Looking at different Board/Pit eras is interesting. Pre/post lawnchair-pulling-up is a subtle difference, but a hint of levity is missing from some threads. No swearing (kind of) has had an interesting effect. I think the protracted elections and developing partisanship touched the Boards too. Of course there was always partisanship, but the trauma of Bush v. Gore, then the Swift Boating etc., of Kerry followed by the Palin have been pretty polarizing. Fox New et al were much different back then, and I dare say the national dialogue has some reflection here.
We’ve had a couple great waves of dissolution, and it’s pretty sad. While I agree that the overall maturity has evolved (not that there aren’t petty squabbles), the loss of some great contributors is missed. Actually, that’s a wider point, whether it’s the loss via exasperation, meltdown, boredom, or life, the overall character was different and missed. Not better – no insult intended – but there’s no escaping nostalgia.
I’m wrapped up in a fairly large project and can’t take the time to move to Phase II (putting things in order), but just reading the great contributions and the reminiscences really brings home how impactful the Board has been on a little corner of my mind. Er, one that spends way too many hours reading the Boards
Echo: I too am grateful for the Boards. Problems or not, thanks everyone for posting, thanks for modding, thanks for administrating … thanks.
I think that’s mainly a function of time plus everyone getting more familiar with everyone else, their positions, their strengths and weaknesses, and so on. It’s a lot easier to spit venom at someone you don’t know that well versus someone you’ve become familiar with and who isn’t a complete twat. I think it’s largely grown from being an assemblage of generally familiar posters and faces to a community that, to a relatively significant degree, “knows” one another, especially through the agency of Dopefests and those who live in relatively close proximity to one another getting to know each other on a more personal basis.
Then too there have been both cohesive and polarizing events that has done as much to bring people together and to divide them along political lines. Yet beyond that there is a certain respect most have for most everyone else in their own particular fields of expertise – or even just that they are good people in general, even if they hold certain disagreeable views.
I joined here around the tag end of '05, so there’s a lot of history I was never around for, but I’ve spent a lot of time here over nearly four years now and I’ve grown a great deal of respect for many people here, even those who hold views I find disagreeable. In fact, that’s part of what makes this a great place: We can disagree, and even have lively debates, without lunging for one another’s throats. Most of the time, anyway; there is always the occasional and aforementioned twat who can’t seem to debate without making every argument feel like a personal attack. Still, it is our differences and our ability to debate them with civility and even grudging respect usually without devolving into a trainwreck that makes me stick around.
It is, of nothing else, one of the most interesting and intelligent corners of the intertubes that somehow, in general, managed to avoid becoming arrogant about it.
The funny thing about AYB on the Dope was how it went before the phrase became (in)famous: someone would start a thread with the title, “all your base are belong to us,” and one of the grumpy mods like manny or Unc would come along and shut it down after a few posts for no apparent reason - maybe they just didn’t like threads with apparently meaningless subject lines.
After this happened about a half-dozen times, they started shutting down AYB threads, saying it had already been done. And it had, if you count a bunch of threads they closed while the number of posts could still be counted on one’s fingers.
