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Where Lupus' contention errs slightly is that the Head Shop is not in any meaningful sense elititist. What it is is exclusive, in the sense that it excludes, or attempts to, offtopic rambling, lengthy threadrotting flamewars and a number of other elements common to bulletin boards. It's like a bar that doesn't allow children so that the patrons do not have to deal with wailing and crying- a bit hard on the children, but with a purpose.
In doing so it is following what I understand is the mandate of the board and its creator on how fora in the Revolution shoudl be administrtaed. Anybody with some awareness of their environment should probably be able to understand that, or at least acclimate to it without deciding to devote their lives to complaining about how they have been boo-hoo-bullied from then on. Lupus and Duncan appear to have decided that complaining that they do not fit in to the Head Shop is more important than changing either their approach or the Head Shop, but that's entirely their decision, tedious though it must be for them and us.
Quantum, for example, seems to have popped up as a newbie and done perfectly well in the Head Shop; likewise Orr, el Zilcho and indeed most of the people who can currently be found in it. Now, personally I think that restricting people from entering the Head Shop until they have been on Barbelith for a while smacks of newbism, but I do tend to overestimate massively the maturity and ability to cope with criticism of their ideas of some barbeloids, which is one reason why I now have people like Lupus and Duncan hanging off my voluminous skirts when they could be contributing value elsewhere. It's regrettable but by no means the fault of the Head shop in itself. People who struggle to deal with argument frequently settle on abuse. We. Get. It. That's the lesson of this entire thread.
The other funny thing about this thread is, of course, that a bit of close reading shows that Duncan and I are agreeing with each other. I moved to have the hacker thread deleted in part because the word "fagalicious" in the title added nothing to the thread and was likely to rot it with people talking about why CoF had decided to throw it in, and, since his opening post was one long cut and paste, it would not have taken much time to make a new thread without the distraction. Of course, it was not this that set CoF off, but rather that anyone dared to disagree with him about...was it redemption? And that he was being "bullied". I would invite any of our brethren to have a look at the thread in question and see if the facts bear out the need to start a new thread in the Conversation. You may also marvel at the swift transition from "I was being like Oscar Wilde" and "You're all fat!", which is rather lovely in itself.
As it happens, of course, the delete suggestion appears not to have gone through. This is the joy of distributed moderation - in this caase, it looks like I was out of line with the prevailing thinking, which is why a more serious suggestion like a delete order needs more agreement than moving a thread. Instead, the thread has been left to die through a general lack of interest. Why not have a look at the FAQ on how moderation works? I doubt that it will put your conspiracy theories about board dictators to bed, but it might at least challenge them to become a little more realistic...
Since the aforementioned irony has sailed over the head of, it is unlikely that this response is going to get a detailed enough reading actually to be criticised coherently, so I expect that this post will garner responses from the affronted at best tangential and at worst utterly unrelated to the actual words contained therein, but as has been mentioned before this thread, sometimes audience is more important than interlocutor. |
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