At 13, if I wasn’t wasting my life level-grinding Pokémon, I was wasting it arguing with people on forums—often Pokémon forums. I was about as well behaved as you might imagine a 13-year-old boy arguing anonymously in fan forums might be. I had posts and comments removed, and I was banned outright on several occasions. Naturally, these actions by the moderators, who were more often than not themselves participants in the forums, I simply took as further evidence of my righteousness. I was a prolific player of Internet argument bingo, taking every mark against me as a mark in my favor.
It is quite fortunate that EZboard went the way of Angelfire and Geocities so that the lion’s share of my bad behavior has vanished with the sands of time. Sadly, Tripod has somehow survived, and the painfully embarrassing “liberation front” website some friends and I created to agitate against the the tyranny of the Fanfiction.net forum moderators can be found by those who wish to look for it. Outside of the site, I created an EZboard to serve as our own utopia, in which no moderation occurred whatsoever. It went fine, because there were never more than a dozen or two of us, and we enjoyed a rancorous tone over a civil one. Our rancor was also frequently aimed at people who were not on the board, which did not tend to divide us against one another.
It may have been time wasted, but I did learn some things from those misspent years.
Consider a group chat with twenty friends that is completely dominated by one of them. This one friend sends message after message, never letting anyone get a word in. Any sentence from the other nineteen is met with paragraphs of response. What is more, their perspective is highly formulaic and narrow; in short, predictable. Nothing new is ever gained from these discussions because the responses, though long, cover the same basic points the same person has made numerous times before.
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