Has this site suddenly become more nasty?

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I don't see a increase in "personal attacks" so much as negative assumptions made of groups. If you are in said group you might feel "personal" about these assumptions.

Eventually the site might have to be split into support and blunt sections. I know it's a wimpy cliché but I really do see both sides of the argument. There should be a place for both. There is the old saying that Freedom of Speech is not unlimited, you can't "yell fire in a crowded theater". Being too blunt in a place with a high amount of people with suicide ideation is an equivalent of yelling fire in a crowded theater in my view. Big I really do see the point of people saying that after a life of continually holding back if they can't "Let it go" at an autism site that is psychologically damaging.
The big problem as Fnord mentioned will be spillover. To me that is an issue of moderating correctly. Right now Wrong Planet does not have enough moderators to enforce this now. In the meantime we could stop assuming everybody just knows PPR and L and D is the place to be blunt and the Haven is "huggly wuggly" . Let's be autistic about this. Very specific rules and purposes can be set up for each section and everybody can be PM'ed or emailed this information one a month.

Since we're not likely to have more moderation anytime in the near future, it is left up to us to police our own behavior.

"The Haven" is for people to express their woes without fear of ridicule or reprimand.

"PP&R" is for people to argue, but without personal insult or profanity.

"Love & Dating" is somewhere in between - you can express your heartbreak, but expect criticism from anyone who thinks that it's you who is in the wrong.

Other than that, "friendly disagreement" is the norm.

I used to be able to post if I was confused by something and get a nonsarcastic explanation. A lot of what was written was straightforward.

Now there's many times it seems like the real life game of guessing who means what under the surface has to be engaged in, and negative things seem to be written that reflect someone's bad mood, or an attack, as much or more than the poster meaning what they write directly.

So yes, to me it is more negative.

*pops popcorn*
*runs over to PPR*

So that is were all the fun and frolics is? Who knew...

This place is pretty low on the snark.

I think most WP users don't have a problem with "blunt" (i.e. giving an honest opinion), nor nice (still giving an honest opinion, without attacking over and over while realising the other person is getting upset), the issue is about people who will intentionally "pick a fight" just to get a reaction, and/or who will, under the pretext of being "logical" (which in most cases they are not, they are just opinionated and believe their opinion is more logical than the other person's), repeatedly attack another person's comments (and this while they perfectly realise the person is getting upset).

And I'm not sure about the "blunt" or "nice" background, personally many members of my family are very blunt generally (some are even cruel sometimes), but eventho I tend to be blunt (and got spanked a lot for that), I never mean to be rude, and I don't upset people intentionally (which is why often, as I was getting spanked, I was wondering what I had done wrong). I prefer kindness and good will to intentional rudeness (I stress the word "intentional") and conflicts, I have had so much of that with my family, and elsewhere in "real life", I really don't need to go out of my way to look for more of it.

Pretty much nailed it. I've spent most of my life trying to be "nice", to fit in and not be weird. I was seriously emotionally repressed from childhood onwards: you probably would be too if you'd had my childhood. But my temperament and undiagnosed ASD made it even harder for me to express myself.

The internet changed all that; in fact I went nutso for a few years. I had an unmoderated set of forums which were my playground. I've since got the worst excesses out of my system and have no desire to return to them. However, for the past 5 years or so I would say my internet self has been relatively stable and isn't likely to drastically change over the next 5 or 10 years.

I'm reasonably content with who I am now and don't particularly want to change. I see no mileage in trying to please people or to be excessively nice to them. If this was Reddit, I'd have about a million downvotes by now and about 10 upvotes: thank god this site isn't Reddit. Or even Facebook.



For a practising psychologist, you don't appear to be very good at comprehension. Please find me one post of mine where I said I "hate" you.

For whatever it's worth, I do not hate you. I don't think I even dislike you. Yes, you profoundly irritate me, but I do not hate you. I just don't like what you're doing lately: correct me if I am wrong, but what you seem to be doing is making a concerted effort to censor people.

