Ray Sachs
Legend
- Location
- Not too far from Philly
- Name
- you should be able to figure it out...
I hang out a lot here on Serious Compacts and a fair amount on MU-43 as well. Over the past couple of years I've also spent a lot of time on DP Review forums. In the past I've spent a good bit of time on the Canon, Panasonic, and Sony forums, as well as always m43. Lately I'm mostly on the M43 and Fuji SLR/X100 forum, which also deals with the X-Pro gear. I also occasionally check in with the Ricoh forum but its mostly M43 and Fuji. The signal to noise ratio was always a lot worse on DPR than here or on MU-43, but I still found plenty of good stuff there and found it easy enough to avoid the contentious jerks who seem to take pleasure in tearing down people and their gear over there. But it seems like the past few months, the place has just gotten worse than intolerable. The m43 forum has long been subject to some pretty intense Pany vs Oly stuff, but lately its been all about m43 vs the world and the world has shown up to hate on m43 and some of the m43 hardcores have been seriously hating on the world. It seems like almost every thread I open these days I find myself wanting to just grabe people by the lapels and shake them and should in their faces "THEY'RE ONLY CAMERAS - just CAMERAS! - this is NOT life or death!!!". The Fuji forum isn't quite as bad but its pretty bad. Lots of people just seem to show up to go on about how horrible the X-Pro and X100 are and then some of the home-town folks get their backs up and can't even acknowledge that those cameras are less than perfect too - like all the others...
I still have people over there I consider friends, at least of the online variety, and a few I've met beyond online. I don't want to bail on the place completely and my attitude is to just check in and see if there's a question I can answer or a new bit of information or tip I can learn from. But its getting to the point where its just about impossible to wade through the muck to get to the rare nugget. In the past few days I've found myself spending literally about 30 seconds there before getting up from my desk in disgust - its THAT bad.
So, has anyone else who spends time over there noticed this? Is it really THAT much worse than its always been? Or is my ability to tolerate the noise just at a really low ebb? I mean there are more than a few people over there who I've learned to just totally ignore, but if I interacted with them at ALL I'd want to shoot in very short order. And I'm not one who's inclined towards that sort of feeling generally at ALL! And some of them are now so dominant its hard to ignore them because you open a thread and there are all of these huge tentacles with just those people off arguing among themselves or having sucked some poor fool who doesn't know better into their grasp and are busily flogging him or her.
Makes me wonder if these other places would be that bad if they weren't so well moderated or if its sort of self-policing? If its just the level of moderation that keeps this place and MU-43 from descending into that level of madness, than another VERY STRONG THANKS to Amin and the other mods who keep these places civilized. Those DPR forums have started feeling like some sort of post-apocalyptic wild west. I fear I'm this close to just abandoning those forums altogether, but that would be a bummer - I've learned a lot there in the time I've been back into photography and there are some good folks who don't seem to hang anywhere else. They're just getting REALLY hard to find lately.
-Ray
I still have people over there I consider friends, at least of the online variety, and a few I've met beyond online. I don't want to bail on the place completely and my attitude is to just check in and see if there's a question I can answer or a new bit of information or tip I can learn from. But its getting to the point where its just about impossible to wade through the muck to get to the rare nugget. In the past few days I've found myself spending literally about 30 seconds there before getting up from my desk in disgust - its THAT bad.
So, has anyone else who spends time over there noticed this? Is it really THAT much worse than its always been? Or is my ability to tolerate the noise just at a really low ebb? I mean there are more than a few people over there who I've learned to just totally ignore, but if I interacted with them at ALL I'd want to shoot in very short order. And I'm not one who's inclined towards that sort of feeling generally at ALL! And some of them are now so dominant its hard to ignore them because you open a thread and there are all of these huge tentacles with just those people off arguing among themselves or having sucked some poor fool who doesn't know better into their grasp and are busily flogging him or her.
Makes me wonder if these other places would be that bad if they weren't so well moderated or if its sort of self-policing? If its just the level of moderation that keeps this place and MU-43 from descending into that level of madness, than another VERY STRONG THANKS to Amin and the other mods who keep these places civilized. Those DPR forums have started feeling like some sort of post-apocalyptic wild west. I fear I'm this close to just abandoning those forums altogether, but that would be a bummer - I've learned a lot there in the time I've been back into photography and there are some good folks who don't seem to hang anywhere else. They're just getting REALLY hard to find lately.
-Ray