I’ve noticed quite a bit of misogyny but also many personal attacks directed at anyone who dares to post an opinion that differs from the opinion of certain members on a variety of subjects that we aren’t warned about before we post. And there are a lot of political comments from certain members who seem to agree with one another and don’t seem to be concerned that they might be offending other members who might not share their views.
These are the reasons I’ve stopped posting in the sub-forums where I used to post regularly. A community can only exist where there are minimum standards for behavior that are respected. Clearly, in spite of Sb’s efforts to remind people of those standards, there are a significant number of members who are determined to ignore the rules when they choose to and also to dictate which opinions can be expressed here and which can’t.
I completely agree with you on all but one point. I don’t necessarily think those you are referring to are determined to ignore the rules, but have instead developed some form of subconsciously earned and misguided level of entitlement to act, say and do as they please because the level of acceptance is constantly being stretched, primarily by them.
I was not confused at all.
Since I’m already here, I would sure appreciate if you would please stop posting your all-encompassing, broad-sweeping generalizations with which I rarely agree, and don’t want to be included. Thank you.
Back in my school’s computer-center, any gril walking in to do an assignment would typically get swarmed by a bunch of guys wanting to “help”, all buzzing around like desperate bees just looking to pollinate.
And back in my BBS days, anyone with a female-sounding handle would similarly be swarmed by the lovelorn/desperate.
In neither of those situations were any of them threatened or anything, just, again, swarmed. Mostly sad and harmless, but annoying at worst.
Guess times have changed to the point that… I’m not even sure what to call it… situational misogyny?.. has gotten that nasty if not dangerous.
Yes it is! rising (or sinking) to the level of being rude and abrasive does not do anything positive for the situation. It does not remove the post and simply usually just provokes more of the same. Just not worth it, regardless of how it is rationalized.
If everyone would spend less time finding ways to be offended and just allowed that others have a different frame of reference. And that it need not be interpreted as being threatening, or offensive, everyone would be happier and we would all get along better.
OK, I’m not looking for ways to be offended (I’ve never done that in my life), so I’ll proceed as if there was an honest misinterpretation of what I actually posted in the full post from which those few words were lifted and placed out of context. As I said, I have never looked for ways to be offended, and I have also never tried to stop others from having a different frame of reference. I’ll restate what I actually posted about. What I actually mentioned in my post was political speech and personal attacks merely for expressing a different opinion - a different “frame of reference.” Placing the responsibility on me to avoid posting my opinion in any thread in order to make people who don’t want to see my opinion happy is manifestly unfair, and it makes no sense - especially in a thread I didn’t start but have a right to post in just like everyone else.
If it is being suggested that being allowed to violate the rules and to insult people and get away with it is what makes some members happy, and they want an exclusive right to behave that way, that’s fine - they can demand that kind of community here and, to the extent it comes to be, they can enjoy it. As I’ve said before, I have my fill of disrespectful and childish behavior from people I have to deal with day to day, in my job and in my community – I am not interested in subjecting myself to any more of that than is necessary, and I don’t have the time for it.
That’s kind of the point. Non-men by default often get assumed to have a lower level of understanding, particularly when it comes to technical topics, and reactions range from wanting to show off (which can be for any reason from “feeling threatened” to “wanting to impress”) to genuine misguided attempts at being helpful. I have friends who are engineers at huge well known companies who have been treated as if they barely even knew how to use a computer despite in some cases being responsible for massive amounts of the core product’s functionality. I’ve experienced it myself as one of said engineers.
Just because something isn’t shared publicly doesn’t mean it never happens in private.
Really, it’s just that people are more willing to talk about it these days, more platforms are willing to take a stand in declaring such behaviour unacceptable, and people who don’t feel it’s ok feel more empowered to act as a result when it is made obvious. Not just here, but on a lot of the internet, there are non-men who don’t reveal that fact, and in some cases even adopt a fake male identity, just to avoid harassment.
I guess if I count this thread, it’s at least four now. It’s pretty reliable that any time the topic comes up, the reactions are bad enough that sb ends up having to intervene much like he did here.
I can’t post screenshots or archives though, because it goes directly against sb’s decision to remove those posts in the first place. But I hope that seeing it happen right here in this thread a couple days ago might at least lend some credibility.
As wolfgirl42 said, as online communities go, this is one of the better ones. But it happens a lot, everywhere, and raising awareness of it is an important step toward improving things.
