User blog:Cerne/I am back (long-ish rant)

Hoo boy... A very long time since I last typed a blog entry. I took a short break from conworlding a while back to get caught up and get some stuff completed for another site I am registered with but it tok longer than I had intended. I have also sort of been procrastinating.

My participation on the ZBB has lessened as of late, and I don't feel it was a normal thing, either. I am finding it more and more difficult toget along with and relate to some of the people there. Not all of them, nope - there are still a lot of very nice people on the ZBB. But to be frank, I am getting sick of the snarkiness and the general promotion of nastiness on the site. People want to portray themselves as civil and open-minded as they can, that I can understand, but the moment you criticize them it seems like they make it a priority to restore their good name as flawless conlangers, or conworlders, or whatever, by any means necessary. Even if it means insulting whoever is criticizing their work. I mean, its all superficial. Only those who have had to take criticism without answering to it to avoid some sort of consequence, be it ganging up on them or ostracizing them or something else, will be truly open-minded toward criticism. And you can spot it, because only those who downplay their own work will be able to take criticism while those who are more confident of the validity of the information they are presenting will be more likely to protect their reputation. It is sort of one of those things people do unconsciously that you can spot unless they know what you are looking for.

I am also getting tired of the level of elitism on that board: favouring western ideas, western values, western concepts of cultural progress... I have been meaning to say this for a while now, but there is a fair amount of racism on the ZBB, too, or ignorance regarding the topic of race...not by everyone, but by a few people. Enough to make it count. If you find the labelling of a group of people as "blacks" instead of "black Americans" or "black Africans" objectionable, then you would say there is some racism on the ZBB (hint: see Parts of Speech). Other expressions are more obvious and more blatant; really, the fact that they are even there has to say something about how the board is run, or allowed to run. Or maybe it is just me... Maybe they are somewhere near half-way civil or three quarters civil until I point out that it isn't quite good enough, THEN it is perfectly fine to be a bigot as long as no one can tell you that you were wrong. There is a lot of academic elitism on the ZBB as well, and this was a big reason why I stopped posting there for a while. Basically, the prevailing idea is that it doesn't matter who you are, where you are from, what language you speak, what religion or philosophy you follow, etc. If someone took a course about something related to you in college/university, or read it in a book, or even read about it online, they know more about it than you do. I suppose in some ways this might be true but I don't like the idea that someone can automatically assume they know more about who you are or what you do than you do, and then "correct" you when you say something that contradicts what they read. It is essentially putting their expertise ahead of yours, regardless of the accuracy of the information. I mean, doesn't anyone care about authenticity?

I guess more than anything I got tired of all the attention-seeking and the self-promotion. You will see regs (board members who post regularly on the site) get loads of compliments on their work, regardless of what they do, while other board members will get some compliments of their work if they do an especially good job. I call this the Senior Member Bias, whereby board members who have had their accounts on the site the longest will be granted more authority and more esteem by other members of the board. There is also board participation; certain board members have openly admitted that post count is the equivalent to p3n!5 size so that largely decides who gets more esteem on the board. The idea is that the more you post, the more other board members will be aware of you and would have had to have communicated with you, and the sooner it will take (or will have taken) for the other members to like them. This doesn't always work out. There are - and have been - a few trolls on the ZBB who post relatively worthless posts just to piss people off. Sometimes this still counts, depending on who you talk to, but overall the quality of the posts should match the quantity. If you make a lot of posts and other board members like them, then you're on your way. All you need to do is wait a few years - all the while keep doing whatever it is you are doing - and Voila! You're a "Reg." (Geez I hope no one from the ZBB is reading this...ah well, I suppose it doesn't matter now).

