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CaringandReal -> RE: fetlife (7/18/2009 8:00:05 AM)
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meh. fetlife. Looked around. Impossible to search for others so makes it almost useless as a personals site. As far as I and, I expect ,other singles are concerned that's a big strke against it.
The tiny little groups with each group owner the king and ultimate dictator/censor thing has been done to death online over the decades. It generally results in far more small-minded and personally vindicative censorship, witchhunts, and unfair treatment, and stifling of free thought than does a large moderated forum, so independent thought and expression of interesting ideas are very stifled in such places. In a small, tightly enclosed space, the air is close and stale, it's hard to breath. Plus there's a huge, as in close to the size of the moon, amount of ignorance and misinformation being bandied about in such groups. I read a few that covered interests or fetishes of my own pretty carefully and found my jaw dropping in astomishment more than once. I read some of the clique groups too, the exiles from this place, that place, and the other place. I found the poltiics ugly and personally distateful. Finally, small groups each run by their little king or queen or tribunal start out with a vision of utopia but quickly become cliquish, toadying, brown-nosing stinking dens of personal politics all too often. People play out their personal "issues" far more frequently in such places, because often the king or queen of the group is an "enabler" of the emotional illnesses that most entertain them. Think of everything you hate about collarme chatrooms (or hated about yahoo chatrooms before they closed and all the exiles ran bleating to places like collarme). That's fetlife discussion groups in a nutshell. All of that drama supresses individual expression (the only expressions allowed without disapproval re those that fit in with the usually quite narrow group ethos or those made by people who are "royal favorites") and free exchange ideas. No, I haven't any personal experiences with these groups giving me an axe to grind. I intend to steer well clear of them, in fact. I've just seen that particular online social pattern repated over and over and over so many times, and it always results in the same ugly messes. Not feeling particularly bitter or cynical, and I don't have any special love of collarme, it's just... the fetlife small-insular-group-politics thing is old, old, old. And it doesn't work for those who want to expand or learn, it just lets people feel even more smug and insular and not fix minds that badly need an oil change. (shrug) But what do I know?
Kewl graphical design. the black background is easy on the eyes and the fonts are modern. Still, I'll take a blaring white background any day if the foreground has meaningful content.
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