One positive effect of the recent attacks on guinnog is to draw attention to a long-standing problem here, the practice of attacking a person purely on the basis of their date of joining this particular Internet discussion board. For those who like their ‘-isms’, you can call it ‘newism’.
One of the primary purposes and effects of ‘newism’ (in common with other forms of prejudice and discrimination, such as racism and sexism) is to protect those at or nearer to the centre of influence and power. A good way to achieve this is by keeping the out group (people who started posting at SDMB after you did, whatever else their experience and knowledge might be) at the centre of attention, much the same way a racist commonly keeps black people at the centre of attention, i.e. where s/he can control them.
I hope members are willing and able to confront this problem and to do whatever is within their power to provide part of the solution to it.
If you can cite guinnog being attacked because he is new, please do so. My (peripheral) awareness of him has led to the belief that he is being attacked because people don’t agree with him.
(And please note, if the “newism” attacks consist of advising him that he doesn’t understand the way things work here, that is not an attack, that is advice.)
What? I can’t hear anything. I stopped when I saw that I joined before you.
Seriously, though, my treatment is the same since my post count was under 10. I’m nearly ignored by pretty much everyone nearly all of the time, because I choose not to post anything particularly inflammatory, controversial, offensive, or asinine. Sure, the SDMB has some more well-known posters, but this is by far simply because of the volume of what they write and how they write it, not by start date.
I see your Eagles quote and raise you mine (made when they were still relative newbies, so perhaps it won’t be accorded quite the same credibility):
No doubt this will elicit plenty of “WTF?!s”, and “can’t he write proper English?”, and “obfuscatory and prolix again”, and those awful Python quotes.
Perhaps even a non ad hominem comment.
But then, again, perhaps not…
TYM, if people want to criticise guinnog for what he’s written, for the way that he’s written it and for the effect that he wants to achieve on the reader, then his date of joining really isn’t relevant. Especially, although personally I think this is pretty irrelevant too, since he’s been part of the “community” for more than a year, reading threads.
The purpose of the repeated references to his recent joining date is to put him down and to make him lose his rag*. Good for him that he’s bigger than his detractors.
In case you doubt this, consider whether it was necessary for poster after poster to mention (in any way at all) his new status. When it was mentioned for the first time, it became part of the background of the discourse. It is most marked - linguitically - for it to be referred to constantly.
I really think you probably meant that we should eschew newism rather than proscribing it. We have enough problems with junior modding, to say nothing of the problems you are trying to create for the Moderators who will now have to add to their job list the task of determining whether a reference to a poster’s start date constitutes a violation of the proscription against “newism” or is simply a legitimate coment upon a poster’s relative board “age.”
In SDMB terms, I’m as old as the hills, but I’ve never had a pitting, been warned by a mod, nor am I even noticed by the vast majority of people here, as my posting frequency varies quite a bit.
There might be an “in crowd” in places like MPSIMS or even Cafe Society (I rarely visit, so I have no clue), but in the forums guinnog seems to be getting grief in (and the ones you yourself get grief in), I know of no such entity. I certainly don’t belong to it, and I’ve been around forever.
Personally, I think you get grief when you earn it here, with few exceptions. Newness doesn’t seem to be one of the criteria, as most new people have lurked for a while, and finally sign up when they decide they have something to add to a particular topic. They might then post here and there, but for the most part, they still lurk a lot, posting when it suits them and slowly become old members. On the other hand, occasionally, a new person will find the site, then decide that they either need every question they’ve ever had answered on their first day, or that they have new arguments that will captivate us all on every topic that has been rehashed a thousand times in Great Debates. These people get noticed, sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a not so good way. Which one it is is usually dependent on them, not their account creation date.
Good points all (I’ve snipped to the ones I wish to respond to in the interests of reader-friendliness).
I think it’s an incorrect assumption to think that every topic has already been treated to the full gamut of arguments, and that any new poster will merely be rehashing something that has already been said. While this is no doubt sometimes the case, there are times when someone with a fresh perspective altogether appears (think Van Gogh in art terms). I would agree that as in the case of Van Gogh it is almost invariably the case that such as person will not be recognised. But, since the SDMB strives to be a community as well as a knowledge resource, and since it strives to treat all people without fear or favour regardless of background, it would be nice to think that we could make a difference in this way, stand out from the crowd, as undoubtedly we do in other ways. That’s, after all, why we like it and stick around.
Because I do not think that your perception of newism rises to the level of jerkness that is encompassed by trolling, so-called hate speech, plagiarism, and other activities that are explicitly proscribed. The reasons (junior modding and adding to the list of things that posters whine about when they are warned or their “enemies” are not warned) were already provided in my earlier post.
Misunderstanding, then. I was using the word for effect, as is sometimes done in headlines and titles and the like. I reckoned it would be understood that way.
You may joke, but I think you’ve hit at the heart of roger’s misperception.
What newbies don’t get are the subtleties of the board that vets have years of experience with. Vets therefore know how to elicit positive responses more intuitively. It simply takes a while to tune to the key of SDMB. And vets tend to have more friends and allies, which may give the newbie the false impression of cronyism.
roger, it sucks, but what are you going to do about it? You can’t force experience on a newbie.
Still whining about this, are you? Still having trouble wrapping your head around the concept that a newbie may be disliked or attacked for reasons that have nothing to do with his or her join date? Of course, accepting that as fact would require you to confront the possibility that the reason that you’re not universally worshipped may actually have something to do with you rather than your join date, and you’re not quite ready to do that, are you?
Do you have even one example of someone being bashed because of their join date, for no other reason?
