How Did it Get this Way?
 

I began posting under another name on MercedesShop beginning in January 2000. Bill and Donnie were starting their business and their website along with it. The technical savvy available and the high class of the posters seemed incredible.

I was traveling extensively at the time and met a number of posters while on business trips and some of them met with me when they were on their business trips, and every time I met any of them I was totally impressed and wondered how such a great group of people had managed to get to know each other simply because of a discussion forum. Of course, all of us at that time had MB’s as a common interest.

During that period, I was very experienced with the 123 and 124 cars. Coupling that with my many years of car experience beginning in my Dad’s Indy shop at a very early age, I was able to help some of the people with their issues. It was very satisfying to be able to help people cure their headaches.
In the first few years, I checked in on almost every sub forum here on a regular basis including OD. OD was rather tame in the very beginning, but began being a little hostile, so for probably 6 or 8 years, I just simply avoided it at all cost.

In the course of trying to help people with their problems, a poster started heckling me in the tech and diesel forums. He went out of his way to argue over minute details that weren’t germane to the problem I was trying to help someone resolve. He was relentless to a point where it got where I couldn’t even help people with their problems without this guy constantly needling and derailing. I tried ignoring him at first, but he never gave up until he finally got me to start waling at him.

That pretty much soured me of the whole forum and I virtually backed away totally for some period of time, maybe a year or two. Then one day I was needing some MB information and low and behold there was no more MercedesShop. Some idiot at MB evidently sued Bill that resulted in getting name changed.

After a time I gravitated back to the forum and in the course of again familiarizing myself, clicked on OD. I don’t remember at all the issue, but it struck a cord with me at the time, evidently while I was not in the best of moods and I jumped in. Whenever that was, probably in 2008 or so, it was a regrettable day.

The contention on OD at the time, had elevated a LOT since the last time I had checked in several years before. Not one to run from a fight, I began responding in the same nasty tone that was started in whatever thread it was.

When I look back on it, I have deep regrets that I ever allowed myself to be sucked into these kinds of conversations. At least two problems with forum discussion are; the normal differences of opinions and personalities, and the poor communication method of conversing with the written word, sans facial expressions and body language,

Now here we are today. The level of contention between members is to a point where many of us cannot objectively read the post of another without factoring in who is doing the writing and forming at least some, if not all, of our opinion before reading the post.

I suppose it’s one of those situations where it is impossible to go back and start over and make it better. I would love to be able to do a Master Reset and start all over again, but that, of course, is impossible.

I am CONVINCED that if this were the local coffee shop crowd or the local car club, or something, where we all met and dealt with each other face to face, it would have been AMAZINGLY different, but it’s not. On a forum like this, I suppose there is no social pressure as there would be in a face to face group. Whatever it is, it’s not like any other group visiting that I’ve ever experienced.

OD has just taken on a life of its own, and seems to be something impossible to explain.

At the same time nobody is forcing you to post here. I forget who said it, but someone mentioned a few weeks ago "if it seems like everyone else is the problem, it might be time to take a good hard look at yourself" or something of the sort, good advice to live by even outside the context of this forum.

Its just an internet forum. Use it for what it is. Focus this energy in the real world and make a real difference. Leave the Internet to the faceless ankle biters.

So did I say that the problem was only the other people? I thought I had been careful to indicate that it was a two way street.

About a year ago I put four people on ignore. My life here is much more content since. I recently put another on ignore. I don't have Larry on ignore because outside of politics he and I have a lot in common, and for some reason I can vehemently disagree with him and still not get aggrivated about it.

Larry, I heartily recommend ignore for those folks you really cannot stand.

you and I disagree on almost everything all the time apart from liking mercedes cars, but I suggest that you visit some of the other forums out there and get a comparison between this OD and a place where a bunch of 20 year old SOBs are bickering about VWs or other imports that are heavily modded and coveted by teens.

The difference is staggering, no one here to my recollection has recently said he slept with someone elses mom over how high your ride height should be. :D

This place is mild, people are generally polite, and OD is after all, an optional affair. Otherwise its just growth, more people, more threads, more different opinions, and a freedom allowed by the internet for true opinions to come out

Actually the VW forum I frequent is much more mundane than this place, largely because political discussion is heavily moderated.

It wasn't meant to be a personal comment.

I wasn't even thinking OD. Watching arguments over on the mk2 forum on the vortex is where I got that observation. :D

At the Studebaker Drivers forum politics and religion are forbidden. Nobody seems to miss them.

