So said the bowl of petunias… In an earlier post I made reference to disfunctional egroups, particularly railway modelling ones. There is one group in particular, that’s been renamed twice following major flamewars, and has burned out so many moderators I’ve lost count.
Now we have a prominent member (and onetime moderator) feeling he’s being forced out of the group because of the backbiting of others. I’ve never known any other net community based around any subject that’s been as political as this one. While there are plenty of good people prepared to discuss aspects of railway modelling, there seems to be a minority that are only interested in causing trouble.
What in Ed Burkhart’s name is wrong with you people?
I used to be a discussion group junkie – mostly music – and I’ve seen just two kinds of groups: 1. Small groups in which almost the only topic is how to get more people to join; and 2. The disfunctional kind.
It almost seems inevitable that once a group reaches a sufficient level of activity to be interesting in quickly becomes disfuntional. One group I participated in was pretty sophisticated and included not only a lot of professional musicians but also lawyers, a doctor or two, several college professors – people whom you would expect to act mature but at the slightest provocation the forum turned into a kindergarten. Ironically, the few teenagers in the group were the best behaved of all.
I’m on several other railway based mailing lists, and none of the others are as bad as this one; the problem is one of big egos and cliques.
I’ve given up on music lists; I used to be on the Marillion mailing list, and that was one of the nastiest, flamiest lists I can ever remember. It was so bad it made parts of Usenet look civilised.
It is annoying, it seems to have a 6 – monthly “schism” before settling down again.
Looks like it *might* be the end of having two large groups with the same objectives though, which was never going to be a good thing in the long term…
Ho Hum