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Posted by: Mattbluhalofan
But there aren't even conflicts to begin with! It's like the difference between hitting someone in self-defense, and hitting someone just because you had a mood swing and it felt like the right thing to do. A person here can post something totally innocent (walking down the street), and a bunch of people here will totally ambush him or her (random attack due to mood swing, etc.).
I know that this bothers you because, like Thing1, I've noticed your several posts about this issue over the past few months.
It's a harsh world, but the advantage here is that nobody knows anybody else. Why take personal offense at anything that an anonymous child types into a computer? He doesn't intend personal offense -- he is taking out his teenage aggression on an unseen, faceless bunch of words on an LCD monitor. What he types, although it can be seen by you, has nothing to do with you in reality. The proof of this is already evident in this thread, where numerous people have quite accurately pointed out that these are things that nobody would say to your face. That's not only because of fear, but because it's not personal. The fact that you can read what he says, and that he has addressed it to you, has nothing to do with the reasons for his words or the force with which they are written.
With the "why" answered, I wanted to quickly mention that I've hardly seen any insults on these forums that are particularly acidic or cruel. BNet has never really been a place for the faint-of-heart and, with the points that I mentioned in the last paragraph, I think that the level of personal offense that can or should be taken from any particular insult is relatively low compared to what a lot of people tend to encounter in more everyday settings (especially school). There are only a handful of members here who I think are truly sharp enough to really insult somebody so badly that the person could legitimately take severe personal offense. It's not easy to do that here -- what is your average 15-year-old hormone-and-emotion-filled anonymous internet poster going to say that's THAT bad, really? Something about someone's mother who he doesn't actually know? Something about how someone sucks at Halo, or has bad taste in music? For the person who is easily offended and capable of taking anonymous internet statements personally, Bungie.net is probably not the place for them. And I don't mean that at you, Matt, because you're clearly able to handle being here. I mean it generally.
Unlike some real-life communities, the great part about these forums is that, if the style of conversation doesn't suit your tastes, you can just leave. Once again, I don't mean that in a harsh "get out" kind of way -- I just mean that nothing said here is so terrible that you should take personal offense (although I DO understand that a lot of people do), and if you do take personal offense at the things that are said here, you always have the option to go elsewhere. Which is, by and large, a good thing.