My opinion about how things have changed at DU over the past six years.

[Mike 03]

I hope this doesn't violate any rules, but constantly the issue comes up: Is DU really more unfriendly now that than it ever was, or used to be.

That is a legitimate question.

This is my very biased, admittedly subjective answer.

In 2003, I never hesitated to ask a question at DU, having no fear that I would get attacked, or that someone would read into my question some secret agenda.

I just wanted to learn, and the people here at DU were my teachers on numerous topics, from war to law, to science or health.

This was a place to learn.

To the credit of DU, that remains, for the most part, a truth, at least so far as the questions I ask here.

But I also think there is a pervasive cynicism that is undermining, to some extent (and I say this very respectfully, with a full appreciation of how intelligent most DUers are) the basic curiosity and freedom that many of us feel to just ASK.

I can't speak for others, but so many times I just want to be able to ASK a question and receive opinions without being attacked for asking the questions.

Not everyone has a bias.

Sometimes people just want to know what those who are more experienced think.

It hurts to get attacked for just asking, when you genuinely want to know...

[Cant trust em]

1. It's sad, but I agree.

God forbid I agree with the President.

[jgraz]

2. Y'know, I was going to make a smartass comment

Something like "of course YOU would post something like this", but given the responses that people have posted in the past, I couldn't figure out any wording that would make it obviously satire.

Sad but true.

[TahitiNut]

3. Try hard to distinguish between an attack on WHAT you post and an attack on YOU.

There's a big difference. (It often doesn't seem that difference is understood.)

:shrug:

[annabanana]

4. When I first got here in early '04, I asked a question

and was poked a couple of times as a "concern troll".. I was a complete message board newbie at the time and was hurt & confused.

I don't think it's changed too much overall. There are a few more expert shit-stirrers and well practiced beasts, but only a few. If you're a semi-regular at any given time of the day it's not too hard to negotiate around them and still have a good discussion.

[rwheeler31]

5. Seeking answers is never a bad thing. Too many have no

answers just preconceived notions.

[Dyedinthewoolliberal]

6. I feel I should chime in too,

When I found it in 2002, DU was certainly smaller, though even then too large to really allow someone to know ALL the registered posters. Nonetheless it was different in that there was more of a unified feeling, and 'us against them' feeling. The 'them' being those who wanted to rush to war.
Since then we have become involved in many more things political, cultural and societal. A few years ago it felt like everyone had a right to be heard, regardless of the opinion expressed or more importantly, the questions asked.
Recently I have put some things on here and been practically accused of being an 'agent provocateur' or deliberately bringing up things here that others felt didn't need to be 'spread.'
Some of us seem to feel they are the conscience for this board or a watchdog or something. They appear to want to screen everyone's postings for validity and content.
It's been pointed out in another thread if I read a post I don't like, or something about the poster irks me, we have the ignore feature. I do not have to read, join in or take part in any thread that I disagree with. I don't have to be a snapping, barking dog and try to run everyone off. We are not in charge here. We are only posting opinions, ideas and information to share. This isn't a policy making board or a decision making group. It's a bunch of concerned citizens trying to reach out to others who share the same values and ideas, more or less.
So please friends, and you know who you are, take it easy. Life is already hard enough without having to fight a battle here too.
Thanks! :toast:

[obliviously]

7. I am new

and I have found out in most cases it is better to just read the comments and move on. If you comment on political post and are new you are like a chunk of raw meat on a beach full of seagulls.

[Fumesucker]

11. Not trying to be condescending..

But DU is like nap time at the preschool compared to some online venues.

I learned my political posting chops on the usenet political newsgroups nearly two decades ago, the savagery there has to be experienced to be believed, completely unmoderated and anything at all goes.

A hide like a rhinoceros is definitely something you will want to develop if you continue posting online, even non political groups can get pretty damn caustic. A few years back I got called unfit to reproduce on a high fidelity forum simply for my opinion on headphones.

Things were *really* bad shortly after 9/11/2001 if you had any other opinion than "Nuke Mecca", I got kicked off one of the premier amateur astronomy forums on the intertubez after thousands of posts for expressing an opinion that invading Afghanistan was going to be a mistake in the long run.

[obliviously]

12. I just try to

stick with subjects that aren't to controversial or I just joke around. It's not worth running your blood pressure up over. I seem to be more conservative than many of the posters here. I am more the John kennedy Herbert Humphrey type I don't think the party is much interested in them anymore.

[Fumesucker]

14. Umm.. Richard Nixon would be a liberal by today's standards..

Wage and price controls, the EPA..

