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Barbelith- community or message board?

  
  

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STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
11:23 / 24.10.03
Just to take some heat off the "User Juries" thread, which seems to have become sidetracked... (OK, I'm one of the sidetrackers. Mea culpa.)

How do YOU view Barbelith?

Is it an "experimental community"... or is it a "messageboard"?. Or is it somewhere between the two?



Here's my coupla euros...

I don't really do computers that much. I have little or no knowledge of messageboards. This was the first one I found that I liked... I kind of stayed here. I LOVE the way it evolves. I LOVE the way you can watch it happen. I especially LOVE the way I can be part of it.

Yeah, the content is great, too (well, it's all the kind of stuff I'm interested in, otherwise I wouldn't have come here... but the standard of debate is great, I think is what I probably meant). The people are largely (well, enormously, to be honest) great. (And, irl, I've met a whole BUNCH of cool people- though that's not really the issue.)

So, it's a messageboard. No getting away from that. But an actual community? That's what I get from it. Dunno if that was the intention, but that's what I feel when I come here.

Anyone care to agree/disagree/argue about it so it comes to fisticuffs/come round and piss on my sofa? (Preferably not the last one, though.)
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
11:45 / 24.10.03
(still wearing the hat of devil's advocacy)

But don't most successful internet message board/lists create a sense of community? What makes Barbelith's community so special, aside from the fact that you belong to it? Isn't that a little like saying your family is the best family ever because your mom and dad happen to be part of it?
 
 
Tom Coates
12:26 / 24.10.03
I'd actually be really interested in seeing the particular message board communities that you're comparing Barbelith with.
 
 
Olulabelle
13:06 / 24.10.03
So would I and I've asked in a couple of relevant threads, but no-one will tell me.
 
 
Our Lady of The Two Towers
13:37 / 24.10.03
I think it started off fairly experimental but the only methods for dealing with the troll that had any effect necessitated it becoming more of a regular message board with occasional sparks of experimentality.
 
 
Ariadne
13:59 / 24.10.03
Well, it feels like a community to me, but then I do know an awful lot of people here in real life, so that makes a difference. Other than this I just post on a veggie site and a cycling site, and a couple of other general-chat places (including Urban 75, though I mostly lurk there). But none of them are 'home' like this is.
 
 
Sax
14:36 / 24.10.03
I only post here. I only have room in my life for one group of imaginary friends.

But yeah, it's a community. If I wanted a message board I'd get your telephone numbers and text you. In the middle of the night. While I was wearing nothing but my new parka.
 
 
at the scarwash
21:27 / 24.10.03
I only post on Barbelith, so I can't really compare it to other message boards. But I find myself really enjoying getting to know people here simply through the textures of their prose style. People get really passionate and express themselves in highly individual manners, and one eventually forms an interesting blind-men-exploring-an-elephant concept of their personalities. In this, I think that Barbelith has a communal feel. Also, the fact that the governance and modification of the board are carried out--often heatedly--in full view of anyone who is interested gives the place a transparency that I find quite appealing. I don't know if that makes it experimental, but it is special, and oh-so meta. The cross-talk between forums (fora? Fori? Forae?) gives the discussions a texture that I do think is unique.
 
 
w1rebaby
22:10 / 24.10.03
It's a community whose main means of communication is a message board.

The means of communication affects how the community interacts and relates. But there are loads of other factors that affect that - the size, the incoming links, the character of the people who are members and so on.
 
 
w1rebaby
22:29 / 24.10.03
To be honest here, I don't view Barbelith as that "experimental" as a community, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. There are some interesting experiments with the software that can affect how people interact, but to be too radical would potentially cause problems with the actual process of interaction - people aren't just involved in a community for the hell of it, they actually want to communicate with other people for distinct purposes, whether it's discussing magick, organising artistic projects or making shit jokes.

Sure, you could change things around all the time and implement all sorts of interesting social theory, but many people would find it disorientating and disruptive and not be particularly interested in that sort of experiment. And they'd leave. There's a difference between an experimental community and a community of experimental people.

