...is that good men do nothing.
There have been dozens of bad apples on the forums over the years, people with bad behaviors that cause the problems - trolls, antagonists, downright assholes that get their jollies causing other people misery and grief. But not enough of the good people stand up and say something, confront it, or demand something be done about it.
Ignoring a problem does not make it go away.
Now the boards are falling into apathy, decay, and anarchy, and people are upset that Bopp is giving up on it?
On the one hand, I sympathize with Ryan. It's disheartening seeing how people behave and treat each other. It's hard not to become depressed over it. It's hard to have any hope for the future of humanity and the world when you see on a daily basis how cruel and how stupid humans can be. It's frustrating to be the target of these kinds of disgusting people. Or to feel that you cannot express your own thoughts and ideas for fear of being vicuosly attacked by these wolves. Who even wants to be around people like that? A lot of good posters have disappeared.
On the other hand, I have to blame Ryan in part for not doing enough about it, to keep out the riff-raff and trouble makers. He absolutely refuses to use mandatory registration which would give him the one tool that would truly and effectively ban people. Instead, he tries to rely on banning by IP address and we already see folks that are banned still being able to post because they post from a different IP address. Trouble makers are able to post using various IP addressess and using multiple handles (the age old technique called "nym-shifting") and continue to cause problems. Further, he bans some trouble makers, but not others, often times based on his own personal biases for or against them.
Some have pondered why we can't "just behave"? to monitor and police ourselves? That never works because there are always those who refuse to conform to the standard of policing their own behavior. And there will always be others who are willing to engage those miscreants. Therefore the need to have rules and regulatory mechanisms along with capable regulators to control those who do not control themselves never goes away. Failure to do so only results in chaos.
This is how societies are constructed or disintegrate. They must have definitions of what's acceptable behavior. The community must decide what it is willing to accept, and then must actively work to exclude that which it does not accept. Simply ignoring what it does not accept will not make it suddenly go away.
But then, as another saying goes, the only constant in the world is change. Times are changing. The world is changing. Technology is changing. The internet is changing. People are changing. What's important to people is changing. How people communicate is changing. Perhaps that Earthboppin' is changing and might dissappear altogether is just another constant in the ever changing world.
Brian
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