My home is my castle - you like it? you're welcome at the tower. You dislike it? You're free to go elsewhere. Break havoc and you'll be thrown away from the wall. Into the moat.
Apply this rule to your actual house, your internet forum, your sentimental life and relationships. Even your business. Heck when you reject a troublesome client it's twice the gain: one less problem for you and one more problem for your competition.
This posts resonates very strongly with me as a manager of a forum with 400 users (I can't imagine what kind of crazyness can bring 25.000 of them). For instance in the last posts of Steve I didn't reply because they did not resonate much with me, and in some cases I was totally in the opposite side of the fence (for instance, I'm a proud meat-eater, mind you).
But everytime I had this urge to log in here and reply to Steve's inflammatory articles, I always paused and thought, "what for?". Am I reacting? Am I trying to correct some imaginary wrongdoing? Am I trying to prove some point at any cost? Why do I have the need to criticise someone on the internet? Wouldn't it be better to try to understand his POV and, in the cases where the content is too out of my reality for me to accept (say, psychic stuff) just shrug, and move on to my own things?
Because if I have something meaningful to add to a discussion, even if it contains a criticism of some of the points made, then I'm contributing something. But if I think some stuff is totally derailed, I don't even try to argue the points, because I'm not contributing anything except drivel: people who believe in it will keep believing, and people unconvinced will remain so. What for, then? If I'm not adding value, what am I criticising for, internet validation?
Most times the rabid critics have more problems with themselves than with the object of their attacks.
Thumbs up, Steve. Great post.
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