Furthermore I don't see much point in having an experimental community full of willing social experimenters, because they're only going to represent a small and unrepresentative subset of the population.
 
 
EE
05:42 / 25.10.03
I'm with Sax on the imaginary friends bit.

I also agree with what eternal schmendrick said, particularly

Also, the fact that the governance and modification of the board are carried out--often heatedly--in full view of anyone who is interested gives the place a transparency that I find quite appealing. I don't know if that makes it experimental, but it is special, and oh-so meta.

I don't head into the Policy much, but I every now and again stop in to check on things. Usually I'm thinking "christ, what pointless bullshit are they arguing about now", but honestly, I'm glad somebody is taking the time to at least act like they care about the board itself, and care about it more than their own fiction suits or whatever you freaks are calling it. And better you guys deal with all the small bullshit than me, I guess. That sorta makes it feel like a community. And there are some clever people here who apparently can't resist the urge to throw in a one-liner or a pun or something funny, which gives this place a bit of flavor. A sort of sitcom about a community, maybe.
 
 
Cat Chant
07:34 / 25.10.03
On the interwebnet, I have this place and a B7 email list. The B7 list is much more like a community for me, because - and I realize I may have an idiosyncratic definition of "community" - it has a fairly narrow remit (slash-friendly discussion of B7), so there's enough of a sense of a common purpose to keep us together despite the fact that a few of the people irritate the hell out of me on a personal level. (Also, of course, there are fairly frequent gatherings of sub-groups off the list wherein we bitch about the absent members; two f/f couples have emerged from the list in the last three years, one of them to the utter surprise of the formerly straight participants; and one of the newer list members has run off with the wife of one of the other members. So there's enough interpersonal drama and conflict for it to feel like a community.)

This place... I think of it as a safe space for me to think in. I shouldn't think of it like that, probably, because it means I'm constantly being hurt, pissed off and frustrated by the non-collaborative aspects of the board as well as the complete lack of consensus on many of my baseline issues, which I'm not interested in arguing about because I know what I think about them, and what's the point of just restating stuff I already know?

But then if I didn't think of it as a safe space I wouldn't ever post anything outside the Conversation (which I think of, kind of separately from the rest of the board, as a place where lots of very funny and skewed people post interesting and funny things to keep me going through the day).
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
07:41 / 25.10.03
But none of them are 'home' like this is.

See, this is what I'm wondering about. Seeing as how I don't frequent other boards, I really have no idea how different or similar this place is. Frankly, I don't imagine I'd get the same feeling from anywhere else, but that's just speculation, and I really have little inclination to actually try to get involved in anywhere else.

Strangely enough, I've gradually become addicted to the Policy- I never used to look here, other than when directed here from another thread, when I joined. Now it's one of my first ports of call. Partly for modding information, partly for the whole sociological "how people work shit out" fascination and partly because it's almost like a news-feed on important stuff that's been happening on the board recently. I think perhaps this is one of the things that contributes to the feeling of community- there's definitely a sense of people trying to work together to achieve things in this forum which will improve the others and make everyone's time here better.
I definitely felt "at home" here even before meeting anyone in meatspace (otherwise there's no way I'd have left my house to meet a bunch of interwebnet weirdos), so it can't just be that.
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
17:59 / 25.10.03
The 'home' thing is the most important thing about Barbelith for me, personally. This feels like my internet home. It's where I feel the most safe, and the place where I feel like I have the most to offer. Other places, I feel like a guest. I have more fun here than anywhere else, and my best internet friends are all from around here.

That said, more and more, I feel like I get more out of some other places. Mainly from ILM, and also from some secret smaller places in which more detailed and nuanced discussions can occur between a smaller set of people. With ILM, I find the discussion about music far more challenging, passionate, and generally far more knowledgeable. I wouldn't know how to make Barbelith's music forum more like it without kicking the lot of you out and replacing you all with new people. It's just a totally different thing, and that's okay. The fact of the matter is, while I can find better discussion about specific things elsewhere, I can't find a better set of people. ILM, for example, is mostly populated by very intelligent folks who can write brilliant things and pull off some very interesting debates, they are mostly a very obnoxious lot.
 
