I first signed on to AudiogoN in '97 or '98. I don't remember exactly when but the site was quite civil. Then within about a year, it totally fell apart. You could write absolutely nothing without somebody flaming you. The more you posted, and became known, it was like certain people were laying in wait for you so they could make some sniping remark. And there was no moderation of the posts. It got so bad that I just tuned out for about five years. I came back a year or two ago and I find it's greatly improved. Maybe it's just the perspective of time between now and then, but I think that it's a lot better now. However, it still took a year after my return before I felt it was worth my time to try posting again. Now that I've started posting, and opened myself up to attack, I don't find it's a problem yet. However, there certainly have been a couple of times when criticism or comments to my posts seem to be personal more than fair differences of opinion. A couple of days ago, I took some heat and ridicule in a thread for suggesting that people should be honest. The positive side is that now I know the usernames of some people that I certainly will never do business with.
I think that we could help ourselves a lot if we point out the trash. A moderator may let a flame through if it's a one-off event. However, a one-off flame to you and a one-off flame to somebody else and a one-off flame to another person turns into a pattern that identifies a particular individual. If the same name is brought to the moderator's attention again and again, they become noticed and perhaps tossed off the site. However, if an intemperate post is not brought to the moderator's attention, all the individual flames get lost in the thousands of posts. I have no problem at all with ratting out on the trash, because they drive away the good people to the detriment of us all. It's happened to this site before.
