Last August, I found a refuge while waiting for Katrina to ravage the landscape of Louisiana. I was simply stunned at the incompentence of what I saw unfolding before my eyes and felt like I needed to do something, even if doing something simply meant typing.
I remember reading and writing and thinking to myself how the site was beautifully clean of trolls and nasty people. Eventually, I got TUstatus and saw the ugly underbelly of this neat site called DKos and discovered why that crap was hidden---it was ugly, it was nasty, and it deserved to be behind closed doors.
I've never even been troll-rated beyond a scattered zero tossed out like a handful of seed. Most of those were asked for---something I wanted only the TU community to read or those that I was begging for in a snarky diary. It wasn't hard to keep myself out of trollville because I was simply being myself.
I spent my time uprating, downrating, and making snarky remarks along with commenting on real issues.
The 9-11 tinfoil diaries really sucked me in because I felt like it was a personal attack on what I experienced that morning. I saw the second plane hit from my car as I was frantically trying to get myself uptown and away from that madness, whatever it was. I didn't know at the time that I would not return home for several days. My job took me to the edge of ground zero for one week. I still have the clothes I wore then all bagged up because I didn't know what else to do with them and they stink beyond belief. They smell like something really bad burning but I have no clue what it is; years later, I don't want to know and so that bag of stuff quietly sits in the back of closet.
Those who write that planes didn't hit the towers, bite me. I saw it and you are full of shit.
It was troll rating the 9-11 rejectionists that I first became aware of the troll issue here at this great site I had discovered months earlier. I ticked on that zero as much as I could with those fools who were watching from Tulsa and felt they knew exactly what happened that sunny morning in NYC.
One afternoon, Darrell Gahm, aka several previous names, diaried that he was tired of it. It was distracting he said, and people were getting their feelings hurt. Those that had been downrated had a carnival proclaiming, "Woe is me, people don't like me." Those that had been policing the site from all sorts of trolls were roasted.
Sadly, that self-pity amongst the trolls has perpetuated and grown. And people here are fucking falling for it. Those that have been banned a few times get uprated because they sing a sad song. Those who spend some time outing them get downrated because they are being truthful.
What the fuck do you guys hope to accomplish when the trolls are uprated and those who are not are downrated? You are handing the place over to them.
I have done some early volunteer work with YKos and will finish that out next weekend. Other than that stuff, I'm outta here. My garden needs tending and those plants don't grow on the whines of trolls nor their defenders. I can work locally at getting my candidates in office without worry of troll wars and their cheering squad disrupting my routine as they have here.