So you find message boards nasty lately?

This is not specifically about this board. But in general, I feel like the entire internet has taken a turn. The internet was always a refuge for me. I could find similar like people, and, for the most part, find nice people and nice people to talk to. But no more.The internet in general seems to have gotten very toxic. Almost as if people that are nice have left the internet and are doing things in the real world and the only people left are the nasty reddit trolls.

Or, and it has long been a theory of mine, that people are nicer in real life only because they can't get away with being mean.

It makes me feel lately like there isn't any place to go. Sure, some message boards might have good people but I can't seem to get to them without snarktastic people interfering. I mean I suppose I could do a PM but that sort of defeats the point of a message board.

When people used to complain about online bullying I would be like, just don't go to that website, but now, I feel like a LOT of websites are like this no matter where you go... the majority of viewers are like this.

Last year I had a blog. I was happy with my blog. Until I was discovered by a psyco. Fortunately, within a few weeks I found out she was a psyco, where upon I called her out on my blog. Her psyco minions decided to start searching for who I really was... and **** it.. quickly they were able to find stuff. I had to burn it all... delete everything... and hope for the best. Fortunately, I got it all in time... but, some stupid nutball could have actually threatened my real friends and family or workplace.

Even if you go to a message board that is right up your ally -- maybe one that is about "good people" you will actually only find about 3 good people and 10 that aren't but will remain there anyway.

I think the Internet is suffering from nothing more than quantity. People are terrible. Put them in a group and let the cliques start forming, and they're even worse--even the good people. The good ones just go along because it's their friends doing the bad things.

Back in 2000, there just weren't enough people to form efficient Internet mobs. I only know a handful of enjoyable spaces these days.

The web is awash with crap. Anyone can put anything on the internet. There's a tsunami of information but little to no wisdom. A dog could post on the internet and no one would be the wiser because it's easy to hide behind a fake persona.

I read a few news web sites and most of the below-the-line comments are complete rubbish. The Guardian is one exception, it seems more of the comments there especially on European stories are at least a little intelligent.

As far as message boards go, a lot depends on the moderators. I was on a forum for single parents for awhile until a male member and a female member started to poop all over it with their misogynistic diatribes so I got off that forum. I go to an atheist forum that seems to be well moderated too. I've been here 5 years and I credit that to the moderators.

What was your blog about?

-Teresa

Tealeaf said:

Back in 2000, there just weren't enough people to form efficient Internet mobs. I only know a handful of enjoyable spaces these days.

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I think that is probably it. And I do find a lot of the moderators lacking. Like they feel like people can be rude as long as they don't threaten anyone or anything.... it is so disappointing.

I am starting to think, alas, I am going to have to start going out and meeting real people!! NO!!

I am considering giving up the internet at home. I think it is hurting me. Someone posted a plan of giving it up at home and just using it at work and if you had real stuff you had to do, just write them down and do them when you got to work.

This is the only forum I go on.
I used to go on plenty, football, music but like people have already said, so many horrible people about.

I didn't really use the internet until college. I didn't know computers 'did the internet' during the 90s and I wasn't particularly concerned. It just wasn't my thing. My sister is a millennial- that strange breed of human who has never known anything different and lives, breathes, and eats it. I don't know if you could tear one away from the internet for any length of time. I'm still..not the most tech savvy. There are people on the internet and they talk back, and it's always just a little bit astonishing. The internet for me is very much like the luggage from Terry P's discworld. Mystical, suspicious, a bit dangerous, entertaining, full of surprises and prone to growing legs and carrying you off in a direction you didn't expect. The internet can be harmful and a life wasting aid and there are mean people and lots of garbage dumps and yes, there are cliques here as there are everywhere. Any forum where you have a lot of people and personalities is going to get everything that comes with having so many people in one place, and that includes nastiness.
But even though it's been years on and off forums now, I'm still sort of caught up in the wonder of being able to talk to someone thousands of miles away who I've never met, or finding something out I never knew just through this absurdly deceptively simple medium. That's very childish, but people get so easily disillusioned these days no matter how wacky and wonderful something is. And the internet is exactly that.

I think the amount of nastiness has increased, but the Internet was never a "nice place". Even in its heyday I saw a fair amount of nastiness and trolling in online communities. I even engaged in some bad behavior myself . You have to keep in mind that people had far less resources to express themselves in the 90's and 00's. Now anyone can start a blog and spew whatever comes to mind. But yeah, I'm tired of the nastiness too. It's why I tend to stick to support sites and boards that admit to heavy moderation.

LonelySutton said:

Tealeaf said:

Back in 2000, there just weren't enough people to form efficient Internet mobs. I only know a handful of enjoyable spaces these days.

Click to expand...

