On toxicity in forums

[Penthea]

I agree with the sentiment behind your post, but people in general are terrible to each other on the internet.

If you want to know what someone is really like, see how they act when they can hide behind an avatar.

[micropanther7]

In general I've found that the "suck it up" and "thicker skin" types are the ones with the thinnest skin. A little empathy and compassion never hurt anyone, and part of growing is realizing that what you say and do to other people has a real effect. Nobody's perfect, and we'll all have days where we're snippy with someone because of what's going on with us, but what's important is trying your best to control it and defuse a situation if one arises.

As far as forums themselves, the only way to discourage the kind of hostile and low effort arguments we're thinking about is heavy moderation. Communities won't police themselves, and toxic people corrupt those around them by driving away reasonable people who are discouraged by the vitriol, and encouraging those that remain to play at the same level. Of course, heavy moderation brings its own set of problems. I always hear people say you'll get banned easily on these forums, but I've taken some hard stances over the past few years on controversial topics and I haven't seen a ban once. I think what's most important is, if you're going to make a strong statement, to make it in good faith and with a clear contribution to the discussion as opposed to flame bait or drive-by posting.

I agree with the heavy moderation point,the problem is the moderation isn't nowhere near enough on most forums these days. Or the mods aren't visible at all, like here for instance, the only time anyone gets a ban hammer/temporary ban is if you swear (which I understand why they do that, I'm not arguing with that). I used to be a mod for ChickClick (sister site to IGN, got shut down in 2002, had huge forums!) where you'd have one or two mods in each subforum lol, that was heavy moderation for you Any trolling/baiting/flaming and your butt would be out of there Most forums nowadays seem pretty much like a free-for-all, especially gaming forums :P

With that being said, I personally feel that these forums are the best gaming forums I've been on, without heavy moderation that says a lot for our community as a whole.

[MoroMurasaki]

Sidenote: all of this is why PR people get paid a lot of money. Communication is hard, especially on the internet.

I appreciate your response!


There is nothing in there that I disagree with overall, I think that this median approach is generally superior in both reaching a wider group of people and not being overlooked.

My main isue is really not any of the ideas you present here, I simply interperet 'sticks and stones' to mean 'words are not violence, if you take issue with someone's harsh language first appreciate that they are using language to express themselves instead of violence'. I understand that this is not really an issue on the internet as words often are the most hurtful weapons we can use on each other. I really just have a problem with dismissing 'sticks and stones' out of hand. It is (to me) an important lesson to remember in terms of everyday life.

I completely agree that communication is particularly hard when all you have to represent your ideas is text. I work managing operations for a major North American retailer and often communicate important directives in plain text to large groups of people. I don't have the luxury of being able to tack on "loljk" or an emoji to most of my correspondance. I also think that my job might contribute to the brusque/aggressive way many of my posts here are taken but that's a discussion for another time.

Either way just wanted to say I totally understand where you're coming from here. While I may not agree with exactly how you impliment your communication style I do think it has value and works for many people.

[JunseiKei]

I thought it was having power.

"Nearly All Men Can Stand Adversity, But If You Want To Test a Man’s Character, Give Him Power"

Abraham Lincoln

“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.”

Lord Acton

As said before
1. Internet
2. It's a static written format – there is no nuance or tone and a conversation with many voices not in real-time.

By all accounts this is one of the better behaved forums I've seen.
You can generally judge how a thread is going to go by the title and topic – some are clearly more incendiary than others but again, the FFXIV forum seems pretty tame overall.

Pretty much this. Unless people know your particular mannerisms in typing and word choice to your own personal lexicon, people may take offense for something that was not meant to be offensive.

[BigRed5392]

snip

try WoW forums someone got temp ban from the game for 72 for asking the forum how to report someone (well 5 ppl) after they was called " the w h word for a lady of the evening"
the forum goers mocked the person over it, they said what they was called, and was temp ban from the forums and game.

no it wasn't me but a friend of mine. I get flack for typing on the behalf of my girlfriend, when she has me type for her due to the fact she has autism.

[Miste]

In the end I am very much behind the "sticks and stones" statement, especially when refering to annonymous online interactions.

