Approval:

The assumption seems to be that people will be divided into two categories:

• Approved People
  
• Unapproved People

One thing that I noticed right away that really bothers me, but no amount of webmasterly mojo will ever be able to fix, is that people that I approve of don't approve of other people that I approve of.

If I start dividing things up based on who likes who, things become very dangerous.  I've talked to enough people here to be pretty confident in saying that for every person on the site (including me), there is at least one person who does not like them.  Dividing people up this way is a bad idea for all kinds of reasons.  The scariest is that it almost forces people to play politics.

It also forces people to group together. There is a huge difference between cliquishness and elitism. Being cliquish means joining a group so that you can feel like you are better than everybody else.  Being elitist means simply being better than everybody else. Being better comes with responsibility. If you are better than someone, then you are in a position of power, and if you abuse that power, then you are no longer better.  

The viciousness of the comments lately has been pretty disturbing.  I'm all in favor of vicious comments, but it's supposed to be "us against them" not "us against us". The attacks, the reactions to attacks, the assertions of status, the whiney questioning of status - All of these things demonstrate that people are ignoring their responsibility as someone who is better than everybody else. While some of the people here may annoy you or completely piss you off, that should not be what you base your interactions with them on.

While I don't subscribe to everything he had to say, Freud does describe this situation very nicely when discussing The Narcissism of Minor Differences.  He wrote, "it is precisely the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike that form the basis of feelings of strangeness and hostility between them."

What this means is that the more alike you are to someone else, the more the little things piss you off.  This is the reason that Christianity, Judiasm, and Islam have always been at each other's throats - yet don't seem too bothered by Buddists or Hindus.  

In another reference to the narcissism of minor differences Freud wrote, "It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness"

I believe this is the root of the problem. By making everybody a part of the same group, we have taken the focus off of the original point of the site and focused on our minor differences with the other memebers.  

"I lurked for a while before joining because I wanted to make sure that this was a place where ideas could be exchanged in an atmosphere of reasonable acceptance. Basically, if you do not actively prove yourself to be a hostile idiot (like billgates from way back when) you will be acknowledged and politely corrected when you get something wrong." - Rogue

"It used to be smart with a bit of social, now it's all social with no smart." - ickgirl

Originally, the site was a place for us to be better than everyone else.  Not by talking about how much better we are than those idiots, but by talking about Lucid Ideas in an effort to become better than everybody else. I think it's important for us to get back to that, since that is the value of this site. There are thousands of other sites where you can assert your leetness, but there are very few where you can talk about the kind of things that you used to be able to talk about here.

Everyone here, including and especially me (although more privately), has been guilty of slipping into the Unapproved People category based on all of this, so I decided it was the wrong approach altogether. If I divided things up this way, the site would no longer have any members, editors, or webmaster.  Looking at the site, I began to notice that the membership had already divided itself in another way, and that there really wasn't much sorting for me to do if I just defined the categories right.

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