I don't have a terribly large number of posts for someone who has been a member of this forum for five years now. I had a lot of posts initially when I made the account. I was very excited to be playing my first mush character when I joined, and I did so because I kept hearing in oocs about this place. I was very horrified by having things like, my character being icly aggressive toward a rival covenant's pcs while oocly I was actively defending their players, combined with me not making their builds quickly enough on the heels of my having had a heart attack and being hospitalized for over a week for the ensuing heart failure turned into a wave of 'bad actor' and 'they were attacking me' (when I had receipts showing me defending them instead) turned into this whole big thing that resulted in so such discomfort in engaging with the community that I started trying to delete every post I had made and actively changed my username to try to attempt to keep ffrom being actively dragged for... I guess not being a part of the circle of winners?
Recently, after the forum split, I tried cross posting both here and there about a role I was looking to fill. Just to compare and see. The thread here was actively engaged with, upvoted, and interest and discussion engaged over a dozen times. The one over there didn't get a single response or upvote. Now, as someone who studied psychology at the collegiate level and has an understanding of neurobiolpgy, I am not surprised at all by the results of my experiment. After all, I was part of the 'out' group, and no one was getting feelgood brain chemicals for engaging (see:oxytocin as love and hate chemical).
There don't need to be accusations or speculation made about cliques to understand how they work and form when you understand oxytocin. I will say this: I am really happy to feel like there is a good chance that when trying to engage with other mushers here there will be some small response and probably positive in tone, after the split. Where before it, I lurked without engaging for fear of being dogpiled and wildly misrepresented again. So to me, this fixed the community. And it is unsurprising that they are continuing the pound puppy party over there. How many new people have we all been warned off of over there in the two months time the place has existed?
/my 2 cents
Edit to fix typos.