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Look - I enjoy this board, for the most part. I think it's incredibly interesting, therapeutic, fun, etc. When I enjoy things, I'd like other people, specifically my friends (real or potential) to enjoy them too. This, on the whole, doesn't seem to be happening - because of certain predominant attitudes, among which is a certain smug superiority.
I think this probably covers off the problem Duncan is having. He likes Barbelith, except for the bits that he doesn't like, and the bits that he doesn't like are bits that his friends don't like either, so we should change them so that his friends can enjoy Barbelith as well.
Personally, I'd suggest that labelling as undesirable anything that might stop more people like oneself joining Barbelith is comically smug and astonishingly superior, but I already get that Duncan, for all his many good points, does not have much of a toolkit for analysing his own attitudes. That's basically cool, but I'd rather not be the fall guy for his lack of self-awareness.
I'm noting here that, leaving aside for a moment the questions of "clique" (and I would agree with Fridge that clique depends on having power - there are certainly people on Barbelith I like going for a pint with, but I wouldn't feel obliged to follow their advice on how to moderate the Head Shop), the same couple of people are basically raising the same complaints, which makes it difficult to work out whether the board has already processed the objections or whether this is just an attempt to win by attrition.
Speaking of which - It's already become clear that Duncan did not read or understand my post on how moderation worls and why, but it looks like Crimes of Fashion's thread on the Hacker Manifesto has not been deleted, thanks to the wonders of distributed moderation, and may yet with the help of Mister Disco evolve into something vaguely interesting. If the clique could not pull together three votes for a thread deletion, including the arch-clique administrators Grant and "Mr. PC" Ganesh, then clearly it's a bit of a shit clique. See under "the joy of distributed moderation".
Still, I am kind of resigned to the fact that Duncan, Lupus, Toksik et al are going to divert an awful lot of time and attention into complaining about either their treatment or, more ambitiously, the way people on Barbelith think, far more in fact than they seem to be able to channel into actually adding anything of value to Barbelith. That's unfortunate but borne out by history, and the misfortune is that any valid points they may raise will probably be written off as lost in the wave of carping, and any support likewise seen only as the usual alliances. Hey ho. In fact, by endlessly backing each other up over a series of claims for which they never seem willing or able to substantiate, it strikes me that some of our more lacrimose members are something of a clique in themselves.
However, a serious point has been raised here, which is dyslexia. If Duncan will forgive me for referring to past events on Barbelith, which is apparently on the Big List of Things King Duncan Feels Are Not Desirable in Duncalith, the one time somebody did take the piss out of somebody's spelling, not knowing that they were dyslexic, they were promptly and rather brusquely set right. Isn't Political Correctness a wonderful thing? Personally, I'll correct spelling is the word being misspelled is a technical or philosophical term, or the name of an author, since the misspelling would make it harder for people to track down more information. I might correct spelling if somebody is being rude and insulting, as a reminder that everyone has weak points and thus flaming is not a great idea. Where somebody's spelling or language usage is so garbled that it makes their writing incomprehensible I will ask for clarification. That pretty much covers it, and I've seen about the same approach applied by moderators throughout Barbelith.
So, if Lupus' friend feels able to cope with that without losing it, getting abusive, storming off and devoting the rest of their Barbelife to whining about it, they are of course more than welcome. Assuming, that is, that Lupus has not just made them up, as seems reasonably likely, in order to continue to prosecute a grievance against the Head Shop the origins of which I cannot even recall, but which no doubt follows the same "They dared to disagree with me! The bitches!" pattern that we have come to know and love so well. |
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