I strongly believe that equating (or even comparing) verbal abuse with actual physical harm is fundamentally wrong. There are certainly people out there in the world (and internet) who are so effected by words, spoken or written, that it can drive them to mental instability but the fault in that situation is still with the person who is letting someone else get to them that way.

It is fine if you disagree, but I was mostly talking about in all aspects and not only online.

The last part of the "sticks and stones" statement is "words can never hurt me".

Words can never hurt is a lie and that is why I hate that saying and I really feel it has no place anywhere even online. Maybe some people in the world are completely immune to anything anyone ever says to them, but the thing is not everyone is and you have to take into account emotional and mental maturity which not everyone online, just as in real life, is an experienced adult either. You also have to take into account current mental state.

I am not saying that online we shouldn't try to tell people to ignore people who are cruel to them online and use tools to avoid those people like blacklists, but the thing is not everyone has the ability to ignore it completely. So you might be asking for someone to "get a thicker skin" when they simply aren't able to. Like I said not everyone has a mental state tough enough to handle it. Is online the best place for these people? Probably not...but the internet is used for so many things in today's world.

So I still hold the opinion that that saying is useless and it just tries to sweep aside the problem and I strongly disagree that the person who is not immune to verbal abuse is the one at fault. It is not their fault if they cannot handle verbal abuse.

I simply interperet 'sticks and stones' to mean 'words are not violence, if you take issue with someone's harsh language first appreciate that they are using language to express themselves instead of violence'. I really just have a problem with dismissing 'sticks and stones' out of hand. It is (to me) an important lesson to remember in terms of everyday life.

Words can be violence. Verbal abuse or physical abuse, both are forms of violence against a person. I have personal experience on why words can be violence which I won't get into.

I strongly disagree. No one should "appreciate" verbal abuse just because it isn't physical abuse. One is physical harm which you could argue "hurts more", but emotional and mental harm can hurt just as much and also can have just as much long term scars as physical.

I don't think it is an important lesson to teach a lie. Like I said "words can never hurt" is a complete lie.

I understand where you are coming from with the life lesson thing, but we need something better than this, old, dated, and really bad lie.

We need to advocate the truth, not a lie. The truth that sometimes words may hurt you, but you have to remember how important you are to your family, loved ones, and so on, and realize that the person trying to hurt you with those words doesn't matter; you matter. You have the power to overcome the hurt, not lie to yourself or others that the hurt doesn't exist.

[Angell]

>calls P2P game forums toxic.

Go and try F2P game forums or the games themselves. Then we talk whats toxic.

Thin skinned children everywhere nowadays. This is the only thing that irritates me beyond reason in ffxiv: how everyone is getting catered upon and they get spoiled to infinity.
Sure it's all great and nice and flowers and rainbows everywhere with sunshine in the background. Then you go cry to the mods/gms over the smallest argument.

Pathetic. I blame the SJWs for this spoiling.

[alimdia]

The word "toxic" always gets thrown around so easily, specially when someone dares to disagree with you in any topic. This forum does has a problem of people being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian whenever someone makes a suggestion (aka "this doesn't affect me but I don't want it just because"), but I wouldn't say that's toxicity.

But on the topic...

I tend to prefer the middle ground, honestly. Some posters do need 'thicker skin' and other posters need to take a step back and tone down their aggression from time to time.

The posters who are truly worthy of being taken seriously will be fairly 'middle of the road' and will be capable of agreeing to disagree.

I agree with this, there are people who are over aggressive and there are people who are oversensitive, unfortunately you can't control the first group, but belonging to the second group is your choice, you can choose to ignore aggressive people and hit the middle ground of agreeing to disagree, you don't have to argue with first group people unless you choose to, you don't even have to acknowledge them unless you choose to, if someone is being mean the solution is as simple as not reading chat or blacklisting, and the problem goes away.

[Miste]

The word "toxic" always gets thrown around so easily, specially when someone dares to disagree with you in any topic. This forum does has a problem of people being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian whenever someone makes a suggestion (aka "this doesn't affect me but I don't want it just because"), but I wouldn't say that's toxicity.

This is very true. Personally this forum doesn't seem very toxic to me. People have differing opinions and we all disagree with others sometimes but yeah it isn't really what I would call toxic. Toxic would be a lot of outright verbal harassment and I don't see that much on here. The mods would likely take care of that anyway.

[Aramina]

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog...mage-the-brain