Anachostic

In any other year, I would have simply rolled my eyes.  But in the current sociopolitical climate, the message raised my eyebrows.

I have had a hard time finding an online home.  Online forums are full of nothing but toxic and bitter people.  Everywhere you go, you  run into people who just can’t help themselves from cutting other people down for whatever reason.  The anonymity of the Internet gives them the power to do so without recourse.  I’ve wondered more and more lately if it was a good thing to make the internet accessible to all.

So, I had been settled into a new forum.  It had a very, very strict rule about not bringing up politics or religion in any way.  While that boundary was pushed occasionally, it was a line no one stepped over.  And the forum seemed to thrive for it.  There was some bickering over tastes and preferences, but that goes with my previous observation about general Internet usage.

This particular forum has no advertising and runs an annual donation drive for its expenses.  Maybe a little unusual, but it seems to have been working for a long time.  I did donate last year, maybe $20.  This year, I don’t know.  As ironic as it was, a pinned message was posted just above the pinned message for the donation drive with a new order from the owner.

The order was: if you are going to write a review for others to read, you must publish the review in the forum.  You may not link to a review posted on your personal blog.  If you do, the post will be flagged as spam and removed.  If you continue to do it, your account will be closed.

I can’t really express the feelings I got when I read that.  Maybe it doesn’t sound as bad here, where I’ve paraphrased it, but the literal words that punched me in the gut were, "directing us away from the forum".

Let me start on the positive.  I sort of understand.  This is a very popular forum.  I suppose the owner would not want people simply joining his site and taking advantage of a large audience to get some ad revenue and traffic to their own site.  Maybe that feeling is amplified because the owner doesn’t have advertising of his own, so why should others get the benefits of his site’s popularity?  And also, he didn’t specifically say you couldn’t copy your personal work into a post on his forum, because well, that’s what a forum is.  He’s not demanding exclusivity (unlike those fuckers at AlbumArtExchange).

So then, where’s my problem with it?  It’s that wording.  Posting a link isn’t taking any traffic away from you.  They have links set up properly where they always open in a new tab – you aren’t losing your place.  Second, this is the way of the Internet.  It’s how it was conceived and how it should be.  You link to related and relevant content.  You don’t try to be authoritative for everything.  Yahoo and AOL tried that and look how it worked for them.  The Internet is meant to be open and free and exploratory.  It’s not healthy to stay stuck in one place and get all your information from one site.  Some leaders are attempting that now and look how well it’s working for them.  Actually, don’t look at how well that’s working.  Look at the consequences of how well that’s working.

"Don’t leave" is never a good thing to hear from someone.  There’s the pleading, "don’t leave", then there’s the threatening, "don’t leave", and when you can’t tell the difference which one it is, that’s the worst of all.  And that’s unfortunately when you really should leave.