[Ibby]

I think there are a lot of posters here who frequently go too far. The Cellar has a bit of a tradition, at least in the few years i've been here, of being rather... well, bitchy and prickly, but it was a good-natured sort of prickly. I don't wanna name names or give examples, but I think the cellar has its own culture of good-natured prickliness. I know I personally, outside the cellar, have a similar good-naturedly prickly personality. But I think, especially lately, things have often escalated too far, and there are posters here - many of them - who frequently escalate things too far.

but i wouldn't have ever singled monster out as one of them. Or Ali, or Cloud, or Shaw, or Infinite Monkey, or Jim, or, well, a lot of other frequent posters. I'm not really going to weigh in on whether or not it's a valid concern - i've been absent for a long while - and this also isn't the time or the place to single out the dwellars whose behavior concerns me the most. But... aside from concerns i've previously recently raised about my own concerns about what has changed about the cellar recently, I think the culture of the cellar has also gotten... more entrenched. I used to hear a lot of talk about the Cellar as being like a coffee shop, and the attitude towards the community being like, if not a coffee shop, a bar (or group of people at a bar), where the banhammer comes out in cases where, metaphorically, people come in with no concern for the other patrons or the establishment and run amok. but lately, i feel like it's become less like the "coffee shop" metaphor that was, last i checked, the guiding metaphor for the cellar's operation, and more... just, groups of warring factions, taking it all personally. None of the posters I've recently heard being accused the most of this sort of thing are ones i've noticed, myself, going beyond reasonability - EXCEPT in the widespread cases of longstanding vendettas carrying over from thread to thread.

I think a LOT of people here could all stand to cool off, back off, adopt more of an attitude that promotes the "i'm sorry, i didn't mean to offend, i wasn't trying to be personal" mindset that builds the close-knit, "coffee-shop" attitude of, even when there's mutual dislike and distrust and hurt, putting the community first, and trying to avoid conflict instead of trade blows and perpetuate it.


all too often, I find that lately, the attitude is "fuck you, i can post whatever i want, i don't care what you think of it, fuck off if you dont like it, it's a free forum and a free country and it's my right to post whatever I want." I'm not going to say that any of that isn't true. But i think that the right to be an asshole sometimes (or all the time) should not come ahead of the responsibility to the community to be both polite and respectful in a wider sense (if not always on a conversation-by-conversation basis).

Basically, I think a long series of back-and-forths, whoever started it or whoever's to blame or whoever's the most guilty, has set into motion an altogether unhealthy atmosphere for the Cellar to have. I can remember when, for example, rkzenrage was banned, it was because he consistently and unapologetically violated the sort of social contract that the Cellar operated under. I feel like we're losing more and more of that sense of collective agreement and social contract and community. And threads like this only fan the flames.