And people get points for arguing. Or rather, they get points for making their posts look authoritative enough to look like they are right. It is an effort to make them look smart. Many members on the ZBB have this obscure idea that if you can be correct on some things then you are correct on a lot of other things. Give a board member some detailed information in a long post about Climatology and you are suddenly the board's authority on Climatology. Or Geology, or Physics, or Sociology...and of course there is Linguistics. Or rather, particular areas of Linguistics, or particular languages, since Linguistics is just one topic. I am a testament to this. I never once portrayed myself as an expert in Biology or Anthropology, though I have been guilty of arguing with other members extensively on these subjects whenever they came up, and the prose in my posts portrayed a more-or-less over-confident air to them. But let's forget that I have on occasion, been a naïve know-it-all - especially in the past - for just a little bit. I would engage in discussions that were about, or related to, what I felt I was familiar with and/or had some knowledge and/or experience with. Whenever I had to argue about it, I gave it my all. I haven't always been right, but I was still a pretty active arguer. After a while I get complaints that I never admit it when I am wrong, and then later that I don't know what I am talking about and that people are taking a risk by listening to me. All the while, I have read posts that I disagree with, and that I cannot find any support for, get a good reception by other board members. And what is more, these members who are making the posts can keep making them and argue to the death about them, and no one will complain about the fact that they have never (and I mean never - except to the board administrator) admitted that they are wrong. It is like they have some sort of license or badge that allows them to do this. I have actually had to put a disclaimer in my signature to (try to) protect me, should I get into another one of these arguments with one of these members, but the Seniority Bias still works. It is very largely a social thing, this type of authority, but certain members can use it and manipulate it to give themselves more attention at the expense of those they are arguing with.

And then there is the general nastiness that is encouraged on the ZBB. People all over the internet, on sites that aren't hyper-sensitive to it, think it is cool to be as mean and as subjectively critical as they can in the name of honesty, objectivity, free speech, and so on. I don't mean to generalize but this seems to be some form of Liberal idealism. On sites where you have more conservative-minded members - people who don't dispute things other people say and that generally conform to established ideas no matter how much they might disagree (or maybe they are just lazy and gullible) - authority usually sets up quickly and conformity is stressed. On other sites, however,people who antagonize and intentionally disturb other people are treated almost like heroes. This doesn't happen all the time - sometimes the site administration tries to regulate activity and a lot of the board members get ahead of themselves, or get confused and are hardly active at all - but these sites tend to have problems. Either the sites get too hard to manage and the administration gets a reputation for being too sensitive, or the site has trouble encouraging activity. Personally, I would like to see a site where the administration is reasonably liberal yet the members are aware of what can and does upset people, and actually tries to avoid it. This was no doubt what Mark Rosenfelder was aiming for when he designed the "House Rules" for the ZBB, but too many members didn't respect them and the board has become a free-for-all for insensitive and sometimes downright apathetic behaviour. It is encouraged by other members of the site when they comment on how accurate the member in question's posts are, how knowledgeable those members are, how objective they are, and so on. Even saying someone is downright verbally abusive can be considered a compliment, as such behaviour is encouraged by the general board population as long as it is honest and critical-minded. This gives the illusion that it is objective when all it really was is an excuse for being nasty whenever the h3ll you feel like it.

Whatever. It is all just some sort of attention-seeking Rat Race and I don't want any part in it. From now on, I am only going to post on the ZBB to ask questions about my own conworld. I may also post in some of those threads that ask for people to type about their own conworlds, like "What are your Conworld's politics like?" But no more discussions or debates. I am through with the cost of being a contributor on that board.

Ah, OK... This wasn't supposed to be a rather long rant on the ZBB but I am afraid that is what I have now. I must have allowed my ideas to get carried away. I don't think it would be a good idea to introduce what else I wanted to type about, as the rant would probably drown it out, so I will save it for later. Possibly tomorrow, but not tonight. It is waaay too late now. I do have stuff to type about that I want to get underway, though.

Until then, thanks for reading.

PS: I noticed the Conworld's Wikia site layout has changed...I am not altogether sure yet whether I like it or not. It looks nice, but some changes have made things a bit more confusing...ah well, I will probably get used to them.