Part of what attracts people to the board (IMO) is the specific combination of devotion to verifiable facts and sustainable logic plus the Cecil Adams attitude.
Yeah, that attitude. Sure of his brilliance. More than a little bit contemptuous of the world of cretins he must suffer, and of the foolishnesses that they utter. Blunt in his presentation of the answers —entertaining, perhaps, but not particularly disposed to understate them as possibly-relevant bits of info and opinions that folks just might want to take into account. Nope: here’s your answer, good thing you had the good sense to ask me instead of stumbing around in the dark as you’d otherwise be doing. Etc.
Should it come as surprise to anyone that the people who have been lured here by all this excellence like to behave in a similar fashion?
Most of us fancy ourselves intelligent and wise and we relish the opportunity to behave with confidence and arrogance. We don’t suffer fools cheerfully, at least not without informing them that they’re fools. And we have, or did have, a board culture where in return for the license to behave that way, we accepted others behaving towards us with that same gloves-off insouciance about offending anyone.
So… it’s my observation that the powers that be want to shift that. (Not without dissent, but that’s been the general thrust of the peremptory instructions to play nice, be less abrasive, mind our language, knock it off with the insulting, etc). OK, fine. Well, not so fine (I liked it the way it was) but it’s your board and all that. You don’t want us being arrogant and abrasively insulting to each other.
Instead of going at it via a never-ending sequence of rules and edicts (which the members then inspect like lawyers trying to decide exactly how close they can skate without being in violation, all the while trying to preserve the classic suffer-no-fools tone of our interactions), maybe it would be more productive to have a conversation about your intentions, what you’re trying to accomplish with this push towards a different tone of discourse, and why?
I mean, it’s got to be frustrating to be issuing new proclamations of what is no longer going to be tolerated around here and watching us all adhere (ever so carefully and legalistically) to the letter while doing nothing to embrace the spirit of these changes you’re hoping to see.
And it’s not like we enjoy the current process. It feels… I guess you could say infantilizing. Treating us more and more like children whose behavior has to be constrained with authoritarian rules because we can’t internalize a sense of good behavior and then hold ourselves to that standard using our own maturity and good judgment.
I’m sorry things have taken such a turn that you folks who run the board sometimes end up feeling like we’re willfully making the board difficult for you. It didn’t start out like this. When the board moved from AOL it felt like you had liberated us from the AOL nanny state and we could finally have free discourse. It wasn’t so “us and them” between members and admins & mods and TPTB. I don’t think it has to be that way now, but maybe you could try talking to us as if we were all part of a collective “us” with some shared interests that brought us here in the first place?