Those things can be quite threatening. Not always, but it’s exhasting at best, and at worst, well… there’s a reason why so many women carry mace and form “dead man’s switch” networks with friends so someone will call the authorities if she misses a check-in. Pretty much every woman has friends who got “pollinated” against their will, and she doesn’t want to be next, especially if she lives somewhere without a legal right to bodily autonomy.
It’s not a new thing. If anything, it’s less bad than it was in the past. Things are moving forward overall, but slowly, and with frequent steps back before moving forward again. It may appear to be worse now than it was decades ago, but that’s mostly just because instead of affected people being silent and alone, the internet is helping them get the word out and make issues more visible to more people.
It’s getting better, but there’s still a long way to go.
To my mind the distrust and hostility that Carla Rogers received in the first several posts in response to her thread were entirely unwarranted.
However, I wonder if the poster’s name was a contributing factor. Some might have seen a female name and applied the stereotype “girls don’t exist on the internet”. Combined with a post that they thought looked like it was written by AI made them conclude it was a scam and respond with outright hostility.
Would that post have gotten the same instantly hostile response if the name of the poster had been something like “Flashlightlover”, “Ilovelumens” or “John Rogers”?
Actually, no, it doesn’t. If people can’t see what’s wrong, they can’t/won’t learn why it’s wrong, or see examples of what not to do.
I just got zinged on some comment I made on the yootoob. Only clickable option on the popup was [Got it!]. Uhhh, yeah, okaaay. Reeeeally helpful. Which comment? What exactly did I say? One guy made a snarky comment to me and I replied in kind, but nope, that’s still there, so that wasn’t the one. Was it a comment from days ago? Weeks ago? Months ago? At this point, don’t know, don’t care.
I didn’t see any of those incidents that were referenced, so to me, they don’t exist, and no one did anything wrong. Is that the intended effect? I doubt it. But it’s the actual effect.
“Some people here did/said some really nasty things!”
“Ummm, not that I’ve seen.”
It depends on who’s in charge. At a company that tolerates Bad Behavior, of course don’t expect higher-ups or even HR to do anything. At a BBS or forum where the syslop/administrator tolerates if not encourages Bad Behavior, also expect no help.
Places where that thing isn’t tolerated, expect otherwise.
At school, any time we’d notice too many buzzing drones, we’d make a comment like needing to break out the firehose and hose down the drones. If subtlety didn’t work, a more direct, “Hey, leave her alone, a’ight?” would do it. If not, a more direct “Enough, gtfo…” would do it. You did not want to get banned from the computer-center, because then you’d need your prof to intervene and petition us to let the miscreant in to do his assignments, and the prof would definitely ask questions as to why he got banned in the first place. It never even got to that point, as people understood what would happen.
What was puzzling, though, was one incident where one gril was being “swarmed” and I just got back from lunch or something and walked in. I saw, rolled my eyes, and just walked over, “Don’t youse got actual work to do?”, and she looked up and said, “Oh, that’s okaaay, they’re just hellllping.”, like I should mind my own business. Kfine.
Get that a few times, and you almost get conditioned to look the other way unless someone actively asks you to intervene.
I think the issue was that Carla was… odd. The powerpoint slideshow of what was wrong, the text-bubbles pointing to this and that, the odd way of expressing things, the stream-of-consciousness yet organised style of writing, all added up to… odd.
And every time I pointed out a spammer to SB, it was never “ilovelumens” or “flashlightlover”, but usually some plainjane name like “Steve Jones”, “Edward Smith”, etc.
Of course the spammer would’ve just signed up that day or the day before, and had 1 message… the spam. But the names were all “normal” with no imagination.
So “Carla” could’ve been “Carl” and the result would’ve likely been the same.
I even commented “Wow, tough crowd.” or something like that, to kinda point out that people were jumping on “Carla” for whatever reason. I wasn’t sure what was the deal, but I didn’t want to presume.
But ultimately, not my zoo, not my monkey, so let SB handle it as he sees fit. Check the IP, etc., and whatnot.
Chloe was really cool.
Looks like she was active on BLF for about 3.5 years.
I don’t know why she left, though.
By the way, I have accounts on many forums and on some of those forums my username or avatar are of a female.
If anyone suggests that I’m female, I tell them that I’m a guy, but that almost never happens.
I just don’t see why I should limit myself to male usernames or avatars.
I’ve been very lucky, and no one has treated me poorly (or hit on me) because they thought I was female.
