Dear ILE - a plea

did NB introduce this concept?

was it just an honest approach? taking what already happened on ILE and ILM to a logical conclusion?

-- resumo impetus (n...), February 14th, 2007.

It was right is everyone's face, Tyler and I just made it visible. It was on the tip of everyone's tongue, Tyler and I just gave it a name.

Also Sam OTM about ownership.

Some people will find a way to perpetuate feuds and things no matter how much others ignore them or remove themselves. Almost anyone can occasionally act dickish. Usually it says more about what is going on in their own lives, than in the life of ILX - until it takes a major blowup to set ILX acquivvering.

This thread itself has revealed just what different views different people on ILX have about ILX. It's certainly been illuminating in that way. I've generally been feeling relentlessly "OTM" to Accentmonkey.

I suppose you're right about the flameculture of NB infecting ILE, Stevem.

this is steve from forever ago and i don't know if it's entirely serious, but, no! to it all.

xpost

Kate, you're probably the most likely to fit in on the noise board of all the people who dislike it!!!

There was a board where my name was verboten to the point where accounts were deleted for mentioning me offhand. Funny, after I left (4 years ago?), the community decayed to nothing.

Yeah, ditto.

and i don't know if it's entirely serious,

of course it was serious

ok, well, again, i think it's a terrible idea. the all-in-together messiness and the friction of ile is its strength, maybe its ONLY strength. thread balkanization is one thing; more and more board balkanization will be the heat-death of the whole enterprise, i'm sure of it.

M Grout so OTM!

I do think that if a thread has started to discuss (or avoid) a certain specific subject, people should stick to the topic for the most part. If other subjects arise, new threads can come up. (the way that the "Self" thread evolved out of the "dating non-vegetarians" thread, to me, was a very good example of that.)

In a perfect world, one wouldn't need the concept of "ownership" over threads, because people would be reasonable and polite and not drag threads off topic unduly (Something I used to do myself terribly, before I had the 'Cooler thread to corral all my current obsessions into.) or degenerate into personalness. But the world is not perfect, and threads *do* get prematurely atrophied - or unreasonably blown up into hellish conflicts - when it would have been a lot more interesting if they had stuck to their original remit.

people, here, are exactly like how they are, "for real." i think a lot of times they don't even know how, but they are.

what so there is some sort of ceiling to balkanisation? anymore and the engines cannae take it cap'n? doubt this myself

again all i am advocating is a quicker move towards what started happening 2/3 years ago. logical progression and conclusion. because i don't think this thing has a reverse gear.

I'm often more charming, witty, and better looking here.

(Take no notice, I have no Idea what I mean by that, I think)

This whole spectacle hasn't really been edifying for anyone especially Lex and Dom. FWIW the post Lex linked to wasn't about Dom getting dumped nor was it about a suicide attempt, but it did paint Dom in a very poor light indeed which is probably why a) he got so enormously pissed off and b) he made up that suicide stuff as an appeal to sympathy and a way of winning a fight.

Many xposts - using the noise board as a scapegoat for everything that's wrong with ILX is disingenous considering the real bitter rivalries stretch back way before that and the noise board was actually set up in the first place to keep this stuff OFF the rest of ILE.

The point is that the people going "ooh you are all being nasty and bullying" and the people going "ooh you people are just being oversensitive" are NEVER going to agree so there's no point in even having this argument.

The problem with zing culture is its BORING. You open any thread and then there's the same four or five posters all zinging each other and you can tell THEY'RE not even finding it particularly entertaining, they're just doing it because they're bored and they can't stop posting. Enrique did it about four posts into this thread with that knackered old Mark C/Pringles meme that surely only the most easily amused can still find funny. It's fucking annoying for the rest of us to have to trawl though as well.

Might I add that I think the turning point for ILX was when the number of posters who didn't know or care about Freaky Trigger exceeded the number of posters who did?)

This is OTM I think, the moment when the sense of cohesive community sort of evaporated and as did any claim to some sort of universal 'ethos' of the boards. And although Ethan asks can someone please name any of the intelligent, enriching, worthwhile posters who left because ilx was 'too mean'? it's pretty clear that the likes of Tom E, Mark S, John D and so forth stopped posting as much (if not left) because the overall atmosphere was something they didn't really want to be involved in.

so I could edit messages and embed audio after ILE banned me from doing it!

yeah no-one is really saying this. see my post re 'boards vs boards' mentality.

But the world is not perfect, and threads *do* get prematurely atrophied - or unreasonably blown up into hellish conflicts - when it would have been a lot more interesting if they had stuck to their original remit.

they got exactly as interesting, or not, or atrophied, or blown up, based on what the people participating in them wanted at the time. look, this is a market, not a project. you have to take the occasional shitty outcomes with a little zen grimace and just get on to the next thing, srsly.

as i SAID, but i expect nothing less from them so it had less impact.

There are some subjects on which I'd rather have one post an hour, which was on topic and thought out - than 100 posts in a row of meaningless chatter and nastiness.

not a week seems to go by on watercooler threads without some massive argument about what can and can't be talked about on them.

It reminds me of that Twilight Zone movie where the kid had special powers and turned his house into a cartoon world, and nobody dared say anything against him.

i *might* be exaggerating a little there tho

Sometimes I like to take a kitten in a can, chew it up, and use the resulting paste as a sandwich spread between two intact kittens in cans.

I get this with Jon too, but it's probably 50% projection (and he must surely expect it if not enjoy it).

Yeah, I forgot to say, that's brilliant.

-Football/sport
-Big Brother/reality TV shows

That's the point of them. If a person wishes to talk about those things, there are dozens of other threads on ILX on those subjects.

People may say that it's random that I picked those two specific subjects to ban, but it's not. Those are the things that people chatter about when they've got nothing else to talk about. The rest of the world - well, my bloody office, people in the pub and on the bus - I have to put up with it there, I want to just draw a line in the sand where I do not have to listen to it.

The early pre-cooler thread was an experiment to find out that if those "substitute for conversation" topics were banned, what would people talk about? Would they feel freer to talk about themselves and their own lives/concerns? What other things would people chat about? Now, obviously, it turned out to be a success, and there is a culture there which a lot of people enjoy and stay for - EVEN WHEN THEY DON'T LIKE ME. Funny, that.

As ILX has got nastier, I've got more defensive on them, yes.

And people have joined in the conversation/atmosphere who don't understand the principles of why those certain things are banned, and then go off and start massive rows when asked not to talk about sport and/or reality TV programmes. Which again, makes me defensive that the 'Cooler is getting ... *infected* with the whole culture it was trying to avoid.