 
Tom Coates
09:29 / 27.10.03
I think there are some very legitimate questions about how we find new members to be honest. I'd like this place to be a superheated ball of intellectual cross-pollenation but to do that might require some specific invitations, or some rebranding or whatever.

I keep thinking about redesigning so that the site looks more 'Foucault's Pendulum' / 'Quicksilver' / Renaissance man-ish and then going on a dedicated assault on people I think write and think well...
 
 
Quantum
12:35 / 28.10.03
Tom read my mind. I think it's a community with a purpose, like an orchestra, and it requires good members. There's a lot of good reasons to be careful advertising (trolls) but without a decent turnover of members it'll devolve into just another board.
I'm not an internetty person but I'm Barbaddicted, and I think that is a common stance here. Many people, if (God forbid) the board went to the silicon chip in the sky, wouldn't go elsewhere but would simply stop using messageboards. I've been to a few and the only good ones are fiercely specialist .alt groups (B7 slash is a good example of how specialised a group has to be). Barbelith is the only place I've found where you can discuss more than one thing with intelligent, funny, guys and gals without getting bored within a week.
I see it as a performance community, with a participatory audience.
 
 
Quantum
12:55 / 28.10.03
..and to finish my train of thought, perhaps we should consider novel techniques of recruiting new members. As it is, word of mouth and people stumbling across Barbelith works well enough, but there's no reason we shouldn't consider novel ways of attracting new members. 'Rebranding' would be nice just because new things are cool, but it won't get more people to see the site.
A dedicated assault you say? Tell us more...
 
 
Mourne Kransky
15:28 / 28.10.03
Huge, long post. Sheesh, got carried away. In any real community, I’d be the bore blethering away in a corner, trapping some kindly soul who is rapidly losing the will to live, while everybody else is dancing to Sugababes and necking alcopops. But in this virtual community, the damage is limited by the scroll bar, just on the right there, folks.

It was more of a message board to me (and a really good one) when I lived up north. Apart from Ganesh, the only barbelites I knew irl were old friends of ours who posted occasionally. Of those, only hanabi really stuck around. I really wouldn’t have valued the “community” aspect then. I belonged to various solid, irl communities up there so maybe I didn’t have the need. I remember arguing with Ganesh about not wanting to meet any of the posters I enjoyed communicating with irl because it would “ruin it” for me. I thought I’d lose the anonymity that came with the message board routine that seemed to allow me to say things that often didn’t chime with what real people knew of me in the real world. I didn’t want to tell lies in any sense but I did want to be free to take a deep breath and approach issues and discussions without so much personal baggage.

Then G moved to London and I perceived a pull towards “joining up” in a more real sense. I’m not that sociable and I’m not one of nature’s “joiners” so I resented that feeling that, when I too came to London, I would meet barbelites and the whole dynamic would change, since I had come to value the time I spent here and it was providing an interesting communication tool for me and faraway Elephant Boy. Instead of being caught up in “divorced dad” syndrome on our few days together or acting out our frustrated emotions, the Lith would give us lots of distraction and mutual topics to chew over, despite that our individual lives had diverged a great deal.

Then I did move to London and I did meet many Lithers in the flesh and I have to say, hand on heart, it has been a joy in every case. Yes, I see you all differently now than I did before, but there’s still enough distance for comfort and enough commonality for a convivial time in one of the usual barbepubs.

It does feel much more like a “community” to me than a message board now, perhaps because I had no other “community” waiting for me here. I’ve made a few good friends via the Lith and met many other lovely chaps. And there are others I may never meet but to whom I feel more satisfyingly connected than any of the other fictionsuits I meet on other boards I frequent.

