As I was browsing through the pages of ET Truth yesterday, I stumbled upon a huge amount of comments on the "girls of Crossfire" article. What struck me as odd was that the comments were mostly negative while for all the earlier posts they had all been positive - even though some of them contained personal attacks as well. So I was trying to figure out what exactly it was, and being who I am, I decided to write a column about it.
On Crossfire, the way people deal with each other is influenced by several factors. There seem to be certain groups or names where it is okay to make fun of them and then there are others where it is an outrage to put them in a comical context. Does anyone still recall the pictures of TosspoT at i29, him catching the ball and looking, admittedly, a bit mentally challenged? These photos didn't last long, but it was not because Crossfire users wanted them deleted, it was because the admins took care of it. There were a number of other occasions where the Crossfire owner was caught on camera in slightly compromising situations, nobody cried out loud and jumped to his defense though. Other examples of that category include the 10471st "lol urtier is fat" comment, the xth time that people are trying to insult me by mentioning my lack of hair or the uncountable number of times that razz was shown standing in his room with the toys in the background. And who is there to help humm3L when people make fun of the way he looks or his English?
It is debatable where the line has to be drawn between what is still funny and what hurts people. This is mainly influenced by the way people react to certain insults, if they take them lightly or if they show that it gets to them. Those who are quick in dealing out judgement themselves are expected to cope with a lot coming their way, too - "If you can't stand the heat, don't got into the kitchen" is what a famous English shoutcaster would say. evannoobadmin can probably tell you many stories about that kind of attitude. Cheaters are per se bad people you can throw insults at whereever possible, to many even the attempt of cheating at an online game makes those who did it an acceptable target for mockery and malice. Reading the article and comments over at ET Truth, girls are off limits.
So if we have not reached the point where everyone treats the other one with respect yet (which is utopia in an online community consisting largely of young people - although I have to say that those who have met at CPC/shgOpen/Quakecon have changed their attitude towards each other), who is there to tell us what we can say and what we shouldn't say? Is it okay to mock countries? If someone posts his photo, are we allowed to judge it? Is it even Crossfire's task to remove things that could be hurtful?
The current status quo seems to be that most visitors of this page and even the admins have very subjective views regarding attitude and what's acceptable to be said - and they are likely to make a sudden switch in what they like when the one who's attacked is close to them.
I'm asking you - are Crossfire users hypocrites?
On Crossfire, the way people deal with each other is influenced by several factors. There seem to be certain groups or names where it is okay to make fun of them and then there are others where it is an outrage to put them in a comical context. Does anyone still recall the pictures of TosspoT at i29, him catching the ball and looking, admittedly, a bit mentally challenged? These photos didn't last long, but it was not because Crossfire users wanted them deleted, it was because the admins took care of it. There were a number of other occasions where the Crossfire owner was caught on camera in slightly compromising situations, nobody cried out loud and jumped to his defense though. Other examples of that category include the 10471st "lol urtier is fat" comment, the xth time that people are trying to insult me by mentioning my lack of hair or the uncountable number of times that razz was shown standing in his room with the toys in the background. And who is there to help humm3L when people make fun of the way he looks or his English?
It is debatable where the line has to be drawn between what is still funny and what hurts people. This is mainly influenced by the way people react to certain insults, if they take them lightly or if they show that it gets to them. Those who are quick in dealing out judgement themselves are expected to cope with a lot coming their way, too - "If you can't stand the heat, don't got into the kitchen" is what a famous English shoutcaster would say. evannoobadmin can probably tell you many stories about that kind of attitude. Cheaters are per se bad people you can throw insults at whereever possible, to many even the attempt of cheating at an online game makes those who did it an acceptable target for mockery and malice. Reading the article and comments over at ET Truth, girls are off limits.
So if we have not reached the point where everyone treats the other one with respect yet (which is utopia in an online community consisting largely of young people - although I have to say that those who have met at CPC/shgOpen/Quakecon have changed their attitude towards each other), who is there to tell us what we can say and what we shouldn't say? Is it okay to mock countries? If someone posts his photo, are we allowed to judge it? Is it even Crossfire's task to remove things that could be hurtful?
The current status quo seems to be that most visitors of this page and even the admins have very subjective views regarding attitude and what's acceptable to be said - and they are likely to make a sudden switch in what they like when the one who's attacked is close to them.
I'm asking you - are Crossfire users hypocrites?
i think crossfire is famous for its flamers... you can't state one "not-so-pro" question without getting flamed or laughed at. i experienced it too with the column about the ET Scores. i admit it wasnt well thought over and it was a ridiculous and useless column.
we arent used to treat eachother with respect i guess...
