The difference between being mean and having an opinion

XXXMinnieXXX

I love different opinions. I'm very careful in how my opinions are expressed. There will always be someone is offended though even if you do it correctly. Just best to read your comment back through before you post it and know your saying it in the best possible way. It does stop me posting though when I think someone won't like the answer. I got a FR today that king me for the kick in the butt I gave someone. Out of 3000 posts I've only had one person who didn't like my comment, but it was a controversial subject! I try to stay away from those now!


Zara

Oishii

I think a lot of my favourite people on mfp have a reputation for being mean. Very, very occasionally they are. Personally, I try to word things as carefully as I can. As an illustration of this, I am going to try to respond to a couple of points that got me all butt hurt on reading them without personally attacking anyone... Here I go...

Personally, as a teacher, I have learnt how NOT to express my shock and disappointment when a pupil doesn't know something that I thought I'd taught them. If they haven't learnt it yet, I didn't teach it yet and I, and they, have to try again (and again and again). When someone on mfp posts about back fat they don't have one week, then belly fat they don't have the next, and they have been told the problem is in their mind, not their body, the first time, they will still hear it the next time, and still perhaps find it impossible to believe. When people ask something again and again, there is clearly a problem of some kind, but that doesn't mean we should be mean to them.

Secondly, I , personally, find it very strange that in Britain snobbery has become/recently been so openly acceptable. As a child I would never, ever have thought to call someone 'common' even though people teased me for being 'posh' (which I so wasn't!), but now people find it acceptable to call others 'chavs'. Yes, a small group of people self-identify as such, but it seems to me that a lot of people are labelled that way out of sheer snobbery. People are people. Racial slurs are mainly seen as unacceptable, so how did class slurs make a comeback?

Hopefully I added enough 'Personally' and 'it seems to me' to be safely in the realms of opinion....

Shikonneko

I've lurked a lot, so i don't pretend to know everything, but it seems like most of the items brought up in this post could combine together to form a fairly complete answer. The GIFT is always in play (just wiki it, or Online disinhibition effect) and, either in response or preparation for it, this can potentially explode any interaction. Lack of humility (deserved or not) tends to be interpreted as aggressive and others are terminally over-sensitive/anxious. Tone of wording helps; I know I use a lot of punctuation to try to impersonate cadence/tone of voice, but it's never the same thing. Also I think the list is a great distillation: the truth sucks and/or people suck. And sometimes pictures are mean, but I could use a cat gif right about now. :frown:

cparter

And in the end it all matters because?

We have choices but don't use them. I have a choice to read the endless jabbering back and forth or to just ignore it. We have a choice to consider others and their feelings when we give advice, as well as, the choice not to care and deal with the results.

cparter

Sometimes people place the person or group as the problem and not the action. e.g. You are an idiot for driving too fast versus, driving too fast is not safe,

See the second response to driving too fast is face is better received than the one where you directly attack someone. Some people are so caught up in the 'my world and you just breath in it' attitude that they don't care about the delivery. I was taught, growing up, that the first part of communicating an idea is the delivery. So, if you deliver a well intended piece of advice with a snarky attitude then you will never get the intended results.

cparter

to that end, it would help immensely if the mods became active participants on the forums. for some reason, which i don't understand, they are not. if they were, much of the complaining about "meanness" would be understood to be as baseless as it appears to those of us who do participate, and reports to the mods about "meanness" would result in warnings or strikes or bans much less frequently, so that only those who truly deserve the punishment would receive it. as it is now, i believe all of the power is in the hands of those who complain, because each complaint seems to compel the mods to act, no matter whether the complaint is justified or not (in context).

Yes, that. :drinker:

It seems weird to me, as someone who had over a dozen years experience running a fairly busy forum (not nearly as busy as this one) that with very few exceptions, the moderators are relative "strangers" to the community. I chose my moderators among active members who shared my vision for the forum, gave exceptional advice, and had a good sense of diplomacy and fairness. I considered my forum to be like a party or event thrown at my house, and my mods were those great friends who bring a side dish and a case of beer, let me know if someone's being a jerk, and stays late to help clean up. I didn't think of them as hired caterers or bouncers or maids.