Maybe, in time, I will become a part of some meatspace communities down here, but London’s very different from Edinburgh and the working life I have now runs according to a whole other model. The so-called "gay community" is just a broadsheet conceit and, anyway, so much bigger and divided up into niches than I have been used to heretofore.

I’ve been trying to think of an example of community with which I have become fully engaged and the nearest I get to the Lith are these:

University. The Conversation is like sitting all day in the Student Union Bar or the basement café of the David Hume Tower (where all those years were largely but happily frittered away). People come and go but there’s always something new, frivolous or profound, to muse upon in company. Very convivial.

The other fora I visit once in a while, some of them, as I did lectures and tutorials, and every now and then I find it fascinating and I engage. Mostly, I feel a bit humbled and sneak off to gossip somewhere again or to read something I’d just been turned on to by a brighter mind than mine.

Or University Gaysoc. More or less like-minded individuals, mostly tolerating each other, often irked by each other, lots of flirting and showing off, but essentially all sharing some sort of vision, bickering about and planning the means to this end. There was also the strong feeling that the personal was political and vice versa.

Yup, community it is. With the bonus that, as eternal schmendrick said: one eventually forms an interesting blind-men-exploring-an-elephant concept of their personalities in the case of people dotted all over the globe and often very different in most respects from me.
 
 
Tom Coates
16:26 / 30.10.03
I think maybe it's time that I reconnected with the offline community that surrounds Barbelith in London in some way. I think it might reignite my passion for the place a bit.
 
 
Our Lady of The Two Towers
16:34 / 30.10.03
...And you are?

No, you can't join in now, I've been busy telling people that you don't exist, that you're Charlie and Barbelith are your Angels.
 
 
Mourne Kransky
18:06 / 30.10.03
I think the online community is the real joy of this place. I come here often and interact with all sorts, usually to my benefit and with relish. The offline community bit is a much smaller subset but having that spur has, as Tom said, rekindled my enthusiasm at various points.

I like to think that there are more little irl offshoots around than just us London-centric chaps but they're the layer of marzipan on top of the thing, not the essence of the fine confection that is The Lith.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
13:26 / 07.08.07
So I'm looking around the other boards that I'm a member of, and one thing strikes me square in the chops: forget functionality on its own for a moment, what Barbelith's currently missing is a sense of community.

And I've got a bunch of ideas as to why that is, but I just want to check before I launch into this one: is it just me?

I think there is a sense of community, I just think the community's depressed, but I might have a different notion of what constitutes a 'sense of community'.

Spatula, I think you should start a new thread for that topic. (I think barbelith is missing a sense of community too or rather most of "my" community left or lurks now and I haven't really bonded with a lot of people since.)

I found an old thread and I thought it would be interesting to use because we then have a direct contrast between 2003 and 2007 available.

I think the sense of community around barbelith, the sense of "home" that people describe above (which was very relevant for me) started to disintegrate when we closed the board to new members and stopped strangers from viewing it. This action in and of itself wasn't necessarily a huge thing but for me it did two things, it made me feel bombarded by the larger Internet in a way that was unrealistic and it created a division in the community between those who supported Tom's action and thought it was okay for him to have that kind of power (when I felt it was very much against the ethic that barbelith was developing) and those who didn't.

When barbelith was locked I started to see what wasn't right about the place, it was like we had to make it really good because exclusivity had been forced on us. All those clique accusations started to roll with actual effect, they weren't laughable anymore because they were true. Communities aren't robust, they're frail and when they take wholly negative action, the type that just can't be seen as good because it makes them a fortress or sets them apart from an openess that's been so carefully fostered they split. For me the community spirit was destroyed, at the time I thought it was recoverable but in retrospect it just destroyed my hometown, arguments got bigger, more important and just worse, people started to leave, problems that already existed were highlighted and it never got better and the sense of community I understood was gone.
 
 
grant
14:55 / 07.08.07
Above post quotes from tangential discussion here, if folks were wondering.

I think I might point toward that, too - there was something that happened around the idea of exclusivity in the sense of exclusion as something that had to be done.

