I know what has me concerned - reactive behavior.
I've been part of on-line communities for going on 20 years now. I started off by running BBSes and what happens is that you have 3 groups:
Group 1: Core group of regulars - 5% of the population.
Group 2: The Trolls - 1% of the population
Group 3: The casaul readers - Everyone else.
The core group will tend to believe that they decide what is and isn't acceptable behavior because they post the most. They tend to feel a kind of ownership. The problem is that people are naturally reactive. So as trolls come and go, especially when there is a rise in them, the regulars will tend to demand and implement an increasingly more confined set of behaviors that they will tolerate.
This in turn creates more trolls which in turn calls more reaction until eventually the message board ends up basically an ugly, narrow minded, quasi-fascist message board where the regulars run out everyone who isn't behaving exactly as they should (in their minds).
We're seeing that here unfortunately. An increasing tendancy of the regulars (moderators included) to narrowly define what is acceptable behavior and taking very strong action on those who they feel fall outside those boundaries. This incites bordlerine people to enter the realm of the troll.
You can see this in the Mac world a lot more since they have been around long enough and are small enough communities to have this go on for awhile. Anyone remotely critical of a Mac will get creamed on those sites.
People should have the right to post things here that the majority don't agree with. The boundaries should be as wide as possible - as long as it's not harming anyone, as long as no personal attacks are made, as long as the posts don't exist purely to hijack or detract from the conversation, etc. then it should be okay generally.
And if it's not okay, a polite note from a moderator pointing where the author went wrong can be made and life can go on.
We're too large a community now for us to get into a bunker mentality. We're way beyond the time where we can just circle the wagons. Doing so only makes the message board reek of elitism, snobbery and intolerance.
My advice is for everyone to try to be as tolerant as possible, mellow out as much as one can, and for those inclined to the melodrama to try to resist the temptation of making a post telling the world how unfair life is to you and how you're going to leave, take your skins, stop skinning, stop posting, or whatever cry for attention that one may be tempted to make.
At the end of the day, this is a site for personalizing the very thing many spend hours in front of each day. It's supposed to be fun. It's a means to an end, not an end in itself.
