Cyril Haearn wrote: ↑19 Apr 2021, 11:44am
We have a lot of expert amateur psychologists on these fora, they explain what others are trying to say, think, explain, feel
Can someone explain why one cares what others (hundreds of miles away, whom one shall never meet) think of one?
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Actually I do not care mostly. Anyone resorting to insults has lost the argument
I have no idea what this latest online argument you've got yourself into is, but going to an unrelated thread in order to complain about "expert amateur psychologists" who've resorted to insults and have therefore lost the argument isn't indicative of someone who doesn't care. But that's by the by - I'll leave you to have that discussion with whoever has upset you.
I've avoided responding to two recent-ish forum contributions of yours: I held my tongue about your attempt to derail the 'best wishes for Brucey' thread with your pedestrian crossing button pushing campaign and your more recent non-sequitur announcement to users of the eBikes thread that they were unsafe/antisocial. However, as the context here is a thread about moderation, I think this is an appropriate place for me to say my piece. (As we both know, you'll be getting our 'politeness moderator' to delete this pronto, but even though this particular essay is doomed for the dustbin, I'll be content that it's at least been said.)
The bizarre approach to moderation on this forum has sheltered you from the reactions you would normally expect to get in normal interactions with normal people. I actually found it painful to read the obviously-muted reactions to your uninvited contribution to the eBikes thread. People were clearly treading on egg-shells and avoiding saying what they really, and understandably, wanted to say to you. I'm no more interested in eBikes than you are, but I do understand that if I barge uninvited into a technical discussion between a group of enthusiasts to inform them of their moral failings, based on made-up data, they will rightly tell me to sling my hook, and I won't be surprised about that or complain.
Despite the above, I'm all in favour of your off-kilter contributions to this forum. It's the characters that liven up a forum and the 'robust' responses they get actually constitutes a democratic process by which the forum establishes its norms of what is and what isn't cricket. What I'm not in favour of is the terrible moderation, which means that anyone who responds to a forum character directly, honestly and robustly, no matter how justified that response, will be censored, whilst the original offending comment can get away with murder, providing it's cloaked in respectable language. What it's resulted in is a kind of 'Stepford Wives' situation (as we can see in the eBike thread) where people are basically forced to respond to inflammatory remarks with unnatural language, through gritted teeth and fake plastic smiles. If you're interested in living in some terrible 1970s sitcom, that fake veneer of politeness and respectability probably appeals to you, but there is not one person on this forum who is fooled by it. And consequently this forum just gets plagued by never-ending, ill-tempered sniping between the usual suspects, rather than a good old-fashioned blow-up, followed by (justified) moderation, a bit of wound-licking and the establishment of norms and boundaries.