Community Manager Appreciation Day!

Yesterday was the second annual “Community Manager Appreciation Day”!

:::sigh:::

Fuck my life….

I run this place: http://www.freespeechzoneblog.com

Metafilter was my first ever blogging experience.  All the tech-head, hacker, and geek-folk I was friends with showed me this place and it led to me getting involved in places like “Maddox”, “Something Awful”, “Newgrounds”, and then…well…”4chan”.  

After that I took a hiatus and ultimately returned after my Xbox 360 broke to do political blogging at the Daily Kos.  I was quickly banned seeing how I was used to the above mentioned communities and didn’t know about the harsh realities of political blogging.  I was thrown over to “My Left Wing” and then to “Political Flesh Feast” of which was great for a person like me.  That, however, shutdown and longing for a place like it started FSZ with help from others.  

The things you learn when administering a blog, especially a political one, are many and fucking nerve racking.  But nonetheless you learn to not give a shit and it moderates itself.  Nobody is perfect and the fact that this guy was the sole admin for a place that has been around that long….well, mad respect to THAT guy.

The theme of all this is that by creating a central forum you bring people together that wouldn’t have possibly ever interacted.  For good or bad, I always found that to be essential in life.  Even from assholes you learn something.

I learned that being an asshole on the internet is an art form.  The humor that they tap into in the psyche of those realizing what they’re doing allows that person to laugh at those genuinely trying to persuade the person who wants nothing but to be an asshole on the internet.  If one is too much of an asshole, not clever at all, or stale in their tricks they deploy from their asshole arsenal, then the higher order of assholes dismisses them and they are shunned by the internet asshole community (a.k.a. a “Fail”).  One obtains a position in the high order not by subscription or dogma, but must jockey for it everyday, start over to earn it with every post in a forum, and know they lose it as soon as they close their browser.

It’s the beauty of places like ours at FSZ.  An organic entity, separate but the same with no leader just sporadic operators with no real power.  

You either get it or you don’t.

The thing those in power don’t realize is that it can’t be controlled because as soon as you try, you become an asshole to the assholes.

And you don’t wanna do that…