I think that is probably it. And I do find a lot of the moderators lacking. Like they feel like people can be rude as long as they don't threaten anyone or anything.... it is so disappointing.

I am starting to think, alas, I am going to have to start going out and meeting real people!! NO!!

I am considering giving up the internet at home. I think it is hurting me. Someone posted a plan of giving it up at home and just using it at work and if you had real stuff you had to do, just write them down and do them when you got to work.

Click to expand...

I think it's hard to crack down on rudeness in an official way without cracking down on expression. There's already enough self-appointed police who'll be on you in an instant with corrections if your thoughts, feelings, and experiences don't conform to their idea of how people "should be".

Ideally, if people were rude ******** other people would stop talking to them and giving them attention, so they'd be hard to notice unless they did stir up enough trouble to warrant attention and unable to dominate threads. But it's never that simple because with people it's not about right or wrong, kind or unkind, helpful or not helpful, it's about how something makes them feel.

I used to moderate a small forum where one problem user repeatedly turned threads into a mess and everyone else was unable to enjoy normal discussion. The site admin decided he wasn't bothersome enough to ban. People stopped posting just to stop having to be around him and read people's arguments with him. I think it gets a couple posts a week now from people drifting in from the main website. No one wants to stay because there's no activity, and when there is it's still mostly arguments.

Tealeaf said:

LonelySutton said:

Tealeaf said:

Back in 2000, there just weren't enough people to form efficient Internet mobs. I only know a handful of enjoyable spaces these days.

Click to expand...

I think that is probably it. And I do find a lot of the moderators lacking. Like they feel like people can be rude as long as they don't threaten anyone or anything.... it is so disappointing.

I am starting to think, alas, I am going to have to start going out and meeting real people!! NO!!

I am considering giving up the internet at home. I think it is hurting me. Someone posted a plan of giving it up at home and just using it at work and if you had real stuff you had to do, just write them down and do them when you got to work.

Click to expand...

I think it's hard to crack down on rudeness in an official way without cracking down on expression. There's already enough self-appointed police who'll be on you in an instant with corrections if your thoughts, feelings, and experiences don't conform to their idea of how people "should be".

Ideally, if people were rude ******** other people would stop talking to them and giving them attention, so they'd be hard to notice unless they did stir up enough trouble to warrant attention and unable to dominate threads. But it's never that simple because with people it's not about right or wrong, kind or unkind, helpful or not helpful, it's about how something makes them feel.

I used to moderate a small forum where one problem user repeatedly turned threads into a mess and everyone else was unable to enjoy normal discussion. The site admin decided he wasn't bothersome enough to ban. People stopped posting just to stop having to be around him and read people's arguments with him. I think it gets a couple posts a week now from people drifting in from the main website. No one wants to stay because there's no activity, and when there is it's still mostly arguments.

Click to expand...

Yeah amazing how one person can wreck a site if they're let do so.

I think there is a lot of nastiness on the Internet. There's a lot of people who seem rather geeky themselves with all the memes and stuff, and then they turn around and act nasty to whatever other groups they feel like - mostly other races, genders, people with disabilities, people like in that thread about beauty, people with differing viewpoints, animals, whatever. It's one reason I haven't really been into online gaming much, besides not having the technology. I remember I used to play Counter-Strike online, and people there were just so rude it made me mad and eventually I stopped playing. I was thinking, we're all gamers here, we've experienced rudeness from other groups. And now they are turning around and dishing it out to whoever they feel is inferior. No, I just like single player games really, or games with friends where I can feel like it's only friendly competition. I don't want to deal with all these smug, douchey adolescent trolls out there sitting pretty from behind a keyboard where no one can get at them for acting like that.

I just went to a conference on digital learning, and I think some of what was discussed during that applies here.

They told us we need to teach our teenagers "netiquette", how to communicate online correctly. I feel like most of the nasty people online are around my age. When I was a teenager, my mom and dad taught me how to talk to people in person correctly, but because social media was a newer thing, they had no idea they needed to teach me how to talk to people online. Now we have all these people communicating online, and not doing it properly, and being mean.

Media control is very powerful in shaping public opinion. If you think open expression is free, you're fatally wrong.

When the value system of a significant and vocal part of the population is one which demands eugenics, the problem isn't the medium or what is being said, but the people themselves. The internet is a nasty place because the world (or at least, society) is a nasty place; as control consolidates and the volume of information increases, it actually becomes easier rather than harder to force the message into a coherent and desired shape, if someone is so inclined and has the means and trust to manipulate public opinion. In the past, the Internet was where nerds discussed Star Trek and other sf garbage, and it's still used to that effect in a lot of ways.

