The Essentia Sphere

This has been the look on my face for about a month and a half now:

Why? Because I have come to the conclusion that the world is crazy. Take a trip with me. It’ll be through a looking glass or down a rabbit hole—either way, you’re going to come out the other side feeling like someone used a handheld mixer on your brain.

Picture it: a message board with a large community. People post. Blah, blah, blah. Disagreements occur, of course. The mods say “take stuff you can’t talk about here elsewhere—we won’t allow it.” Cool, right? All adults? Yeah . . . no.

So another message board is created. It’s announced in a public place, where most members of the first board can find out about it. It’s a private board that people can only join through an invite. It becomes a place where posters who have gotten pretty close can talk more freely than at the first board.

Within two weeks, the crap hits the fan. Drama is created through personal messages. People are told lies and they get upset. Posters such as myself, who were pretty much done with the first board, see this as a sign to leave and only post at the splinter board.

And then a second, private splinter board is created. And then—I’m not making this up—a third board is created specifically to complain about the people on the first board. Publicly.

Does your head hurt yet? Well, it’s about to get worse.

So they start to rip into people from the very first board. The Internet is all about mocking people (and porn), so no big deal, right? You have folks upset that they weren’t in on some jokes. You have people irritated by motivations that they assume other posters had. You have people mad because there was a thread that they didn’t like. If a poster posts a joke, it’s taken seriously. If a poster doesn’t give every detail of her life, the other people on the board fill in the blanks, sometimes vindictively. A poster who feels liked enough to post about her wedding/engagement/whatever is mocked. It’s a board created to keep the lame drama going and to create fights.

But that’s not the point of this post. It’s just the background to my thinking behind this post. I must admit to being shocked as hell at all of this. First of all, I do believe most of the people involved in this are adults. That fact combined with many of the actions by some of these people blows my mind. Frustration from disagreement? OK. Dislike from disagreement? Alright. But a hate so fierce that you go to other message boards just to publicly mock someone? That, IMO, is bizarre behavior. Especially for a grown person.

But don’t even talk about the people involved in any dispute there may have been. Talk about the people who lurked on the board. The people who, after the stupidity of the original message board’s mild meltdown, join the fourth board just to anonymously attack the people who they didn’t like. Why read or belong to a message board that you hate that much? I began to dislike one message board. I left. But these people, apparently, stayed at the first message board and just got irritated at people who posted a lot. Again, this is strange behavior.

As someone much smarter than I am wrote;

There’s a certain weird, cowardly satisfaction that some people get in hate memes or places like *name of board*. They like that it’s in public, they like that because it’s public it will be hurtful, and they like that they don’t have to be called accountable for their comments

But who has time for that? Who spends their time reading a message board that they have problems with or that has so many posters that they don’t like? Who then takes the time to post long diatribes against posters who they may have never interacted with—or worse, were friendly with to their Internet face? Who takes an argument from months ago and lets it get to them so badly that they feel the need to bring it to a public board and continue it there?

And I’m not talking about complaints people have about actual posts. People have different senses of humor or what have you, so not everyone is going to agree on everything. But giving motivations to people who post on a message board (remember, this is a message board with thousands of members. This is not a blog in which someone posts something about her life every two minutes.) or filling in gaps because you aren’t getting the whole story is odd. I can’t say it’s sad because that’s condescending but I do think it is very strange behavior.

I guess the only thing anyone can take away from this is the fact that you never really can know someone on the Internet. With thousands of posters on a board, there are bound to be some people who have problems. And some of those people will be very good a hiding those problems, until they feel threatened or left out or even if they simply want lame Internet drama. Whether it’s something as simple as someone disliking you because they felt left out or if it’s something bigger, like someone feeling outright hate for you because you dared to disagree with them, it all adds up to a group of people getting a little too invested in the the Internet. Which, I’ve heard, is serious business.

Boy, that post had no structure and it said nothing. It fits perfectly in with all my other posts!