Hell, Nixon even had single payer national health care on his agenda and stifled it for arcane political reasons.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/226/story/22163.html

The trick is not to take this stuff personally, it's those who you love who can hurt you the most, people you don't know can't really do anything to you unless you let them.

[obliviously]

15. Richard Nixon

was very liberal you could have called him a rockefeller republican. He opened up dialog with china and paved the way to native american sovereignty two noble liberal causes of the time which he was much criticized for by conservative republicans. I often wondered how different the world would have been if Humphrey would have won. As far as I know he was never accused of any corruption during his political career.

[Fumesucker]

18. Yup, only Nixon could go to China..

I remember seeing an interview with both Humphrey and Goldwater on PBS shortly before AuH2O passed on, they basically said they didn't disagree on much at all any more.

Would that we could get back to something like that these days.

[obliviously]

19. It is a dangerous world

coming I am concerned for the young. We are spending their future now. We will soon see the beginning of wars that will effect everyone enjoy your time with your families now.

[Fumesucker]

22. It has always been a dangerous world..

"The future's uncertain and the end is always near" -Jim Morrison

I have three grandkids I worry a lot about, I'm heavily involved in their lives and am trying to as gently as possible prepare them for what I foresee darkly.

I wish more people in America had even a tenuous grasp of history, as Mark Twain once said, history doesn't repeat itself but it does rhyme.

If we do not know where we have been we haven't a chance of seeing where we are going.

[Sebastian Doyle]

26. Nixon was a Bush Crime Family tool for his entire political career

But he was also born and raised a Quaker. And maybe growing up with that value system allowed him to moderate his positions somewhat, at least as far as the environment goes, and a few other areas. Not enough to get out of Vietnam, unfortunately.

[obliviously]

28. Who got us out of vietnam?

[H2O Man]

36. The people of Vietnam.

[noamnety]

16. No offense, fumesucker, but

you probably shouldn't have been trying to reproduce on a forum in the first place. :P

[Fumesucker]

21. Rimshot..

Good one..

In my defense though it *was* a forum dedicated to sound reproduction. :)

[chill_wind]

24. ! Dang, that's good DUzy stuff, you two. :-)

eom

[Blue_In_AK]

29. I pretty much let people have their opinions,

but it pisses me off when they attack me for having mine. I won't even mention the topic, but there's a certain subject that comes up periodically here that brings comments to me like "Do you hang out with Michael Vick?" or "You must enjoy shooting wolves from helicopters, too." These are people who don't know me, with whom I've not interacted much, so I shouldn't care -- but I get annoyed and then I get sarcastic -- and I really don't like that side of myself.

I've had similar conversations with these people enough times now that I confess to sometimes jumping the gun with snarkiness. But I don't call people names, and I don't insult them. We can agree to disagree without resorting to personal attacks.

[Omaha Steve]

8. I don't think I have ever attacked anyone

Disagreements have really been very few. Democratic success brings trolls and R's in disguise. I hope that is the biggest part of the problem.

[annabanana]

23. I suspect there is much truth in this possibility. I'm sure there are now

at least a FEW people who's actual, paid profession is to disrupt & shit-stir here at DU.

[donco]

9. I wasn’t around here then but

it could be that there is much people here now, and with more people comes more opinions and paranoia, add eight years of bush to the paranoia… :shrug:

[Fumesucker]

10. Now that the Democrats are in control things are a lot different..

Back when DU was almost entirely about opposing bushie and the Repubs people were much more unified, now there is a great deal of infighting and friction between different factions.

It's entirely predictable and quite understandable really, cats are veritable herrings compared to Democrats. The biggest single division I see is between those who want to support most if not all Democrats just because they are Democrats and those who are more focused on policies and results.

[Blue_In_AK]

30. I'm a "policies and results" person.

I think you've very accurately described the divide.

[asteroid2003QQ47]

35. You nailed it, Fumesucker, but you're too kind.

It's been my observation that the "policies and results" people you describe have been overwhelmed here by the "Democrats just because they are Democrats."
The plethora of PHOTO threads and their like suggest the "Dems JBTA Dems"
would, in the interest of accuracy, be better labeled the Cult of Personality People.
Their zeal serves to cripple the afore mentioned "results" people and
is manna to the entropy of human thought!
-----------------------------------------------

The flame will cool tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow.... But someone must see this already today, and speak heretically today about tomorrow. Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought.
--Yevgeny Zamyatin,
(On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters, 1923)

[dusmcj]

13. complacency and self-satisfaction cause "we" won (no, "you" didn't, someone did it for you)

and then there's the flogging into meaninglessness of the word "progressive". Pretty much the same as 8 years of DNC emails that may not have had any worthwhile content, but they sure had the word 'fight' in the subject line.