Before that point, if you found the place you sort of belonged here, because it wasn't all that easy to find unless you were already sort of "in the club."
 
 
Quantum
17:16 / 07.08.07
I feel part of a community. Maybe more Temple than Barbelith, but I wear my red shirt with pride.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
17:49 / 07.08.07
Yeah, you've both said more or less what I was going to.

This place just became so fucking precious when membership was locked - or possibly when it was re-opened, but with that daft thing of people having to justify their application for membership.

Same on the thing of people joining up because they tripped over the board by accident - that worked really well and was wiped out as soon as it became visible to Google. Second search result for Invisibles, fifth for Grant Morrison. Nowhere for 'good times funky shit'.

The sense of us vs them has only been heightened by the static moderator lists, and I'd be surprised if there's a single moderator who's been here for over three years who isn't currently feeling pretty despondent about the state of the board, or at a loss as to what they can do to turn it around. Which means pissed of old timey members, which destroys the feeling of community. Unless it's a community of the bored and tired, and really, who wants to be a part of something like that?

Main reason I brought this up on that other thread is because I do think there's a lot of talking out of bums going on in it. This place looks cold. It looks clinical. It doesn't stand out when you're surfing at work? Why is that a cause for praise? What you're actually saying is that it's become boring.

So I looked at the board that I call home nowadays - it's not this one, in case there was any doubt - and I saw: avatars (not sigs, btw, as any fule no they're fundamentally evil and wrong), persistent posting records for all members, smileys, standard moderation, online status indicators.

All the things that this place has gone ewwww at in the past.

It also has a sense of community. Because all those things, we shunned them because we're an uptight bunch of self-important tossers. Yeah, I'm holding my hands up to it, too. The more uptight and tosserish we've become, the more the sense of community - fuck it, of friendship - has been chipped away at. People get bitter, or they get paranoid, or they piss off.

And they're not, as far as I can tell, being replaced at a rate that makes this board sustainable. Even if they were, the new people'd be coming into a board that feels embattled and weary. It's in the foundations now.

And if you want to go right back to try and identify when it started, I'll place good money it was with a stupid little Welsh prick and our reaction not to him, but to everybody who came after him.

So I guess what I'm saying is I don't see Barbelith as being salvageable now and that if the majority of its active membership does ultimately manage to find a new home, then they should maybe *not* automatically presume that the current Barbelith structure and functionality - closed membership, dry text presentation, no self-editing, whatever - is something that should be preserved. Because then all you'll have done is repeated the exact same mistakes elsewhere, and wasted all your time.

As it is, I've set myself a fairly vague departure date - definitely as an active moderator, maybe as a regular poster. Because I just don't understand why this is meant to be fun any more. It hasn't been for ages.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
18:40 / 07.08.07
I just don't understand why this is meant to be fun any more. It hasn't been for ages.

I agree. I think I'm here because I miss it, I really miss it.
 
 
grant
18:57 / 07.08.07
I also think part of what happened at the same time was that suddenly the place became a little too large to comfortably keep track of all at once.

Now, it's a smaller amount of traffic, but in a structure built for largeness, if you know what I mean.

I can't read everything that happens, nor do I really want to. (I look at the Gathering maybe once a season, and nearly never glance at a Late Shift thread unless it's linked to from elsewhere.)

I also think there's a fair amount of personality invested in the place - it's not just a software network, but a place where people are who I find amusing or interesting or pleasant, so when someone changes a job/loses interest/has a baby or whatever, the whole place changes a little bit.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
22:09 / 07.08.07
I completely agree with Anna and, to a large extent, Spatula (I agree on the causes, but am not quite so pessimistic about the place).

I certainly think closing to new members was the point which saw us taking our first faltering steps up our own back passages.
 
