manveruppd said:
I think what Minstadave was saying is that he wants a forum where he can hang out with other people interested in computers, and that he would have preferred GD to be a chillout room where he could chat off-topic with people who shared his computing hobby about non-computing-related things. The current situation is that the forum population is completely segregated: there's the hardware crowd, and the life crowd. There's some overlap, of course, but a lot of GD regulars are here for GD and GD only and never set foot in the hardware forums. I think this makes a lot of the hardware-section regulars feel unwelcome in the life forums.
Some of the oldest members of these forums are here for the hardware section, venturing into GD only sporadically. It's not unreasonable for them to want to have a "chillout room" where they would feel at home rather than being outnumbered by people with absolutely no interest in computers.
I can't say I agree with him completely, even though I sometimes share his feelings, as I think having a diverse community is extremely valuable.
That may be what minstadave was saying ...... but I quoted mightynimrod, not minstadave.
And mighty was advocating the shutdown of GD. How will that give the techies a general place to hang out?
If the case exists for a General section for techies (which, personally, I doubt but then it isn't my opinion that counts) then lobby to get one created. I don't see how wanting GD shut helps that ..... unless the argument is to get rid of all members that aren't techies altogether? Is it?
If so, I vehemently disagree. The strength of this place is diversity. It would destroy that.
manveruppd said:
But it may be that the growth was too unrestrained, which is why GD reads more like a drunken MSN conversation some days. It's perfectly reasonable for Spie to try to shape the community he founded: every online forum is centred on a specific area of interest. OcUK's used to be hardware, but GD became bigger than all the hardware forums put together, so this focus was lost, and GD became a chatroom for Myspace users.
I think a temporary closure might be good because it would "prune" out those people who are only here to socialise with their RL friends and don't really care about the community at large. There is a small danger that too many people will leave, and only the hardware crowd will remain, and I hope that doesn't happen as I like having a diverse community - if I wanted to surround myself exclusively with geeks like me, there are other, more specialised computing forums I could've joined.
As I said in my first line in this thread, if Spie's threatened temporary closure is what it takes, then it's what it takes. I'm not convinced that such a closure will work, or if it does, for anything more than temporarily. What it needs, in my view, is a clear understanding by all members of what is and is not allowed, and moderators to ensure that's what happens. If standards start to slip, and moderators don't curtail that, people assume that such activity is permitted. That is why I think the snippiness and bickering has grown - it's because it's been
allowed to, so people assume it's okay. That's why I said I felt the perception is that rules aren't enforced in GD the way they are in other forums .... and they ought to be.
I have no problem with Spie shaping the 'community' as he sees fit. That's absolutely his right as the bloke that pays the bills. My right, as a member, is to post (within the rules) and if I either can't do that, or don't want to, to just not post. If I don't like the way the community gets shaped, about the only right I have here is to not be here. So far, I have no problem with the shape of the community. But, as GD is where I spend most of my time, if it goes (permanently), so do I. I'll find somewhere else to post. After all, whatever people say about this place, it's far from the only forum with a community spirit.
