I'm not going to name anyone.
It's cool I it's me
To the point, this isn't good. The more common it becomes, the more clique-like this place is. Some have said that you should need to be extremely insensitive to the comments of others to deal with the internet, but I don't see why anyone should be any less sensitive than they have to be in real life.
You should have a thick skin, is what I said. That's because the reality is that people are jerks on the internet, and if you go around getting offended by everything that someone says to you online, you're setting yourself up to feel like you're being attacked constantly. That's not good for you.
The internet does weird things to people. Not seeing somebody as you're talking to them means a lot of the psychological processes that go on while interacting with someone in person don't get triggered; part of this is that it's much harder to identify with a person. As a result people tend to be much ruder in internet interactions. Maybe that's a bad thing, but it's a reality, and if you spend time interacting with strangers over the internet, you're going to encounter it. You can react in a few ways - stop using the internet, or be horribly offended by what people say to you, or just grow a thicker skin and realize that there is no reason to take offense at something that some wiener on the internet says. They don't know anything about you; why should you care what they think of you?
The exceptions, I guess, are when somebody's attacking an entire group that you belong to or sympathize with. Still, it's just an opinion. Is it going to kill you to hear it? No.
It's probably not for the best that people tend to be mannerless online, although from what I've seen, there's not that much of a correlation between the quality of a forum and how polite people are.
In some cases, a place where discussion is kept civil can be a great community, although the example I'm thinking of is bikeforums.net, where the rather noncontroversial topic of bikes is discussed. Even there, as soon as political issues get dragged in, people start to get heated.
Other times, attempts to keep things "nice" and protect people's feelings from the scorn of idiots on the internet result in all interesting discussion being banned, threads locked and any mention of something which sometimes results in controversy is off-limits.
So yeah, I'm sometimes rude online, although it tends to be in situations of either brutal honesty (and if you can't be brutally honest on the internet, where can you be?) or else if somebody's advocating human rights abuses against certain ethnic groups or something (I have two strikes of warning on this forum, both because somebody was doing that and I got pissed).
But while you can fault me for that, ultimately everyone's just responsible for themselves. And so fault me all you want, but people who take something I say personally have only themselves to blame. For all they know I'm a disgusting slob living in a basement who goes outside only to buy Star Trek porn once a week. Why should my opinion matter to them? Moreover, I know nothing about them. Plenty of my internet arguments involve somebody attacking me, especially if I'm arguing about psychology - I've heard it all, psychology's not a real science, whatever college you went to sucks, whoever wrote that book you're citing isn't a real scholar, you need to pick a different career path - and I don't care. Because the person saying those things knows nothing about me, so their evaluation of me is irrelevant to me. Everybody can benefit from taking that attitude. Save being offended for people who matter to you - if a friend or family member backstabs you or treats you like shit, that's a reason to be upset. If some jackass on the internet insults you? Move past it and laugh at them.
edit: christ I didn't realize this was such a wall of text...oh well, I'm too tired to edit it and it's the internet after all
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Topic: Internet manners (Read 4027 times)