Specifically, leaving one thing–a community that I’ve been part of since 2012, and really, going back further, closer to 2000. This was a break I made as a positive step, a way to help get away from not doomscrolling exactly, more like complaint scrolling.
Here’s the background, in convenient list form, because I love lists:
- It started with Quarter to Three, a gaming forum that originally had two gaming writers as admins, Tom Chick and Mark Asher.
- Mark eventually gave up admin, making Tom the sole admin.
- Tom has some, uh, quirky personality traits that sometimes led to interesting interactions between himself and various forum members. These interactions often resulted in bannings, sometimes temporary and sometimes permanent.
- Eventually (in 2011), Tom seemed to have enough of his own forum and banned…himself! For about four months, the forum was ostensibly run by the hands-off tech guy who monitored the forum software.
- Tom returned and created what amounted to a honeypot to ban more people. He banned a lot of people.
- So many people were banned that an entirely new forum was created in January 2012 for the exiles. It was called Broken Forum (named after the website that hosted it, Broken Toys) and was created by Lum the Mad (Scott Jennings), who was not actually banned.
- Broken Forum grew and thrived in the early days, and experienced many of the issues that typically befall an open forum, with trolls appearing and getting banned. But things eventually more or less settled down, and it was a pleasant place to have conversations about games, tech, entertainment and even politics.
- Lum grew increasingly hands-off for whatever reason(s) and eventually allowed another person to act as moderator for the two (!) politics forums. This person eventually came to effectively moderate the entire forum in Lum’s absence.
- During the infamous Gamergate harassment campaign, a bunch of trolls showed up to attack the female posters on BF. It was as awful as it sounds. The forum was locked down after this.
- After a long while, the forum was opened up a bit, but with stringent new rules in place for new posters. This had the side effect of making it hostile to all new posters, not just trolls-in-waiting, and the forum became increasingly insular as fewer people joined the community. On the plus side, it made it easier to get to know regular posters, because traffic became relatively light.
In the last few years, I’ve come to realize that much of the forum has become dominated by a few voices and there is an unspoken requirement to fit in, to toe the line, not just by following the actual rules, but by following the implicit rules as well. Deviating from these will typically result in a dogpile. I never experienced this directly because I don’t express any particularly controversial opinions and had long ago lost the taste for debate on public forums, anyway. But I did witness it, and it was off-putting.
The other thing I noticed was the complaints. The regulars on BF love to complain about everything. EVERYTHING. There is a venting thread that is thousands of posts long. The tech forum is filled with threads that all have variations of the title, “What has [company] fucked up lately?” And yes, there’s also a generic one as a catch-all for all the tech companies that aren’t big enough to warrant separate threads. There is no real discussion here, just complaints about whatever.
The sheer volume of negativity began to wear on me. Several of the most prolific posters have always rubbed me the wrong way and when one of them started a thread with an especially bitter title, it finally made me sit back and consider if reading the forum was still a good investment in my time. And I found, on balance, it wasn’t.
It’s been a few weeks since I last logged in, and what has surprised me the most is how little I actually miss it. I suppose that means it had become that poor a fit for me. I may pop back eventually, just to see what may or may not have changed, but right now there is no urge to do so. I feel a weird sort of relief at not subjecting myself to all the rants, complaints and negativity. It’s even inspired me to try to be more positive in general, including on this blog. I’m not giving up on writing about bad design or anything, but I am being more mindful of complaining just for the sake of complaining. I want to get away from that and after many years of being an active member of BF, I regret that leaving that community has turned out to be a key part of making this change.
UPDATE, July 26, 2023: It's now been over a year and a half since I last looked at Broken Forum, and I've yet to feel any urge to go have a look. Someone still there asked if I might reconsider, then admitted the forum is much as I had seen it last in January 2022. I did not reconsider!
UPDATE, June 18, 2022: It's now getting close to six months since I last logged onto Broken Forum, and I've still had no desire to check in on it. I installed the LeechBlock extension in Firefox back in January to lock the site out in case I was tempted to look, but it's never been needed, because the temptation is just not there. Again, I think this emphasizes how the forum had evolved into something that simply wasn't for me anymore. And I'm okay with that!
