Just Walk Away

Dammit, it happened again - I fell out of love with a gaming forum that I thought I would never leave. I lost count of the number of times this has happened, though I think I have finally figured out why it happens to me. It all has to do with the nature of the Internet.

Say you have a small, intelligent message board that somehow explodes in popularity. The arrival of new users of varying degrees of posting quality will eventually bring down the board's overall quality. You can't really stop this trend, however, so I find that the best thing to do in this situation is to move on and not lament.

Another scenario is that the board is part of a massive community website, in which users come and go quickly, and the idea of a "regular" is measured in the span of months. This causes the nature of its content to fluctuate, so that it will have "good" and "bad" periods of various lengths. The trouble here is that you never can tell where the forum is heading towards. You may join in when it is great, only to see it devolve into endless list threads. Will the next influx of regulars turn it around into something interesting? Or will the lists simply give way to something else that is aggravating? Usually it isn't worth finding out.

There is one more situation I am thinking of, and it applies to the forum that I am currently at. We often lament how the internet is hampered by people who are varying parts hateful and unintelligent, but just as troublesome is its ability to shelter us from the people and thoughts we do not want to hear from. When a community is so small, so tight knit, it tends to become insular and warped. Without fresh blood or fresh ideas to challenge the status quo, the members simply reinforce each others ideas until their belief becomes unshakeable. They also end up repeating themselves. You will hear about the same games time and again, and you will read the same debate play out exactly like it did a month or two ago. You can get to the point where you can accurately guess what news will be worth creating a post for, what people will say, and how others will respond. It becomes boring, and as the users keep going through the motions, they become caricatures of not only themselves, but the people they claim to avoid on the internet. The hate, the sarcasm, the snark all creep in, and they can't even tell that it has happened.

This time, I don't think I will go about looking for a new board to post in. If I find one, terrific, but if not I have plenty of good offline relationships to spend my time with. And if I do find myself on another one, I should be able to walk away before it gets on my nerves.