I'm not going to link to it

[james_davis_nicoll]

Because I think doing so could have the undesirable effect of facilitating hostile attention on a community I like but I will say Artcomm is making me consider adding "everything is worse with doctrinaire polyamorists" to my list of tags. oh, except it's too long to be a tag. Bother. And so is " if you were more evolved you'd agree with me."

Comments

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

I had similar feelings back when I had a larger LiveJournal friendslist. There were 2 people who posted daily -- and that is not hyperbole, I promise -- about how they were more evolved than monogamists. Their comments about asexuals and transpersons were downright offensive. Both had dozens of friends who would agree with them, which meant I often saw up to 50 people a day saying wholly offensive things about everyone else's sexuality.

To be fair, I've seen similar phenomena with libertarians, atheists, childless/childfree, and Kibologists.

[ms-danson.livejournal.com]

What is a kibologist?

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

My standard answer is "You don't want to know," but I'll be good: Someone who posts/posted on alt.religion.kibology on Usenet. The Wikipedia article has been written by those who have deemed themselves "most prominent members", so that tells you a little bit about the kind of people they can be.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The group was basically just subject to the usual geek social fallacies, abetted by the merry-prankster ethos. They weren't all assholes, but there was extreme toleration of assholes.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

The further away I get from ARK, the more I realize how extremely problematic it was. I'm not just talking about the pseuicide, which I figure everyone thinks has colored my memories of Kibology, yet which in reality doesn't matter in my overall impression of ARK and how many Kibologists behaved. People were valued as commodity in a deliberate effort to form a hierarchical culture; in retrospect, it's surprising that someone didn't come up with some kind of numerical cataloging technique to place an actual worth on each poster/regular. And the biggest trolls claimed to do it for the lulz, but in reality did it to spread this hierarchy to other areas of the 'net, indulging their compulsion to judge everyone they encountered. The end result was humor that unfortunately often disguised bigotry and an inability to form appropriate relationships within a group.

The sheer amount of toxic people ARK attracted has been unparalleled in any other forum I've been to with the exception of one anonymous one; that said, on the anon forum, it would be impossible for me to tell how many of those anonymouses are really one person pretending to be several.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I had a privileged view of the whole thing, having gotten into a central position more or less by accident. The competitive element energized me to write funny stuff back then, but at the cost of denying the ugly aspects of it to myself.

I remember the time Sam managed to cheese off a bunch of regulars by having the gall to suggest that a particularly antisocial cross-group trolling session was not OK. One of them told me to give her a good talking-to and set her straight, apparently without realizing we were dating (but it would have been pretty creepy regardless). It was one of the very few times I actually flew off the handle.