13
by SunRiseWest
My sympathies as well! Online culture is generally ghastly, but kinda fascinating, too. I am curious about the posts that got you banned, but no pressure if you don't want to disclose.
A brief tour of a few of the forums I used to visit that are now closed:
The Oil Drum was an incredible place. I loved arguing with Swedish engineers who were drafting policy on nuclear reactors, and I made friends with this brilliant organic chemist who totally schooled me about psychopharmacology, though my chemistry still sucks. Me and a classmate from grad school visited him once-- he lived in a trailer behind the Museum of Jurassic Technology-- and he gave us an after-hours tour, complete with tea on the roof! But some of the other people there scared the living crap out of both of us, wanted to burn all the oil in the ground or didn't care if we had another Fukushima or Chernobyl.
Then there was Boring Old Man, a forum of older psychiatrists-- guys who ran departments at major universities, who worked with RIAT, the team of white hats that reanalyzed Paxil Study 329, and blew the lid off all the dirty tricks SmithKline Beecham used to get that junk approved. Man, those dudes didn't suffer fools gladly-- sometimes, I'd proofread a three-paragraph post for hours before putting it up, and if you got something wrong, you'd get totally chewed out. So that was scary in a different way.
The eBike forum where I spend a lot of time is still going strong, and probably the most hostile of all of them. It is unmoderated and sometimes gets absolutely insane with invective and spewing insults. No one ever gets banned, and some members have been hurling abuse at each other for, like, three years. At times, it's been a complete digital cesspool, and I've had to leave for months at a time. I have about four or five really good friends there and a dozen acquaintances I am friendly with. It's a left vs. fascist civil war, with constant skirmishing between other members about all kinds of lame stuff that makes no difference.
The worst member is a 'religious' nut case (that's a clinical term) who mentions all the guns he and his family own when people disagree with him-- like this really weenie, passive aggressive threat-that's-not-quite-a-threat. No one else was talking about guns, so it was super creepy. I told the mods, they did nothing.
So now I've joined an actual gun forum, and it turns out to be just about the most laid back place I've ever been online. I mean, I have no doubt some of y'all would be pretty scary to anyone stupid enough to jump over your back fence, but compared to most other places I've visited? This place is super chill.
I've told my brick-and-mortar friends how civil everyone here is, at least compared to most other places I've visited, but I don't think anyone believes me.