The Silencing of GaG

Anonymous
The Silencing of GaG

When I first joined GaG, it seemed like there were a lot more people who were really invested in both writing quality questions and mytakes and reading and responding to them. Of course you've always had your trolls and such, but to back something another take brought up, with more of an influx of younger GaGers or at least those posing as younger GaGers (hey, it is the internet), I've had to block a few more people who just seem to spend their time leaving nasty comments that have nothing to do with my content.

I hate to blame it on one set of people, because there are of course, some young people on here, some of whom I follow, who do want help, advice, or do leave good advice and comments. I've never been one to completely assume that someone's age defines their maturity level because we all know some really immature older people just as we know immature younger persons for their age levels. Back in the day, GaG used to have a filter, where you could filter questions out by age, and I would use it quite often simply to see what each age range was talking about and what the conversations were, but I think that function is long gone.


With takes especially, I find that there are fewer and fewer real quality responses. It usually tends to be responses like "good take," or "this sucks, " which means 99% of the time, this is a person trolling for points or trolling as opposed to someone who actually read anything beyond the title, if that. The reason I know this is because I'll get notifications, one after the other in a short span of time saying this one person has apparently read 5 takes in 2 minutes and on every take they've written..."good take/this sucks," nothing more, nothing less.

The Silencing of GaG

I guess the question boils down to, how much can we expect from such a public and broad based forum? Are we to expect any level of quality from GaG...a social media site...or are we just to assume that more than half the time, we'll get the same dribble of trollers and negative people dealing with personal issues and taking it out on the world through negativity. I would like to think we should expect, not complete civility, but more of it. In my mind, I think weeding out the ones set on causing trouble to all as a community is warranted if we'd like to make GaG a place for good advice and good exchanges of information.

Despite these those, there will always be those that feel that this would be tantamount to censorship, even if it is to rid the site of those who purposefully troll and cause trouble, and as much as I hate to admit it, even if an idea is negative or useless, it is what it is, and to rid of one, leads to another, and another, and then who do we actually allow to speak? We're seeing this in politics right now. When someone does not agree with the main speaker, they are shut out and shut down whether they are actually right or wrong or somewhere in between. That doesn't encourage dialogue or any deep thinking beyond one's own nose. I do think people should not just accept random antagonism just because it exists, but it's much harder to just put a blanket label on something and just shut it or them down without a more in depth look at the real problems.

The Silencing of GaG
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