I know that many women are treated poorly in real life and online just for being female and I don’t really know what the solution is other than myself personally trying to treat women with respect.
This is my take on it too. It’s not an excuse to treat another user unkindly just because they’re eccentric, but as it relates to this recent angle of the discussion, I’m pretty sure that misogyny wasn’t the reason in this case.
The rest of this reply is just a general response to the latest tack of this conversation, I’m not thinking about or directing this at anybody in particular.
I like to see the best side in people, and I’m sure that all of us here would feel terrible about having made a woman feel uncomfortable or undervalued. But on the other hand, one doesn’t have the prerogative of qualifying one’s own speech and actions as inoffensive, since offense is really in the eye of the offended party. So even if it was unintentional, anything that is perceived by others as unkind is not OK here, and that is how some users have reported feeling. This is especially true given the purpose of this forum, a place where people hang out voluntarily on their own free time, not just out of obligation to grit their teeth and bear it in order to maintain a job position. So as I mentioned in the OP:
I still think Carla may have been a bot, or someone just trolling with ChatGPT or a similar AI for post generation.
Reasons:
Using first name and last name on a web forum
Claiming a background in lights and a large volume of light-related forum reading but not knowing what a brass pill is by name
someohow competent enough to generate a graphic with detail bubbles to point things out, but also somehow ineptly compressing the images.
Note: some free web based AI tools have resolution limits for image generation
most detail bubbles indicated points of interest but the last one had 5 points indicating nothing in particular. Looked very much like what an AI might generate. See also images of humans with inexplicable extra limbs
posts which are at once highly ordered but poorly organized
the claim about being a former user and/or lurker is definitely something an AI would come up with if it parsed a lot of Introduction posts for patterns.
Please note that I am not condoning aggressive behavior without proof. Just pointing out that I think the mistrust was warranted and was not gender related.
I agree we should err on the side of caution at first to avoid dumping on someone who is neuro-atypical or is a second-language user with a translator.
Who knew a flashlight forum could evolve into free sensitivity training?
Free bonus kids.
if the AI offends someone’s feelings, but that person is not allowed to display that fact back to the Phantom Person in a human way for fear of hurting another members feelings, then exactly what is the point of dialog and /or free speech?
P. S> The Bots Are here.
What keeps someone from using AI and then adding the political/off color crap later and accomplish a false sense of “Ohh, it’s definitely human” ?
How about AI assisted human.
Had this problem on another board frequented. It’s here and everywhere.
Personally was not involved in this AI mess here or the one on the other board.
Peace out.
That is a pretty high bar. Especially when there are people that seem to look for ways to be offended. I mean, taken to the logical conclusion, no one could say much of anything because another might figure out a way to have their feelings hurt by it. Something that it seems to me that people are being conditioned to do with more frequency these days.
I do tend to try be very careful, but there have been instances where people entirely misinterpreted my intent. Resulting in their feelings getting hurt or them getting angry. I don’t know what to do about that. Especially in a text medium where people don’t really know me and without all of the social cues, that typically help indicate intent.
Then you have the situation where a third party decides to be offended about something said to another person. Even though that person was not offended. I ask how that can be avoided?
What is the solution, other than to never write anything? As I said, SB, your statement sets an almost impossibly high bar.
Being Australian i understand lots of people don’t like our casual use of language or don’t understand it lol. In a casual sense words are only words, here you can call your mate a knob or worse and he won’t get hes feeling hurt.
I wrote all this yesterday but the “slow post rate” of this thread said i couldn’t post till today. I touch on topics that the previous couple of posts talk about…
The key to any good relationship , no matter how tenuous, is good communication.
One cannot qualify one’s own speech BUT there is intent. If one unintentionally offends another then i see fit for the offended party to speak up and say that’s not okay for reasons ‘xyz’. Most would apologies as that was not their ‘intent’ to offend. Unfortunately when someone gets offended civil conversation usually devolves.
Wilful and intentional offence is of course not okay. What makes life difficul… err i mean fun is that everybody uses different ways to express themselves (even if it’s the same language i.e. English) and have different ways of interpreting/understanding and different levels of offence.
The recent thread in question was all over the place like a mad cow’s $#!T .
A side note on ‘intent’. Aussie mate language does not translate well (if at all) on the net. I could say something in jest to a mate and its taken as friendship banter. If i use almost literally the same words to someone i don’t like the words will be said and received as an offence. Intent and and understanding the other party is the key i.e good communication