So, we expect a short staff of mods to be active in every forum? Realistically?

cparter

It's not that a teacher is getting frustrated a student isn't learning quickly enough (hell, I've specifically been a teacher for special needs, so I *do* know that people out there exist in the mainstream), as much as a teacher being frustrated when they have already talked about the subject.

Many hugely controversial, strike-worthy posts I've seen have been from people who are asking a question they already asked, or who were in another thread; there are so, so many "sarcastic" threads that spawn from people asking the same thing over and over and expecting different responses. I am thinking of specific, perhaps well known, users in particular.

I think new users see THESE posts, and get an initial impression. So I suppose it would be like a student, coming into their first day of school, and seeing a teacher reprimand a student who's been there all year for not doing the homework. That student might think, "Ah, this teacher is mean!" Until this student, being new, asks a question and gets a surprising response.

I still stand by that the majority (a huge majority) of the people who make the "everyone is mean!" posts, or contributes to them, ARE those new users who are forming an impression without all the information, OR people who have been here awhile, but don't contribute often (so the student in the back of the room who's always doodling one day raises their head to notice the teacher reprimanding the class troublemaker, and so thinks, "Damn, this teacher's a jerk" and goes back to doodling).

I can fully acknowledge that sometimes there is a legitimately new person who pushes a wrong button for a person, and the person--having dealt with attacks from people they simply disagreed with, or frustration from answering the same question over and over--can be more brusque than they usually are. But that's still not necessarily a negative, as much as they might be shorter about it.

Then don't answer the question.

smantha32

I enjoy watching the back and forth debates over which is the best way to lose weight without losing lean body mass. I love watching people deplore and defend 1200 calories. It's when the conversations denigrate into GIF posts to mock, belittle, or otherwise ridicule one or more contributing debaters/OP that my eyerolling starts - it's like people don't know how to validate their opinions with facts so they resort to GIF-posting.

The .gif posting usually starts when someone accuses someone else of being a bully or mean, because they have a dissenting opinion. And they then deserve the mocking they get.

smantha32

The biggest difference I've personally seen on here is that having a differing opinion is great; to be expected. Its when you respond and you're obviously talking down to someone trying to make them feel stupid or insignificant; then you're just being a jack-*kitten*. Some things are lost in context on a forum thread, but when you start a response in all caps and follow it up with alternating exclamations and question marks........ there's nothing constructive there. No miscommunication at all; you're just trying to look better than the other person...............

Educating someone is awesome and its what we need on these forums. Educating someone by making them look dumb and your own self look "superior" just means you have your own issues to deal with and you probably don't need to be dispensing your "valuable advice".................

Other than that, people need to get a thick skin and respect differing views. That small change in perspective has helped me on more than one occasion. IMHO anyways......................

Except the people who are perpetually butthurt view every opinion that is different from theirs as someone talking down to them.

You say people need to get a thick skin and respect different views, but the thin skinned people don't respect different views, and the thick skinned people get bashed for being insensitive.

LorinaLynn

So, we expect a short staff of mods to be active in every forum? Realistically?

Maybe they need more mods then. If I one horse town suddenly became a booming metropolis, they'd need more cops, more firemen, more hospitals. Most of the mods, I believe, are volunteers. Even though I know I'd be good at it, there's no way I'd do it on a volunteer basis. They might need to expand their budget to include more paid mods.

Ideally, I'd like the mods to be assigned to the particular forums that fit their knowledge base and skill sets. Someone who's shown to give good advice about nutrition to the food forum, someone who's shown to give good advice about exercise in the exercise forum, etc.

But what I don't get at all is why have mods who aren't actually part of the community? There's only one or two I recognize as being even moderately active members. The rest, I think, "Where did they come from? What qualifies them?"