Originally Posted By: First Amongst Daves

Why?


The RKMBs has an unhappy history of letting very one-eyed political views, of people who want to shout and not listen, overwhelm and eventually drive away a lot of good people. So now its just a handful of us left, and even then I rarely stray to those forums which are more rant than respect. Soon, you'll just be shouting into the darkness.

Maybe that's just message boards. I don't go to many of them anymore.


Actually, I thought I was lightening things up.

I ran across the photo of two leopards fighting and thought of this topic.

And before a few here went off the deep end, I always enjoyed that we for the most part explored the issues themselves, from both sides, and could generally agree to disagree, with a only a degree of overheated rhetoric. I'd say it started to get overly personal and ugly in the Canada allows same-sex marriage topic, where a few went for me in a really nasty personal way, and for the most part rather than retaliate I tried to just leave the topic.
Gee, I can't quite recall who it was that went after me so hard, making all kinds of wild assumptions about my beliefs and character. Some guy from Australia, maybe someone else here recalls...


But seriously. I've always done my best to stick to the issue, and to avoid personal attacks, at times firing back when enduring sustained attacks. And on a number of occasions I stopped posting for a month or two on the POLITICS forum, and moved to comics and media or women sections.

Respect and civility is a two-way street.

Now that some of the worst trolls from here are gone, I actually think it might be possible to rebuild these boards, without people who chased away new members as soon as they registered, as occurred in the past. I've always liked that these boards have a relatively small membership, where we've gotten to know each other pretty well, and it isn't such a huge group that we've lost that close-knit familiarity with each other, even in some of the more heated debates. On boards like Youtube or HuffingtonPost, I often can't even find my own posts later, let alone others' responses to them.

Maybe now that RKMB has survived its most gonzo period of trollery, and those members have supernova'd and moved on, maybe from the ashes we can find a new civility.