I will also say that Larry is the only person here who comes to mind who complains that everybody hates him.

There is an old saying about reaping what you sow.

Oh, well vortex is a different animal. I'm over there but just lurk, don't think I've posted in years.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'this way' as in "How did it get this way?". I've been here since 2002 and as I see it, it's been 'this way' all along. OD is a free exchange of ideas. Some people get their panties in a wad and some don't. If a person is worried about the effects, it's easy to buy wad-resistant panties.

You staying?

Studebaker ownership IS a religion. Discussion of other religions would be superfluous...

Studebaker enthusiasm must indeed be a religion.

My Aunt married a Rancher in North Dakota. They separated about 15 years later, but when I knew the guy in the early seventies, his farm trucks and his car were all Studebakers. He seriously said several times that when they wore out he just didn't know what he was going to do. It was as if after Studebaker went out of business, there was no one else to bulid cars and trucks, so he would be walking.:eek:

I'd love to see everyone at a "meatspace" event. I think we could have a nice discussion :)

-J

:P

Me too, but you'll have to give me enough time to put on the Kevlar.

That is your opinion, unless you are projecting your own practices upon others.

Nonsense. The Master Reset button is available 24/7. You just have to want to press it and keep it pressed.

If you want cordial discourse, be cordial, and stay away from inflammatory topics. Politics? Religion? You are aware that discussions on those topics have a higher potential than average to be contentious, correct? An expectation that you can be some little schoolgirl prancing through a field of daisies, unsullied and demure, while simultaneously opining that the values of others are materially flawed is insanely unrealistic. You want to insult the values of someone's beloved Presidential candidate, and infer that their support evidences some intellectual or moral deficiency on their part? Fine, but rest assured that the favor will be returned. In spades.

You like to stick your hand in the fire, then complain about the blisters. Grow up, or just stay over in Diesel Discussion and engage in rousing debate over such hot-button topics as the true cubic-inch capacity of the glove compartment on a w123 station wagon.

:eek: :)

I don't know how "high energy" you are in person, but I find it easier to moderate myself when I'm face to face.

-J

I'm pretty high energy, but I am indeed more toned down in my rhetoric in person. Will that take the place of Kevlar?:)

True glove compartment volume? I remember you saying that once before Paul.

Your post is quite ironic. You are lecturing me about turning down the rhetoric while you have yours at full volume, calling me a schoolgirl.

Priceless.

BTW, would you please point out where I said in my post, or even implied, that the values of others are flawed?

Picture or it didn't happen!

Link please.

Not quite. I am lecturing you about your habit to present your rhetoric at a high volume, then crying how everybody hates you when you feel the blowback.

Back at you, son!:D

Here you go.

Larry:

Go back over your last 5,000 posts on Open Discussion and see if you can hazily discern a trend.

This is why I would love to have a calm, face to face talk. Perhaps I'm crazy, but I think it's possible a face to face discussion could change his opinion :confused:

-J

If Larry looked like that his troubles would fade away.;)

Are you suggesting a photographic comparison of that image with one of Larry in similar attire?

ew....

Once again, a thread by the OP, recounting a nostalgic history of the forum corrupted by other members without a semblance of recognition of his own acts and deeds. What was the intent of the thread, again?

...remembering fondly the days gone by in Larryworld.;)

The rest of us have to make do with the reality that it never was as good as we want to remember it....nor as bad. (depending on our mood).

I seem to recall a different set of circumstances regarding Larry's departure from OD. I see to recall some drama and victimization involved.

Of course as MTI said, it was all our fault and Larry was complete innocent.

Good grief. The drama.

I remember when we all used to go over to Bill Wood's house for milk and cookies and catch a fresh episode of "Leave It To Beaver" on his black-and-white Zenith TV...

I prefer to recall that in high school I was handsome and athletic, got laid every night by the best looking girls with no fear of pregnancy or STDs, was rich with perfect grades, and that woman with 3 breasts from total recall was my math teacher who preferred topless lectures and a lot of one on one tutoring.....

Revisionist history is a beautiful thing

Oh man - you're strumming my pain with your fingers...

That three breasted whoare broke my heart - she'd give anyone and I mean ANYONE extra lessons - I was the only one that really needed them.

Luckily after all of these years I have a new found infatuation - Kerry's arse...

hahahaha

I remember being beat up in high school for dating a “black girl”. I remember the days when they burned the rice fields in the summer. It added a nice grey highlight to the already brown sky. I remember the days when a thirty MPH crash meant that you bounced off the dashboard. Shall I continue?

please do!

although these sound more grounded in reality than the fantasy we were discussing above.
the point basically is that the OP has a tendency to fondly remember something that never existed

What's he fondling?