 
This Sunday
22:50 / 07.08.07
I've been hanging around the board, reading it, since just before it stopped being the Nexus, I think. I didn't try to sign on because there was enough good stuff to keep me coming back, but enough frustrating or insulting stuff I knew better than to start posting or it'd be nothing from me but lecturing and whinng. I waited until the climate settled on certain issues to where I felt I wouldn't see too many eye-gougy posts in regards to certain racial or other social issues and a certain atmospheric humor I felt uncomfortable with, subsided. And, still, for the most part, I stayed out of Conversation, which seemed the social, the community area, mostly bunked down in Comics. There were still the occasional weird racial thing, the weird tangentially homophobic post, the weird my list of theorists disagreee with your list of theorists, so your list proves you're not disagreeing, but are in fact ignorant vibe that crept up (mostly people now gone).

It's pretty clear sailing, these days. It's an inoffensive board for the most, at least in the sense that very few posters are trying deliberately to offend. I'm not a big fan of all the posts being Google-accessible, but I don't know that all of them need be entirely private (why would anyone new join?) or even if all the forums need to be private. Switchboard or an SBR? Sure, keep'em isolated, but Comics or Books?

Community isn't about being locked away in a private house, it's about the streets you walk and whose house you recognize, whose car you don't, the people you see at the local grocery and the glimpses into your personal life they get, trash collectors, local eateries and drinkeries patrons, whomever you recognize in your neighborhood that's also been inside that store... and I do get that kind of community from Barbelith. And like a functional community, it's got community standards, it's got a concensus politic and reality, it's got a mild xenophobia about many things just outside our borders, and colorful characters whom would become speaking parts if you were to write a play about the place.

I may not be the poster anyone else wants in their community, old guard or new, and I know I'm far more concerned with getting conversational threads about Sexism in... or Racism in... and watching them turn partially into autocritiques, as well as being self-correcting than I am in getting rid of distributed moderation or implementing a new color scheme to the board. I'm interested, but about as interested as someone is in the fact they're community's buildings could all use a paintjob and there's holes in walls, when you know there's people inside with no groceries or jobs, when there's people there with new kids and fabulous holidays or a new joke on their lips. Thankfully, I am neither an engine for fictional digital social change, nor am I a leading voice on the 'lith.

My point is, I do feel it's still a community, even if some people are looking to get out of town, and others are looking to gentrify or move back home and redecorate the old streets. As a community, it can pick up virtually wholesale and settle down somewhere else, for that matter. I do believe that, in the ways I wanted Barbelith to improve before I was comfortable associating myself with it, it has done so, quite a bit. That I don't recognize every poster, read every post, or share every sorrow or joy? That's just life, yeah?

Still, it wouldn't be the same without... well, most of this thread, and I am glad most of the posters from '03 are still hanging around to some degree..
 
 
HCE
23:17 / 07.08.07
It doesn't stand out when you're surfing at work? Why is that a cause for praise?

Because for several years the only web access I had was through work.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
00:03 / 08.08.07
It's worth noting that any board can become pretty undramatic with a browser set to override text colours and not load images.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
08:15 / 08.08.07
I think when things started to go up the trotsy everyone thought Tom would sort it out in his own time and the thing is that he never did and it was the continued freeze that emphasised that the trotsy was, you know, rather large.

Incidentally Decadent Nightfalling, I completely disagree with everything you just said, particularly the third paragraph, which makes no sense to me whatsoever.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
08:22 / 08.08.07
The third paragraph is one of those tortured extended analogies in which Barbelith stands for some kind of external system or structure in a way that doesn't work. These analogies almost always seem to include some kind of chastisement whereby people waiting to become members = refugees in detainment camps, or people who gets banned for sustained racism/sexism/homophobia = Mumia, that kind of thing. For those of you keeping score, "mild xenophobia" is the phrase that should set yr alarm bells ringing.

As I've been saying for a while now, if you're going to compare Barbelith to a place, it has to be somewhere with broken infrastructure, somewhere that the nominal government has more or less abandonned. Which ties in to Anna de L's first point.
 
 
Happy Dave Has Left
08:45 / 08.08.07
Well, for what it's worth, here's a view from a semi-newbie to Barbelith. I now post and participate far more regularly over at Metafilter, because the constant level of activity over there means there's always something to get involved in.

