Subject:
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Re: Are we all too nice?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Thu, 26 Oct 2000 23:13:05 GMT
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Viewed:
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261 times
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Well, I have read all of these latest developments with some concern
and thought that a few comments were in order. For the most part I am
a little below the radar for the off-topic/debate crowd but I still read a
pretty fair percentage of the posts to LugNET and thought a different voice
might be useful.
In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Todd Lehman writes:
>
> One trend I've noticed is that here (at the LUGNET discussion groups) people
> seem to get much more upset when someone acts "incorrectly" as judged by group
> norms than people did in RTL or than people do in other small communities.
> Oh, people screamed back louder in RTL than they do here, but I what I see is
> that people are actually more upset here when it happens.
>
> But in our lofty goals of trying to set higher and higher standards, we
> mustn't lose sight of the fact that we're still only human -- we have
> emotions and we get angry and we need to vent and argue until we're red in
> the face sometimes before we can come back and look at something more
> objectively. It's not a pretty picture, but, for better or for worse, it's
> part of what we are.
Here's a question everybody can ask themselves--why are you here? In my case
I started participating in RTL in 1995, at the time I thought it was just
so cool to find a large group of individuals with a shared interest. But over
time the content-to-noise ratio became pretty high. Then the Mandroid posts
started and the content ratio dropped even lower to the point where sifting
through the NG for value became too much work.
I have always felt that LugNET's content overshadowed the noise (not always,
but it typically does) so my time invested pays better returns here than on
RTL.
To me that is an added value over usenet. Secondly I think alot of the
"advances of the AFOL community" like LDraw, CAD, robotics, Trains, etc that
have been fostered via LugNET are because of, not in spite of, the civil tone
used in discussing them.
Dissention and debate are not necessarily bad, but it is possible to debate
without starting a flame war or without resorting to uncivil behavior. It
is possible to provide constructive thoughful criticism, it just requires
a little restraint. I manage to read and post to the NG's without going
supernova and I think everyone else can too (no, I expect everyone else
to).
>
> Now let me switch gears.
>
> Why is there an .off-topic tree of ng's here? Is it to encourage non-LEGO
> discussions? No, that's not what LUGNET is about. It's actually to give
> them a place to fall when they do come up, because they will _always_ come
> up.
But in fact to some extent it does encourage non-lego discussions, there is
no way around it.
It's human nature to drift off-topic, and to want to talk about non-XYZ
> things from time to time even with XYZ-fan folks online. LEGO is just one
> common thing that unites pretty much everyone here, but there are an infinity
> of differences. So, more fundamentally, the .off-topic tree exists so that
> people don't have to feel bad when they want to talk about something non-LEGO.
> It's a place to go do that.
>
> Along those same lines, why is there a .off-topic.debate group here? It's
> not to encourage debates or arguments, but to give debates a home when they
> pop up -- because they will always pop up. People can argue all they want in
> .off-topic.debate and they don't have to put pressure on themselves to avoid
> doing something that comes natural to them.
See above.
>
> I am wondering what people would think if there were a group
>
> lugnet.off-topic.debate.flame
>
> where, basically, anything goes: rudeness, complete gruffness, even
> profanity. (When I say anything, BTW, I mean anything but copyright
> violations or other illegalities, etc.)
>
> It would have to come with certain technical restrictions on it whereby you
> couldn't crosspost to it or post replies to or from it -- something relatively
> isolated from the other groups but where people could completely let loose and
> speak their minds. Because it's natural to do so, and unnatural not to.
>
> So the purpose of this group would not be to encourage or foster flamewars,
> but to give them a relatively isolated place to occur -- and as we all know,
> they do come up from time to time, even here in our friendly little corner of
> the online universe.
>
> My ultimate concern here, thus, is that by all of us always trying to be so
> nice to each other and always feeling like we have to watch what we say, that
> creates stress on us which builds and builds (pun unintended :-). Finally
> when it reaches critical mass, things get messier than (I think) they would
> have been if we didn't feel we always had to be so godforsaken polite.
I am not sure I buy your Chernobyl Theory (that unless we can contain all
of the poisonous radioactivity it will eventually lead to a full scale meltdown
and require brave Russians to dump sand by helicopter over the Lugnet server)
I suggest that it is possible to acheive ones goals here without resorting
to uncivil behavior. There are many other outlets for your stress, I dont
think that Lugnet necessarily needs to be one. I dont even think that the
internet needs to be one of them. This theory also suggests that
it is impossible (inhuman) to show restraint.
A flame group will not serve any constructive purpose (how many flame wars
have you read wherethere was any real resolution of the issue) but will
engender bad feelings amoung the participants, both in the flame group and
probably in any other group where these same participants interact, resulting
in an unintended spill over effect into the rest of the NG's. Because of this
I feel that over time the level of civility in general would decrease and
finally, back to where I started, I think that there would be an increase in
noise and decrease in content.
--Jim
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Message has 2 Replies:
 | | Re: Are we all too nice?
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| (...) [snip] (...) meltdown (...) I agree whole-heartedly. I've long subscribed to the view that praise should be public, abuse private. People should be encouraged to use e-mail if they have a problem with a particular person - why does anyone feel (...) (24 years ago, 27-Oct-00, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
| | | Re: Are we all too nice?
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| (...) A counterpoint on this is that there are people who spar pretty hard in .debate who otherwise are the best of friends. Of course there is a difference in that the culture of .debate encourages attempting to stay above the muck and _debate_ not (...) (24 years ago, 27-Oct-00, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
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