Thing is, I used to be an admin of a small but active forum. People said dumb sh!t all the time which I disagreed with, but I never deleted or edited anything. If I was admin of this site (hey, you never know: if Alex stood down and then a million more WP members... ), I feel pretty sure from past experience I wouldn't censor you, no matter how much you irritated me.

However, if you were admin I think you'd apply the banhammer to me so fast your head would spin. Even if you didn't bring down the banhammer, then you'd probably censor my posts to ribbons.

I don't want the forum that you want. There is a fundamental conflict here, but it doesn't mean I hate you: I just don't want to behave the way you want me to behave.

Last edited by NiceCupOfTea on 28 Dec 2014, 9:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Who has the time to report people? Maybe I'm just hanging on the wrong forums...

NCoT..did you survive the holidays okay?

Do you think this might be because we communicate in writing here which most people here are probably more comfortable with and therefore write more and communicate more? Also in writing there is more time and also less social pressure so that more support leans toward the social-emotional side? I can really see that being the case. If you think about it, in a land-based, physical AS support meeting, you'd get a lot of people who are uncomfortable or just not very verbal at explaining things perhaps and there is a time limit too so people will be aware of that and not say everything they mean to say. On top of that, most would be hesitant or have great difficulty even expressing feelings and emotions physically. Then in a physical meeting, you also have opportunity for social anxiety to play its part. Like, online allows for more complete disclosure of thoughts and feelings while providing that "privacy" one might crave or need. And online people don't have to think about how they look and how to express or think about what the other person is expressing. It's mostly words here with little or no pressure to "perform".

There's a nice new shiny green "Report" button on every post now... :-/

Yeah, I survived the holidays okay, thanks. Been surprisingly smooth really. No rows, meltdowns, etc. Got a bit meltdown-ey today, but fortunately it didn't materialise into anything substantial... >.>

The psychopath forum may be less huggy and supportive.
I mean it might seem huggy and supportive at first, but you know they don't really mean it.

I appreciate kind people and I respect their wishes, but I'm not one of them myself. I wouldn't enjoy at all if 'support site' was enforced and I was unable to communicate in the ways I have done since registering.

I'd definitely leave.

The psychopath forum I visited was a few people talking about wanting to kill kittens and taking advantage of their girlfriends while feeling nothing for them, so it was not huggy and supportive at all.

I don't think people worry about "preforming" at support groups but you do have multitasking, in my case often conversation has "moved on" before I can fully react to what was said.

I could probably have chosen better words for my proposed model. Blunt and nice aren't as extreme as it gets, for sure. I think sometimes a destructive argument can be triggered from a personality clash between a blunt person and a nice person.




It's clearly more complicated than my model might suggest, yes. I'm not saying that every conflict is accidentally caused by the culture shock between blunt and nice types.

I had similar problems with my family. My parents were very blunt with each other so naturally I copied their style, and it wasn't well-received at all.

These days I generally prefer nice, though it has its problems if it's taken too far. In my first workplace, one research worker regularly expressed his frustration at everybody being too polite to criticise his plans for his experiments. I never managed to do that, possibly because he was the boss. But I did see that he was right. I'm sure that criticism, when done properly, helps a group to do well.

No - I find WP to usually be quite sensitive and supportive. Sure it has its moments of contention. But if I compared WP with the comment sections on anything controversial on say youtube - or on the couple of political oriented Internet forums I have participated in - WP is like a loving, caring Internet family. I guess it is all relative though.

If 2014 was a day in the life of WP - well, it's had better days. Too many good, long-term members left this past year - largely due to the strident tone in some of the forums.

As my lovely wife often remarks: "it's not what you say it's how you say it".

I believe everything can be said and every opinion can be voiced with grace, courtesy, consideration, and kindness.

Let's hope 2015 can be better.