Because the world is increasingly dominated by the religion of eugenics, more people are giving up on life. Not so much suicide or even self-neglect, but they realize that there is nothing in this society for them except a meager subsistence, if that. There are too many people who believe in eugenics and its' natural conclusions, and a few people who lash out verbally or violently to no avail.

I wouldn't even say it's just lately, unless you consider ten years ago to be recent. In 2005 I joined some forums. They were all detestable places and horrid experiences. I was mocked, threatened, plotted against, lied to, lied about, told to kill myself, and worse; things I try not to remember. Sexism, racism, and other hateful filth were rampant. By 2007 I had stopped going back and wouldn't join another, until I hesitantly decided to give this one a shot.

When I asked once why many of my posts went ignored, someone on one of those boards told me that it was because I made sense, and sense had no place on a forum. That was when I finally stopped returning, because I fully realized that people weren't there to listen, learn, or engage in productive discussion or debate; they just wanted to shout. It was true then, and I still find it to be true now.

This is the only forum I've joined, apart from my own which belongs to our family and our friends and it's private. Nice and safe there! No attacking and nastiness unlike some teen forums I see, and they are not worth joining for the filthy words and harshness of some what spoil it for others.

The best way to avoid reading nasty messages on forums is to block the people, and then I don't read their crap. And make doubly sure, I never read offline content either which would reveal stuff when one is not logged in.

There will always be people who disagree with another person's post. But to disagree one can be pleasant, but that never seems to be often from what I see.

The internet in the mid-90's was a wonderful thing. It went downhill fast once corporations discovered it and commercialized it.

Mrs Falcon said:

The best way to avoid reading nasty messages on forums is to block the people, and then I don't read their crap.

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Some boards you can't block the person and sometimes you don't know the response is going to be horrible until you start reading. I am a member of a diet board and it is so toxic. There always has to be ONE person, no matter what your thread is about -- in the "support" section etc. - that has to attack what you say. Ah la Nancy Grace. Sort of unreasonably and without much facts or ideas of their own.

Sometimes I have gone to a new message board and it is the same thing... someone.. always has to make a smart remark.

blackdot said:

The internet in the mid-90's was a wonderful thing. It went downhill fast once corporations discovered it and commercialized it.

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^this

Nicolelt said:

I just went to a conference on digital learning, and I think some of what was discussed during that applies here.

They told us we need to teach our teenagers "netiquette", how to communicate online correctly. I feel like most of the nasty people online are around my age. When I was a teenager, my mom and dad taught me how to talk to people in person correctly, but because social media was a newer thing, they had no idea they needed to teach me how to talk to people online. Now we have all these people communicating online, and not doing it properly, and being mean.

Click to expand...

"Netiquette" was the first thing Mum taught me. Old fashioned courtesy still goes a long way towards making good conversation. I'm glad I learned that, and how to write properly without resorting to txt jargon what is so unbearable to read in forums. :rolleyes2:

LonelySutton said:

Mrs Falcon said:

The best way to avoid reading nasty messages on forums is to block the people, and then I don't read their crap.

Click to expand...

Some boards you can't block the person and sometimes you don't know the response is going to be horrible until you start reading. I am a member of a diet board and it is so toxic. There always has to be ONE person, no matter what your thread is about -- in the "support" section etc. - that has to attack what you say. Ah la Nancy Grace. Sort of unreasonably and without much facts or ideas of their own.

Sometimes I have gone to a new message board and it is the same thing... someone.. always has to make a smart remark.

Click to expand...

I wonder why such snarky comments aren't moderated properly. Forum owners and their staff should be more responsible, but that is not always the case.

If you find the support you wanted over-shadowed by such unpleasant members, then it would be better for you to not return. True that some forums don't have the blocking option. vBulletins do I think, and SMF (Simple Machines Forums) so perhaps you will be better off finding a more suitable diet forum there. Good luck.

I don't teach my kids "netiquette." I teach them manners and to treat people with respect and not to do or say anything to others that they wouldn't want said and done to them. It doesn't really matter whether that people is right in front of them or halfway around the world. People are people and there is NO reason that they should treat people poorly just because they can't see the person and likely never will.

I mean, yeah, I tell that that you cannot carry a "tone" with you when you type words, as opposed to saying them, but honestly, my oldest son doesn't really understand or comprehend tone unless it's very severe.

The truth is that since the internet begun there has always been trolls and idiots, the problem is that with a constant new generation of people they know it's so a difficult to control... and governments are only just starting to realize this. People have this weird alternate personality on the internet vs real life, personally I think it's a control thing; seeing their "victim" react is a feeling of control and/or dominance.

In general people should really be careful what they put on the net, particularly where a large group of people reside. An always be careful who you speak to, it's easy to be someone else on the net.