It's not Crossfire's job to teach kids how to behave towards eachother, or adults either for that matter. We filter out the overly offensive stuff and the stuff we deem inappropriate, with a pretty high level of tolerance usually. It's a delicate balancing act between censurship and looking out for our users. We don't want people to feel they're being harassed on our site. Sometimes it's been coming down to raw bullying and I can imagine some people being rather hurt by this and perhaps thought twice before opening Crossfire again to see 8 replies to their comment in their mailbox with "lol retard".
But we're also just human. We can't check everything and we can't know everything. We also have no real policy concerning flame, so each admin is his own when it comes to what goes.
In my opinion the only way to change the behaviour here is to create a clear set of rules and have admins who are willing to punish people who break them. But it seems they are not interested in it. Maybe it's the fear to become a smaller community because the flamerkids moved to search another playground....who knows...
Also the flame towards younger players (razz for example) is just pitiful if you are to be thought of as being a mature person. And when they come to LAN everything is fine between them again and there is no flame at all, but oh oh when they return to their pc's there is a lot of flame again towards eachother :)
Just sad to watch someone write down some girls as much as possible over one blog-article without even the slightest bit of irony. Just random flame towards a few players because of their sex.
Unless you bring out the fat card, but thats sooo low.
I'm not sure exactly what your point is aimed at, Admin standards? Or user self discipline standards?
As for admin standards, we try to keep as much of a straight line as possible, but its a volunteer organisation who are all from different backgrounds and online at different times. One will interpret something differently to another, vast majority of the time however, if an admin needs to delete something its because it shouldnt be there, complaints only arise when someone else lets something slip. You must be aware, that the admins on Crossfire are also admins on Clanbase, GamesTV, ESReality, GGL, ESL and more, they've gotta be doing something right?
As for user standards, Its the internet, people can do and say as they please without fear of reprecussion. If you visit Crossfire its more than possible someone you've never met will try to score points off you for no reason at all. If you visit ETTruth you know you know what you're gonna get. Just like you could pm anyone on irc and abuse the heck outta them and be perfectly safe from it. I cannot see the point of people getting worked up about ETTruth, there are thousands of websites out there writing things people dont agree with, yet theres nothing you can do about it, this is no different. ETTruth is also not the first of its kind, there used to be Etruth for eSports stuff aswell.
To answer your question, internet hypocrisy and real life hypocrisy are different things because they're different envrioments.
One won again!
People have been sued for making libelous comments on forums, even in America where you need to proof malice.
Wanted to say that parts of that article were libelous. Guess, I misunderstood you?
Something that involves so much work and even if you do everything right the chance of something to happen is microscopic just doesnt count.
To exemplify what I mean, with that 'Girls' article on the ET-Truth website: It's clearly written by someone who is quite outspoken (why would you even contribute to such a site if you're not?). However, I don't think that anyone is sadistic enough to set out to purposely personally attack anyone in such a manner, so I would assume that the author was just trying to joke about the females who seem to frequent Crossfire these days. I don't really find any of the bios offensive, aside for the irZ one. I think that's where he overstepped the line, which I would assume is unintentional. I don't find anything offensive about joking about Fasolka's English (I'm sure all of you have had a chuckle at times, I know I have). Whereas for obvious reasons I find the irZ bio considerably more personal and insulting, and therefore inappropriate.
I haven't lost so much faith in humanity that I would automatically assume that this person is someone who sets out to personally attack/upset/insult/offend people. I'd like to give that person the benefit of the doubt, I could be wrong, but I think that he just intended to make some jokes about people and unintentionally overstepped the line in certain parts (namely the irZ thing). I think that people are getting way too worked up about that ET-Truth website, take it for what it is and stop trying to take the moral highground, and for those of you who want more: http://www.thesuperficial.com
while someone someone else might not feel so hurt when someone insulted his/her look. we dont know that and thats the problem. its all different when you take each person.
also, how we react on insults is mainly caused by such factors as e.g. mood and stuff
and i wouldnt really care about some guys writting it, dont need to know who he is, why he writes it...
The line is open to interpretation, how do I know you dont mind such abuse from lotix and not from nellie for example? However if we think you cant take it from user X, we'll delete it and that goes for pictures too.
Are you of the opinion that the option to flag a post for an admin to look at is a good idea?
Give the possibilites to thumb up or thumb down comments.
The more thumb down you get, the smaller the textbox is.
Err i cant really remember the name of the website i am talking about.Hope you get my point :)
However, what if I saw arni or skooli making the comment, even after you had told us it was making you suicidal? I know arni and skooli to be close friends of yours and wouldnt do something to hurt you, so do I leave it or do I let it stay?