So, my Barbelith story. I registered in early 2006, after waiting about 9 months to be approved to join, and lurking for about six months before that. I think I must have got lost in the shuffle of applications or something, because I don't think it was meant to take quite that long for someone to have a gander at my webpage and verify that I wasn't a wannabe troll.

I'd been combing through the Barbelith archives for months, loving what I read, and going back to the start of threads that had their origins in 2001/2002. For instance, I read every single page of 'Gives me a happy', and 'Urgh FUCK'. I had a whole cast of characters in my head. There was Stoatie, and Haus, and Ganesh and Xoc, Miss Triplets, XK, miss wonderstarr and dozens of others, whose flair with words, wit and collective wisdom I seriously admired. I felt I'd found a vibrant and exciting community of people, with high standards and a low tolerance for bullshit. Simply put, people who would never say 'jeeze, it's just the internet, calm down' but instead who understood that 'just because it's the internet' isn't a reason not to have high quality discussion and regular challenging of lazy assumptions, offensive behaviour and other assorted crap that plagues online boards.

Boy, was I excited to get my login. Boy oh boy oh boy.

So, I logged in, and posted like a demon for a few months. Yay! So much fun. Quality discussion! Brilliant wit! Milk-out-of-nose humour! Then I went to a Barbe-meet here in London - even better! These people are cool in real life also!

I met Stoatie and Haus and Flyboy and XK and Saturn's Nod and loads of others, and felt a bit over-awed. Starstruck almost - I'd read hundreds of these people's posts. These were brilliant people. This was brilliant chat. Meeting of minds. Web-driven equivalent of a fin de seicle salon, oh yes!

Maybe it was just the buzz fading, or maybe things have actually changed, but these days it feels like wandering through that big place in Indiana Jones where they put the Ark of the Covenant. There are beautiful and shiny things on the shelves, along with a few nasty troll attacks, strong disagreements. There's holes where once-prolific posters have disappeared. Everything is covered in three inches of dust.

Away in the distance, there's the occasional spark of light. A few tired, dusty and pissed off looking Barbelites sit around a smashed up thread that they've lit to keep warm. No one is saying much. Occasionally a flare goes up from the Comics area, and sometimes a small cloud of outrage hovers above the Switchboard, but mostly it's dark and silent. Sometimes new people wander through, kick over a can or two, prod the silent, dusty figures around the fire, and then wander out.

We could do a few things, in this dusty labyrinth. We could kick open the gates, let in anyone, turn on all the lights and get our dusters out, ready for the inevitable breakages when a horde of over-excited kids rush into a palace of wonders like this.

We could think hard about how we run the place, about, frankly, whether our dusters are big enough to deal with the kind of damage that we might see.

We could set fire to it, walk away and not look back. Grab a few of our most favorite elements, saddle them onto our donkeys and go somewhere else.

What we can't do, is continue sitting here in the dark.
 
 
This Sunday
10:53 / 08.08.07
For those of you keeping score, "mild xenophobia" is the phrase that should set yr alarm bells ringing.

You really don't think there's a mild xenophobia here about other message boards in general? To the point that, the good is sometimes disregarded along with the very very bad, whenever there's discussion of, say, Facebook or the forums at Comic Book Resources? An immediate reaction of how Barbelith is different, stick with Barbelith?

My point with that third paragraph, in particular, is that it doesn't bother me, at all, that I have no idea what's going on in some posters' lives. I expect to be more familiar with someone living under the same roof as I do, than I would someone two blocks away, even though we share a community. No refugees, no detainment camps, concentration camps, or even summer camps. Never mentioned them. Never said a thing about opening borders or closing them off with big walls and units on patrol. I'm just saying, for me, the fact that I do not, and cannot, keep tabs on everyone on the board, on every thread and aspect of the board? Not really a concern to me any more than it would be in a real community. Or, any other messageboard.
 
  

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