Cause and effect are not suspended at our convenience.

[leftyclimber]

17. I think when active membership was smaller it was easier to hunt down civil discussion.

I'm not talking about the number of people registered; I'm talking about the number of people who actively participate in discussion.

I've been both a mod and an admin on some rather tendentious, interest-related sites. The same thing has happened there: the signal-to-noise ratio keeps getting more and more ridiculous.

I lurked here for a long time before I officially signed up with DU (thanks, Randi Rhodes, for your website being down and referring us here), but when active participation was lower it was easier (a) to find more civil discussion and (b) to sort through nonsense to find said civil discussion. Now that there are more people here and trying to get their post count above 1,000 (a normative measure here of whether you have posting cred or not) there is a lot more nastiness in trying to get to and maintain said civil discussion.

It's a growing pain for any large discussion site, and the determinant factor in whether that site lives or dies in its original form. In my experience there is some sort of transformation and the original intent either stays or goes in the interest in keeping the site alive both in post counts and in funding to keep the site going.

My personal crackpot theory is that AOL discovered that there was a whole other internet outside of AOLworld. regardless of what I may have said previously. ;)

(PS. You're a sweetie, Mike. :loveya:)

[uppityperson]

20. 2004, when I joined, I was attacked mightily for asking a question

After many attacking replies, and replies from me, and then attacking and mocking replies back, and many more attempts to clarify, I asked for the thread to be locked and did not start another OP for some time.

I agree with you "It hurts to get attacked for just asking, when you genuinely want to know", but disagree in that it is a new thing.

[20score]

25. What I've noticed, and I was just a lurker for years, is that people are more likely

to insult for no apparent reason now. Whether someone misspelled something, or whatever extremely minor offense set them off, it's fairly pervasive. I used to argue with right-wingers on Fark and expected cutting comments, but this was supposed to be a place where people could discuss policy, etc. We were all on the same team. The vast majority are great, but there seems to be at least one asshole in every thread over twenty comments.

I've just accepted that and it doesn't bother me anymore. Well, as much anyway.

[unblock]

27. someone once ask lorne michaels if he though saturday night live had gone downhill

and he said, truth is, it was never all that good.

and he was right.

those of us who remember the early seasons recall with nostalgia the great skits and the novelty of it and the great characters and actors. but in reality, dan ackroyd was not a better actor than will farrell, and john belushi was not any funnier than tina fey. and nobody liked garrett morris. and they always had lame skits that went on way too long. usually it was best to just go to sleep after weekend update. and with a few notable exceptions, the bands sucked.


i think du is a bit the same way. we've always had our troubles but we've always had our great moments as well, and we simply view the past differently from how we view the present. it was different then, but not necessarily better.

as to your particular point, there were indeed people on this board who criticized people at the drop of a hat, and sometimes for merely asking a questions. it's in the nature of internet discussion boards in general, and political ones even more so. some people are simply going to infer a motive or bias that isn't necessarily there. and others will simply be stupid and misunderstand. still others are going to stubbornly push their own agenda at every opportunity. nothing new here, that's always been a part of du.

there's still no better discussion board around, the software is the best i've seen on any board, the topics are varied, the level of authority and standard of research are excellent, and it double as a wonderful news filter. it will never be perfect, but the good vastly outweighs the bad.

[asteroid2003QQ47]

32. Long live lively debate and "internet discussion boards."

Where would we be without them?
----------------------------------

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate
-Noam Chomsky, Linguist, foreign policy critic

[Lyric]

31. When I first found DU, I was terrified to post anything.

I saw all of these people who seemed *incredibly* knowledgeable and informed, and I felt inferior--like I had nothing to add. It took me a year of lurking to work up the nerve to make an account, and even then, I stayed in the Lounge. But slowly I came to realize that much of what appeared to be "expert" opinions were really just conjectures wrapped in fancy language. Since then, I've posted my opinions without fear, and I've had more than one thread reach the front page. It turns out that there aren't enough voices from the low-income impoverished community, and that DU'ers are interested in what people like me have to say.

My advice is to keep posting--I firmly believe that there's a "voice" inside of all of us that's wanted and needed, if we can only find the courage to set it free. Goodness knows that this has been true for me.

:hug:

[GeorgeGist]

33. I can't say I recall the question ...

nor do I see a definitive answer.

[omega minimo]

34. What was the comment you got? Anything constructive or just crap?

:hi: