In Reply to: Re: Already a big thread... posted by Excelsior on October 6, 2002 at 4:29 PM:
Well, Excelsior, it’s very difficult to disagree with any of the *specific* points you’re raising. What I’m more concerned about is the context in which this whole discussion has taken place.
Of course I agree that people should avoid doing things that diminish other people’s enjoyment of this website. One group of people discovers a way to use one of Hank’s features to increase their enjoyment, and another group protests that the first group is diminishing *their* enjoyment. Obviously the two ways are not consistent, and something has to give somewhere.
If that had been the situation, then the only remedy was to get Hank to make a decision. One group or the other must be told to stop doing whatever they were doing. I might even have agreed that it really was “an issue that Hank must take a stand on.”
But that wasn’t how it developed this time. The CyberSquatters were simply indulging in some harmless fun, until some of them discovered that it actually annoys some people. Then (for no reason but meanness, from what I can tell) they decided they needed to keep it up.
As I’ve said elsewhere, there are mean people in the world. If this is Hank’s method of dealing with meanness then we need to support it, even if it wasn’t our own preferred method.
But the complainers didn’t act any better in my opinion. Just as there will always be mean people, there will always be people for whom the “climb to the top” is the only important thing. When people like that start to imagine that the rules are being bent in favor of someone else, they can become downright nasty.
E=Mc2 said it just now in his own post: “Get out or else!” is not a constructive, or even suitable, response in this kind of situation.
To my mind there is a fine line between the competitive spark that keeps everyone motivated (what people admire so much in their favorite football team), and the kind of ugly confrontational clawing for position that sometimes develops in ranking systems. In my opinion the Squatting Complainers stepped over that line very seriously.
So perhaps in a sense this *was* simply a clash between inconsistent methods of enjoying WG, that Hank had to step into. My problem with that interpretation is that it was not simply settling a question about how a feature could be used. Both sides had escalated it well beyond that, and to my mind neither side was being at all reasonable. I don’t believe it’s right, in that kind of situation, to do as Hank did and simply (in effect) declare one side “the winner.”
As Beaker says, I hope Hank wasn’t just reacting to all the noise the complainers made.
CM