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In lugnet.admin.suggestions, Anthony Sava wrote:
> I KNOW I should duck out of this now, but I just can't resist not posting
> something. I'm going to regret it, I know.
I get the feeling I'm going to regret it too, having to sit through the eighty
or ninety posts of people telling you that everyone's allowed to their own
opinion as long as it's not to think being gay is a sin.
> Lugnet.org.dietcoke, cause I don't feel comfortable talking about LEGO
> with all those Pepsi drinkers around, and the Coke Classic people just
> freak me out.
Now I have no opinion one way or the other on God's attitude towards the various
lifestyles under discussion, but as a Classic Coke zealot I know for sure that
you Diet-Coke-ists are damned to Hell. But let's play devil's advocate here.
What if we did have lugnet.people.softdrinks.dietcoke, and a hundred other
newsgroups like it? Would that be some kind of disaster?
Most of those groups would go unused, which isn't a problem. There are plenty
of lugnet groups that go completely unused, and I don't hear anyone clamoring
for their removal despite our obvious lack of 'need' for them. (It doesn't
impair my Lugnet experience that we have a newsgroup for Djibouti that no one's
ever posted in.)
Maybe a couple of those hundred-and-one groups would be used here and there.
Maybe there'd even be a bunch of posts in the Diet Coke group claiming some kind
of fallacious preferability of that "beverage" over other, superior drinks.
Reading those posts, I would be massively offended, true! For just as long as
it took me to go and adjust my skip-filter settings, then it'd be back to
business as usual. Do the Diet-Coke-ists need to be notified of my rejection of
their newsgroup? I doubt they or anyone else would care.
And in the far reaches of possibility, maybe one of those new groups would
actually take off and become a center of community for some Lugnetters. Would
it be such a bad thing that it had nothing obvious to do with Lego? (The
existence of lugnet.galidor hasn't killed anybody yet, and that's got less to do
with Lego than just about anything I can think of.)
Lugnet's intended to serve (among other things) as a community, and the human
brain can only process communities in certain bite-sized chunks. No one can
feel like part of a community unless they feel they have a 'home' there
somewhere. The Shiri Doris and Tim Courtneys of the world seem to be able to
interact with the entirety of Lugnet all at once, but most of us don't have that
kind of special ability. Most people need to start with a group small enough
that they can develop familiarity with the people and customs there, and use
that as their psychological base from which to interact with the larger
community.
Personally, my 'home' is over in lugnet.gaming; I'll wander through the other
newsgroups for entertainment or research but I don't feel like as big a part of
those communities. There's just too many names and subjects floating by. For
every neat MOC that pops up, there's another endlessly self-sanctioning post
from one or another of the o.t.d. regulars that makes me regret visiting
lugnet.general at all. If I didn't have the quieter corner where I felt at
home, I doubt I'd bother much with Lugnet at all.
So I see this much more as a community issue than some kind of gay issue. When
the larger group starts to get too big and faceless to feel comfortable for some
of its members, then subdividing is the correct solution. How any one group of
people chooses to subdivide themselves, in order to strengthen their feeling of
identity within the commuity, shouldn't much bother the rest of us.
The test of whether such a group is necessary is whether or not it gets used
once it's created. If it turns out it doesn't get any traffic, then what has it
cost us? (Besides the admins' time, and whether or not that's justified is up
to their own mysterious rationales.) If there were a group of Diet-Coke scum
that felt they needed their own newsgroup to feel like part of the community,
I'd support their effort too.
And then I'd skip-filter the hell out of them!!
- Mike.
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