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 p.5 #5 · Does this forum have a negative tone lately? | |
saneproduction wrote:
Seems like a lot of venom and snarkiness in some of the posts lately. Do you guys and gals feel the same way or is it about the same and I am just noticing it more?
No, it's not about the same, you notice something that has definitely changed over time. I am not sure about the explanation is something that also happens in society. I believe it has more to do with the growth of the community rather than negativity or venom and snarkiness in society.
This forum is a global place, a meeting place for many many different cultures. Photographers coming from more than 100 countries all over the world. I can't believe, more negativity is a universal thing happening in all those cultures in so many countries all over the globe. However, miscommunication happens more often and more easily in larger community that FM has become, especially now that our culture backgrounds, and the way we all communicate differ.
Also expectations from participants in this forum play an important role in perception of this phenomenon.
In the beginning of this place Fred Miranda created, mainly Canon photographers and some Nikon photographers met and helped each other with all kind of matters that were new in digital photography. Sharing knowledge, offering help, starting research and experiments with RAW processing which was new at the time, the great software tools that Fred developed and distributed and sold via this site, that all made this place in the first place a pleasant environment with mostly encouraging posts. I still recognize a lot of that in the forums. If you go in the presentation boards, the processing and printing boards and all the places, though less in the gear boards, I find that original typical Fred Miranda forum culture is still very dominant.
The gear forums have changed though over time. This already happened years ago and it didn't happen overnight, but came gradually. I for one noticed and experienced this already around 2003 - 2004. An incident even let me decide to no longer use my personal alias, but to change to an anonymous alias, one that I chose purposely being EOSfun, because I found at the time the Canon board lacked too much of that. The gear boards on the forum had become the kind of opinion making and opinion sharing place, rather than the experimental kind of community FM had been for a great part until then. Now, opinions can be very important for decision making, and help is often given as an opinion. The review section is a good example of how opinions and rating of products have an essential place in the forums at FM. People who go to the review section are looking for opinions or ready to share their opinions with others. The opinions given in that section hardly ever lead to irritation or disturbance. And neither so lead to venom and snarkiness. I believe because people expect opinions in that section. Critical reviews are not read like venom and snarkiness.
Opinions in the gear boards however do frequently lead to some kind of confrontation, irritation, negativism. Partly because not every FM member does expect, or appreciate opinions given. And even if opinions being discussed are expected or appreciated, things sometimes derail because the style of discourse is not to everyones liking. This has for a great part to do with those cultural differences mentioned above. Once responses in a hot thread become more or less off topic, or posters deny the primary rules of being courteous and polite, a thread sometimes even attracts "troublemakers" from other places too.
Is there anything we can do to get things back in line?
My plea would be to add more EOSfun 
I also do agree with the posters who say we need more smileys  They are very helpful in expressing emotions and sometimes put things said (or should I say written) into perspective.
Maybe a facebook kind of "like" feature to posts, or rating of posts and posters could be helpful to guide readers through all the posts, and quickly see which posts or posters are more helpful than others. I think this is in general a better working system than the "hide" feature, which is a negative feature by its nature on a communication platform like a forum.
Stronger moderation is another possibility. But my experience is this creates it's own disturbance and isn't the solution for all of it. It should start with some more explicit set of rules of what the purpose of the subforums at FM should be. In fact a rating system could be a good tool for the moderation team to see what is liked and what is not. But I know the implementation of a rating system means work for Fred and his programmers. I guess a debate about the essence of the gear boards, our common sense and respect to the basic rules for corteous behaviour and respect for our different cultural backgrounds can bring us for a great part where we want to be too.
Let's start with less venom and snarkiness, and let's have more of EOSfun
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