The point I'm making is that its not always so black and white.
Don't give me that harsh shit either, you scot hating piece of turd!
I'll be representing my homies at CPC3, so you better watch what you say from now on!
Now you do it yourself ;-) Hypocrite?
I'd say something, but I'd only be repeating everybody else here so I'm not gonna say anything.
If someone is able to hurt u on the inet its also ur fault.
Thats how it is. I like xfire because its fun to write comments here. Some ppl like u some ppl dont like u. If u take look @ the journals and the forum topics u will recognize that xfire isnt the place to talk about important themes :DDDD
We mock people we dont like/want to get rid of, which means oponents, or people that opose as a threat to us/our reputation. That means we make fun of better players, not the ones we look up too or the one that are our friends, but the ones we considder competitors. This in all subconscious, and natural human behaviour, "survival of the fitest"
When it comes to the girls of ET, its something we would like to keep. Not something we would like to make fun of, when that only can result in the loss of the few ones we have.
Edit: read the article, and atleast what goes for irz i only saw personal attacks and cant in anyway be understood as "sarcastic comments", dont know if its you writing this article or the anonymous guy writing the other who made the biggest fool of himself.
In general that website is great imo, it contains things everyone thinks or always wanted to say in a very entertaining way.
lolD :\
its just internet, made to have fun, and recieve info from teh world.
I just love reading ESR and all the bs gets filtered out by the flame bait system
Coding it would take endless time, a report button would be a good start =]
That flame bait system is ridiculously inconsistent :p
are you gonna cry like a emo then? maybe gonna sue him?
or maybe you are as same retarded as the insulter and insult back him? plz whine
if i live in kazhastan and someone from nigeria insults me says "youre stupid" or whatever over the internet, then why should i care???
i dont know him from nigeria and hes just a random dude who writes bullshit over internet...
Internet and Real world is 2 different things... In internet people have more balls than in real life because you cant see the other one and in internet you can do all kinda bullshit...
so dont say that internet and real world are same :L
*here is a tissue
First of all, no one knows exactly how many comments actually gets deleted. If a comment is deleted it's deleted forever and all the replies as well, so people who read a journal or whatever after the comment was deleted will never know the an admin has done any work.
Second, most people don't care if their comments are deleted. I'd say about 80% of the comments here are of 1-2 lines saying nonsense and are written spontaneously and therefore reflect spontaneous opinions, often things people might've not said if they had given it some time to think about it. A comment like that is usually of little importance to the author so the punishment for writing something stupid and mean aren't that harsh (having the comment you don't think matters deleted).
Thirdly, we're not superhumanly fast. Lots of people read the comment before we've time to delete it so by posting an insult or stupid comment you can almost be 100% sure someone's gonna read it. Those people will get effected by the comment no matter what we do. I guess my point with this is that there's no way we can prevent people from writing stupid comments, we can only delete it after it's had effects.
Yes, I think those who commented on it are behaving like a hypocrites.
Judging man's photo isnt appropriate, while in the same time judging girl's photo is. Thats what the girls are for anyway :D
http://gotrumour.blogspot.com/ [cod2]
that site often makes fun of weight problems for some of the top cod2 players, just shows the humor level (lack of) of some people. The comments on irz went way too far though, where as for someone like annajr were quite funny. In ego terms think this is like the 3rd/4th time my name has been mentioned in a column!
VS
HOT AND COLD!!!
but i dont really think that Toss or any of the admin crew can do anything about it.
people have the power of choice. some chose to respect the others, some dont.
Thieves and hypocrites.
Thieves and hypocrites.
just look at that 13 years old kiddies ... only flaming and so on but its just funny cuz they would never do/talk something like taht in their rl !
I think the only choice we have is this, either we have faith in the community and the admins to in some way shape things for the better, or to if you feel so aggravated by some text on a screen written by someone you probably don’t know and probably never will known only to you by an alias of some movie that no one has ever heard of and those that do don’t care, then I suggest you get back on your board and surf somewhere else.
Personally the less administration the better. Also, in regard to the e-heros I don't think these are bad people or looking to get the e-penis fiddled with on webcam, I just think that these girls are like the last white rhino’s everyone wants to protect them because there special and unique. But from what I have read these are also generally the people who stick up for anyone suffering from 3rd degree burns ( Yes, watch enough ER and it might save your life.) ettruths is just someone impression the world around them, there little corner to empty there brain, if you feel you have a licence to criticise what ever someone says, then where do they have to sign up to get there’s ?
What i think should be done is don't let people have multi-accounts maybe something stopping it by ip or maybe adding something to our profiles like subnet matches 1. xaccountname 2. xaccountname2