Posted by Willful on July 13, 2010, at 10:40:17
In reply to Re: Is Anybody Responsible for Their Own Feelings? » violette, posted by ron1953 on July 13, 2010, at 9:23:27
The twitter/facebook controversy drove away a lot of people, but I've never been clear, other than that, why people leave or stay here.
I posted here briefly a few years ago, but I left because I eventually felt drained by trying to respond to a lot of suffering without any sense that my responses helped. People seem to go through long periods of just being stuck in certain issues-- I'm sure I've done the same thing-- But when you're on the outside, you see how the emotions they're feeling as so devastating, are come from what they're doing to themselves not from what people are doing to them and you want to alleviate their pain-- but even if you made some small impact after trying really hard to get inside what they were experiencing, it was really hard to see them go through the same thing week after week after month. At least for me.
So I think that might happen to a lot of people-- or other people don't feel helped and give up, or start feeling better and just drop away when they don't feel as needy. People seem to look for something from a site like this, and when that particular need isn't met or isn't there any more, they drop away. I rarely notice someone have a lot of pain. then stay around to help other people later with their issues-- and I very rarely got any sense of other people's realizing how much effort people were putting into trying to reach out. I'm not saying that anyone in particular should be so grateful, but after all while, it does get discouraging. I don't know-- I just found the whole experience sort of draining after a while. I'm not saying my efforts were anything other than the best I could do-- but I rarely felt that anyone noticed that I was really trying. It's ironic, I guess, because now when I read a lot of posts, I feel sort of put off-- it must be my stage of development-- where I'm not as self-destructive, but I"m more like an ex-smoker who gets mad at people who still smoke. At least, I've been trying to figure out why I can't be as empathic as I was-- but maybe that's it.
My leaving, though, had had nothing to do with blocks and pbcs, which I often disagreed with--- One problem that sort of distressed me was how intermittantly Bob and the deputies would get involved, which added a lot to the chaos and sense of unfairness of the rules. So some people would say really awful things and no one would notice-- and other times, someone would say something kind of insensitive and someone would pbc or block them. It often seemed like any little thing could get you a pbc or block-- but you could often get away with being seriously hurtful or unkind. I found that infuriating and upsetting.
Some civility rules are important-- but also, I agree with everyone that the length of the blocks is out of control. A simple formula of the kind Bob uses might be necessary if a machine were running the site-- but imo human beings should have more careful responses-- and it just felt really kind of dehumanizing to see how the blocks were calculated, because the formula generates very long blocks despite what may be minor infractions-- and no matter what, they often seemed out of scale to what had been done. But even though the system bothered me, I don't think it's what caused me to leave
Anyway, I do wish the system were different, but I've often wondered why people leave-- really-- and where they go. I've tried the other obvious places, but I find them really much less sympatico than this place, for all its faults.
Willful
poster:Willful
thread:953893
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/admin/20100321/msgs/954315.html