What is one of your biggest pet peeves in a forum?
Note: Given this is a thread entirely about me, massive amounts of hypocrisy incoming.
Not sure what the best way to explain this is, but I'm going to call it the StDrule. It's a disease that contaminates even the best of forums from time to time.
Stepping lightly here, but basically it's a form of attention whoring similar to the stereotypes from the movie "Mean Girls" where you have a (usually but not always) female poster who is not at all shy about wielding her female gender status like a club to try and get lots of attention (at best) and openly attack people she doesn't like with her hordes of worker male bees (at worst).
There are two subtypes of this disease.
The mild form is simply a female poster who makes everything about her every day. (Key point: NOT a one-time occurence, but a REGULAR occurence.) If a thread isn't about her, she'll flirt and make calf eyes and smilies and post in a SUPER EXCITED way with lots of punctuation and references to her sexuality and/or gender to try and MAKE it about her. Basically, people who don't get enough attention offline and love the fact that simply listing "female" under gender or having a female picture as their avatar gets instant popularity/attention in many forums fall under this category.
I hasten to add after my last sentence that, in many cases, this person isn't even really aware of what they're doing. They don't necessarily make the connection that the attention they're getting has less to do with their being interesting and thoughtful, and more to do with that REALLY CUTE picture that she posted six months ago that a hundred different guys downloaded to their computer immediately.
This type tends to be annoying, but ultimately fairly brainless and/or harmless except in the more extreme cases where they get the ears of mods/admins.
The more extreme form is the type who IS AWARE of what they're doing and does so deliberately. They tend to be outright forum bullies who manipulate their fanboy followers into going after others. This type is far more dangerous because they tend to have a high degree of emotional intelligence combined with a certain sociopathy towards not caring who they hurt when using it. They're the type who ENJOYS turning the forum into their own personal little fiefdom and resents anyone else gaining some measure of popularity or a following as a threat to their personal power.
For this type, it isn't enough to have a big following and have lots of guys worshipping her. Nobody else can cross her in any way. Incapable of letting any slight or problem go, she WILL have her vengeance. In this forum incarnation or the next.
The really dangerous part about this second type is that she IS VERY SMART. Because of that, she's often very adept at getting admins and mods on her side by presenting herself as a victim and someone who is just trying to make the community a better place if her hostility and attacks on others get called out. "Politically gifted" is a kind way to describe her.
Most of my answer on this has gone towards calling out the female part of the problem, and that isn't really fair. Guys, think with your brains and not with your balls...even on a forum.
What is one of your pet peeves in real life?
Going to pull out my Bill and Ted here and put up a Socrates quote: "The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing."
A major pet peeve for me are people I call "Glibertarians". They're people who think they're extremely smart because they got a good grade in a philosophy class in college once because they were able to regurgitate the view's of the professor's favorite pet philosopher, political hero, etc. And thus, they boil down extremely complex subjects into rediculously simple solutions and proceed to berate people who disagree with them by implying that they're brainless cretins who can't see the beauty and purity of their views.
The key point is that their solutions MUST be extreme and simplistic and lacking in nuance or acknowledgements of the problems or downsides with the very easy solution. For example, when asked about a drop in U.S. rankings in education against the world, their immediate answer might be to simply completely eliminate the U.S. Department of Education and let the free market take over to boost educational efficiency.
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