Thread: Forum management and Start-Ups (with anonymous poll)
View Single Post
nthn's Avatar
nthn is offline nthn
2019-04-06 , 13:09
Posts: 764 | Thanked: 2,888 times | Joined on Jun 2014
#33
Originally Posted by wicket View Post
Thank you for replying. Your post is a good example that illustrates my point, so I'm going to entertain a response for one last time.

There is no suggestion in that thread that the seller is a "con artist", only complaints that the price is unjustified. Selling an item at exuberant price does not make one a con artist. If there is a buyer willing to pay the set price, then both parties walk away happy. For the buyer to be conned, the seller would have to run away with the money or send something that did not match the description. The seller provided an option for purchasing the device via a secure method (eBay) that includes a money back guarantee. He has 100% positive feedback on an account that over 13 years old. He also offered an option for an offline deal which could be susceptible to a con. If someone chooses the offline option over the secure method and then ends up being conned, they've no one to blame but themselves.
Note that I didn't say the guy was a con artist, just that your definition of "someone simply trying to sell something" could be applied to anyone, whether their intentions are good or not. As you didn't reply to anything I did say, I'm going to assume you don't disagree.

Going back to my point... these days on TMO, you make a contribution to a thread which might be something as trivial as sharing a link about a relevant news update, and it gets torn apart. So you feel the need to justify your contribution, only for that to get torn apart. So you justify your justification, and it goes on and on and it gets to the point where you question why you bothered contributing anything in the first place.
How often does this really happen, though? I don't read all threads, but the only thread I've recently seen with any kind of (unwarranted) criticism is the one about the F(x)tec phone, where dirkvl went for a full character assassination of chenliangchen, and appears to not have been reprimanded (by forum staff) for it. The only recent thing I can see is the Necuno thread where you posted about a blog post, and nieldk made a remark that to his disappointment there isn't really any news in it, which you appear to have interpreted differently. He's the guy who created the thread in the first place. Should I remind you to take another look at the first couple of pages of the thread, where nearly everyone's comments range from "seems too good to be true" to "smells like a scam"? It's true, Necuno is not selling anything yet, so they have nothing to prove. Because of that, they also have everything to prove.
However, whether his disappointment is justified or not doesn't even matter. You're conflating being disappointed in a project with being disappointed in a user's contribution and taking the former as a sort of personal attack. People don't express their thoughts on your (impersonal 'your') contributions, but on the state of the project itself. They aren't saying "how dare you share this with us?" but "we are perhaps irrationally angry at the project you're talking about". If you're a supporter of any project, you will always have to defend it against attacks from critics and detractors until said project has evolved up to a point where its very existence is already a sufficient defense.

Finally, you have to keep in mind that there are also cultural differences at play in how straightforward people are going to be in their comments, and regardless of nationality people are more assertive in keyboard communication.
 

The Following 3 Users Say Thank You to nthn For This Useful Post: