Posted by floatingbridge on December 8, 2010, at 12:00:11
In reply to Re: This place is dying., posted by hyperfocus on November 29, 2010, at 14:01:39
Hyperfocus, how the hay did you ever become so sensible :) I'm doing some catch up reading and just found your post. Thank you.
:)
fb
!>>This place is dying.
> Changing, maybe, not dying.
>
> >I get the feeling that too great a proportion of the activity on Psycho-Babble has become focused on the definition and enforcement of civility rather than on its presumed focus on mental illness.
> Yeah but activity by whom? Not Dr. Bob, surely. He hardly posts. All the activity around civility is by posters.
>
> If I had a forum and I had a rule that you can't write anything containing the letters a x and y, posters might well question the intent and motives of this rule, the consequences of this rule, together with my sanity. But it's my forum. If you don't like the rules, then, unfortunately, all I can do is show you the (virtual) door. If you write a post like "hyperfocus needs to get his brain XRAYED" what should I do?
>
> I've never seen anybody here get sanctioned for posting about drugs or mental illness. The only time this happens is when people ask about getting drugs without a prescription or about getting non FDA-approved meds. People get blocked for two reasons:
> 1. Going after other posters, including Dr. Bob
> 2. Battling Bob on admin, which eventually leads to 1
>
> There's a lot of stuff in life you can control and a lot of stuff you can't. How Dr.Bob runs Psycho Babble falls into the 2nd category. Dr. Bob owns this sandbox and if you don't want to play by his rules then you're free to pickup your toys and leave - go to another forum or setup your own(which is not difficult to do.) But I bet pretty soon you're going to run into the same issues PB tries to address.
>
> Maybe I'm in the minority but I don't find the rules of civility that difficult to understand. You can't say anything that causes anybody on PB to feel accused or put down. Fin. The focus here is supposed to be on =mutual support and education. I've never seen anybody blocked for providing support or education. You can go outside these lines but if you do you run the risk of getting sanctioned. You don't have free speech here and pleading your case on Admin is simply futile. Yeah it can be hard sometimes and require extra effort to interact in a community with these restrictions, but it's not impossible.
>
> Every day I read a post or see a poster exhibiting behavior that makes me angry and frustrated. But I'm not allowed to go after anybody here. To me this separates the action from the poster and forces me to address the situation differently - in a positive way. Because of my social phobia my behavior in real life upsets and disturbs people and they usually treat me like if I'm the problem, not my disease, and make me feel worthless. But that isn't supposed to happen here because we are all hurting and all vulnerable. So if the rules force us to not accuse or put down anybody here in any way, I'm fine with that. It just means that problems with people need to be addressed differently. I don't see the difficulty in doing this.
>
> Maybe the reason Dr. Bob is so inflexible with the rules is just a simple lack of time. You've got one person moderating a community of potentially thousands. So I guess he just doesn't have the time to try to see intents and motives and nuances. And so he has to strongly discourage people from straying outside the lines of civility. If people weren't afraid of getting blocked for a long time, the forum will spiral into chaos. Yeah, a lot of times Dr. Bob may make mistakes in judgment and sanction people unnecessarily and everything else he's criticized for, but he's just one person - one administrator on a forum with thousands of posters. So put yourself in his shoes. On other forums, like was mentioned in another thread, there's all kinds of nasty stuff - splintering, cliques, moderators playing favorites, trolling, harassment, bullying, people getting banned on a whim. Not saying PB is totally immune to these things, but there's no posting utopia anywhere on the net.
>
> I'm sure people in this thread will think I'm sucking up to Dr. Bob, but that's fine. I owe a great deal to this site and I feel protective towards it. It's the only place I can come to to ask questions about meds and mental illness and try to help others. If this site blocked search engines from finding posts then I probably wouldn't have found it. So if some teenager is out there battling bullying and social phobia and depression and sees a PB post on Twitter on Facebook or whatever, then to me that's worth whatever privacy I give up here (which in 2010 isn't that much.) If somebody vulnerable comes here and sees that going after posters is not tolerated at all and decides to stick around, then that's worth whatever restrictions on free speech we have.
>
> As much as I would like people like Larry Hoover and fayroe and jade and twinleaf and all the others to come back, I can't control what other people do. They chose to leave the community here. Nobody twisted their arm and forced them to leave. They left to prove a point or principle
>
> The only thing I would like to see change is this infinite jeopardy system of blocking where minor infractions can lead to long blocks. But I like PB how it is and I don't want it to change much.
MDD and C-PTSD. Chronic fatigue and pain. Good response to Cymbalta.
poster:floatingbridge
thread:971091
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/admin/20101201/msgs/972923.html