Being on the web is like being in a car. It makes people feel safe, so they let the worst parts of their personalities take over.
I have a huge number of hobbies, so I have joined many forums. What I have found is that Internet forum jerkdom exhibits a few repetitive patterns we have all seen over and over. Some of my favorites:
1. Attack the new guy when he's right. Someone joins a forum, and a resident troll laureate who wants to take his prizewinning hemorrhoids out on the world starts being rude to him. The new guy puts him in his place. Everyone else joins in and hammers the new guy.
2. Here's one I love. Get furious when someone politely rejects your bad advice. "What's the best way to discourage my toddler from drawing on the wall?" "Twelve-gauge full of rock salt." "Thanks, but I don't think that option is for me." "WELL I GUESS YOU KNOW EVERYTHING! WHY DID YOU COME HERE IF YOU ALREADY KNEW THE ANSWER?"
3. Make physical threats you don't mean and can't possibly back up. Everyone on the Internet has his own dojo and set of amazing martial arts skills. Two guys start to bicker. One says, probably correctly, that the other wouldn't dare talk like that to his face. Soon, there appear tales of black belts and bench press personal bests. One guy offers to meet the other wherever he wants. They go back and forth, killing the thread and making everyone else wish they had never joined the forum. They never meet, because one weighs 109 pounds and has to have his girlfriend open jars for him, and the other has to use an electric fat cart to get him around the grocery store, where he only buys Hot Pockets, Root Beer, and Little Debbies. Which he eats simultaneously from the same bucket.
4. Demand sources for everything, no matter how obvious. "I have a cat named Bob." "SOURCE???!!! SOURCE???!!!" Tiresome. Learn to use a search engine. Read your first book.
5. Show off knowledge you don't really have, by providing inapposite answers you just got from Google but didn't really understand.
6. Make angry demands for explanations of things someone else said, which you, alone, are too stupid to understand. I had a guy get mad at me because I said replacing the bottom of a high-end cabinet with half-inch plywood from Home Depot would basically mean replacing all the cabinets in the room. Pretty obvious. A plywood monstrosity would ruin the whole room's appearance, so I would end up having to replace everything. He wanted me to explain the carpentry and defend my claim. I'm not his Dunning-Kruger research assistant.
7. Argue with pros about things they know way more about. I'm a lawyer, and this one drives me nuts. Everyone in America thinks he can tell lawyers about law, as if they make us go to school for three years for no reason. I wonder if they do this to brain surgeons, telling them they should use JB Weld to fix aneurysms. There is a popular gun writer named Massad Ayoob, and he was considered a big authority on the mechanics of self-defense, not the law, right after color TV was invented. Forty years later, there are thousands of younger people who do what he did, better. He has zero legal training, but he puts up dangerous videos telling people what to tell the cops if they shoot someone. A real idiot when it comes to law. I criticized him in order to warn people, and his equally ignorant buddies tossed me from a forum over it. I wonder if anyone has gone to prison for listening to him. If so, I hope it was one of the mods on that forum.
There is absolutely no way to convince a deluded layman he's not a legal expert. It is impossible. As for me, I don't even argue with professionals who come to fix the garage door.
I have a VPN. I should rejoin the forum under a new identity, go back to the threads that made the mods mad, and post furious screeds full of grammatical errors, agreeing with them for labeling me a menace. I'll get them going and then see if I can get up a crew to go lynch me. Better yet, I'll tell them I found that guy and burned his house down, and I'll ask Ayoob what to tell the cops.
One really annoying thing about forums is that if you show any humility at all, and you admit you made a mistake or say there is something you don't know, people who have half your IQ and knowledge will condescend and start attacking you for your stupidity. The Internet is full of chest-puffing simians who know everything and never, ever made a mistake. If you are open about your faults, these insecure people will flock to you like flies to poop. They lurk in wait, hoping someone they can use for a punching bag will show up.
I used to belong to a machining forum, and I got really tired of people talking down to me. There was a little group of guys who gave me the "grasshopper" treatment. One day I was thinking about posting something, and I realized I was no longer in the mood to put up with their attitude, so I joined a nicer forum. That was years ago, and I haven't been back once. They wondered where I went and why.
I've been guilty of Internet jerkdom myself, but I am always trying to do better.
Maybe I should delete all this and just say, "Yes. That has happened to me."
Hey, does the name "Maryanne Kehoe" ring a bell here?
