On toxicity in forums

[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.

[MoroMurasaki]

Miste's thoughtful (but very long) post.

I think the bottom line of our disagreement is that we have different functional definitions of the words hurt and violence. I still stand by my meanings for them personally but I understand coming from your views on them why the 'sticks and stones' adage seems outdated and detrimental. Due to some irl experiences with both sides of this coin I understand that my view may be the less common one but that doesn't sway my beliefs in the slightest.

I also don't think that either of us is going to convince the other to switch to our views on hurt/violence so the way I see it we're basically at an impasse.

Ultimately bad people are bad but we are all responsible for ourselves and our actions, be it online or irl. I don't think that one person taking offense from the harsh words of another person is exclusively on either party there - the poster of said words chose to post them and the reader chose to allow them to effect their mental state. If you are incapable of managing yourself in either of these ways (again excluding extreme bullying/harrassment) then perhaps you need to wait on this type of activity until you can.

[Miste]

(again excluding extreme bullying/harrassment)

Well like I said before my posts encompass everything including the extreme.

I am talking about all situations. A simple forum post is a pretty minor thing and it almost isn't even relevant to what I was posting (because forums are heavily moderated so no one can really say anything really really bad without consequences; I've never seen anyone in these forums say anything on the level of verbal abuse I am talking about in my posts)

Yes, some people are oversensitive to a degree that is very confusing and there is a level of over sensitivity where there isn't much that can be said about it (like for example...blacklisting someone just because they disagreed with something you said cough), but there is more to my post than just forum posts and forum posts isn't the main issue with the saying being a lie. Which I clarified in my first response that I wasn't talking about the situation of the person I responded to. I was basically calling out the saying in a general sense and that society really shouldn't keep using a saying that is a lie; so the main issue wasn't really the forums per say.

My posts are also talking about extreme bullying and harassment. Things that have happened that have caused emotional and mental damage and sometimes even ending in very sad tragedies whether it was online bullying or in real life. To me that is violence and I've witnessed some of that first hand in my life. Physical abuse damages the body and verbal abuse damages the mind. Mind and body make up us as a whole so damaging one or the other seems to be the same thing to me.

But, that is all I am going to say on the matter. I didn't expect it to turn into much of a debate after my single post and it isn't fully relevant to the topic since that level of verbal abuse doesn't exist on these forums as far as I have seen. I just wanted to point out the truth that that saying is a lie and society should stop using it and find something better.