Of Fan Boards and Passive-Aggresiveness

One of my favorite articles on Cracked, itself one of my favorite sites, is about how to stop trolls. The number one way to stop trolls from ruining the internet is to make it less anonymous. Really, I can't argue with any of its points. Dude has very good ones.

I'm also all for accountability and transparency.

Not when it comes to the internet, though.

You see, one of our biggest problems is our tendency to pre-judge people and situations. We see someone, and make inferences and fill in the blanks, as it were, on what we think they will do or can/can't do.

The internet, by letting us be a little anonymous, allows us the possibility to actually judge people by the content of their character etc. (Usually its d-bag, but I digress).

I started thinking about all this when I read this post by a guy names Eric Capper. Aside from sounding like an old man (info superhighway? really?) or at the very least, cliched, ( 'shoot me an email' ) he makes a decent point about bitching about something vs doing something to correct it.

But that is not his real point. To me, it reads more like 'asshole interneters ... talking shit ... come out and fight like a man!' ( Fourth paragraph from the bottom.)

Now, this is purely speculation on my part, but this kind of thing reminds me of the way adults treat kids.

*Saying that makes me sound like I am not an adult, when I am one. I am 24 now.

It goes like this: Kid makes a point or points out some flaw in the adults plan/thinking. Adult ponders it, admits they are mistaken, but quickly points out that there is a 'better' way to point it out. It used to happen to me a lot in high school. My dad was king of that shit, and so was my vice principle.

Again, I am not saying that this is what Eric was thinking for certain. I just get that vibe from the post. One, he admits that there are mistakes from time to time, but sneaks in a caveat:

'Don't get me wrong, we appreciate feedback and we want to be told when we make a mistake, but the fan message board is not the most effective vehicle to drive that message.'

1. I, nor the majority of capable, intelligent people think that venting on a message board is an effective way to get change done. Mostly it is just that: a place to vent.

2. Perusing the fan boards (and in our case, THE fan board) of your customers is what smart people do. There should be someone whose job it is to peruse the board and see what the hell people are really saying about your product ( in this case, UNT Athletics ). Surveys are biased and flawed. Boards are raw data.

He then goes on to talk about the evils of anonymous posting. People who flame and talk shit and are really harmless. People who harass excessively -like the people with that myspace girl- are a different breed.

This is more of that bad apple thing at play here. From what I've seen, aside from a few stupid threads about races that were trying to be funny but fell short, most posters on gmg.com are harmless and really do have the best interest of the school and program at heart.

*Let's be honest. Gmg.com is what he was talking about. There is no other fan board for UNT.

Being anonymous allows people to vent and express their opinions without fear of unwarranted repercussions. I am not talking about committing libel and getting away with it. I am talking about being critical of a powerful group and not getting fired for it. That kind of thing.

So if the worst criticism you found on gmg exit of the information superhighway whilst you cruised along was that Dodge should use the TE more, I think you should take a deep breath and be thankful that you found a valuable place to gather information.