Ten minutes spent reading threads at BWOT will make this seem like a sanctuary. OT is left pretty much alone under the guise of "free speech," unless you happen to get too personal in attacking one of the golden children. :rolleyes:

That said, several years back I joined a Ducati forum. Seemed like a nice bunch of folks, lots of continental diversity in membership. Struck up collegial "friendships" with some members, shared some knowledge, gained more. Helped the site itself with a tech problem or two as well.

One day I posted a fairly benign cartoon (embedded below) in an open-topic thread, the specifics of which I can't recall, though it was generally pro-Barry. One of the "friends" there sent me a PM not too much later that was dripping with hostility and vulgarity -- violative of TOU -- which I passed along to a moderator and site admin who knew me from helping out with the site. His response was basically "hey, you posted a political cartoon, you should have known what to expect." He also proceeded to issue me a warning for posting the cartoon as it "incited" other posters in the thread to get nasty. No warning -- or anything at all -- to the guy who attacked me because it was in a PM. My last PM back to the mod/admin (basically hey, if that's what you think is fair, I'm finished) was my last interaction with the site.

Now I only participate in forums that allow filtering of PMs, so the childish, churlish nonsense can only happen in the open, where at least the mods and admins have to deal with it. So ultimately a forum is only as good as the moderators, since they control the content, as well as the tone of the forum.

Anyway, here is the cartoon. Dated, but still humorous, at least if you have a sense of humor.

http://orangejuiceblog.com/wp-conten...bama_peace.jpg

Speak of the devil.....

lol
I like that cartoon.

Haha, I still remember the first time you came to OD, I and others were flabbergasted by your angry rants. Some even thought you needed help.

You go Larry!

The good old days were rarely that good. This place is what it is. I suggest getting over it. It's just a forum. It's not real.

I must admit that sometimes I get too wrapped up in these discussions. I blame that on having lived too long and seen too much of how the real world operates.

I have known and worked with some folks that were at the center of 'conspiracies' that a lot of American's took as the gospel truth. Folks in my group used to laugh ourselves silly over this since we knew that the folks involved in running the One World Government could barely pull themselves away from blowing the Stockholders money on one new toy after another to put together any sort of plot to take over the world.

Two things I learned early on was that this, too, shall pass and it was a waste of time to think anyone could control an event past their own front door much less the world.

We used to interface with a lot of so-called 'World Leaders' who, when they started a sentence with 'If', as in 'if this were to be true......' we would tell them to save it for the newspapers. We lived in the real world that was right now and did not deal in speculation. We also pointed out to them that we did not intend to move mountains (which we had, literally, done in the past to get at an oil deposit) to further their political career.

Even worse were those that came at us with 'This is what I choose to believe.' We would tell them we were happy for them and that they should put their money where their mouth was because we sure weren't going to. We noticed they rarely did. They were always looking for someone else to pony up the cash.

We even had one Executive tell us to perform an operation that was impossible. When we pointed out it would violate one of Newton's Laws of Motion he asked to speak to this Newton guy so he could get him to change his mind. Yeah, that's your scary One Worlders right there.

Anyway... That is the only problem I have with some folks here. Facts are what they want to think are true when they have nothing riding on the outcome. They may think they do, but if they really thought about it they would see that they are all shook up over nothing.

We used to say, "If you Mother says she loves you, check it out." If we had acted on hearsay we could have blown a Trillion a month, but since we acted on fact we were raking in about a Billion.

I do not understand why this concept of seeking out the facts is so hard to grasp.

This is all Bush's fault.

I remember a "black guy" in high school in the early 60's in Washington DC. He won the DC City Championship for us in 1959 when he returned the 2nd half Kickoff about 90 yards for a touchdown. The PAT gave us a 7-6 victory over the heavily favored Public League Champs, Eastern High School. I still remember watching it happen at Griffith Stadium.:)

This guy went on to break the color barrier in every school he played in, including the Atlantic Coast Conference at the University of Maryland.

His name: Darryl Hill.:):)

Hill opened door to ACC - ESPN

It was so close to being Gore's fault. Hmm, maybe it was . . .

I remember pointing out to a friend that the shape of the shift knob on my 280E was like that so in the case of an accident it was too big to stab your eye out.

He predicted that safety would never drive auto sales, which just shows how wrong a fellow can be.