Radioactive afikomen

About me Talk to me Proper goddamn use of punctuation Stuff by me Handy stuff

I have decided to leave.

Why? Well, I spent the last few weeks soul-searching, and I came to a conclusion regarding my participation in this site: I was ambitious.

My ambition manifested in many ways, some petty (obsessive edit counting, noting my rank in mostlinkedpages, etc.) and some not so petty (attempts at drawing newcomers from the welcome rounds of "hello" into longer conversations, various efforts at working out site policy, etc.). For a while I was quite pleased with myself—here I had settled myself into a prominent role on a small-medium, growing wiki, and was, I thought, well positioned to follow the site upwards as it grew in prominence.

...That sounds very sinister. And in a way, I guess it is: my ambition encapsulates many of the things that veterans of Conservapedia want least in a fellow editor: a person with no interest in the articles, or in the community for its own sake, but great interest in administrating. Which brings me to why I'm leaving: I have increasing gotten the feeling that my ambition is not welcome here.

Of course, many people and their assorted baggage are not welcome here, but most stick around anyways. A realization of what other people think is rarely enough to dissuade the stubborn. And so my decision to leave was also born of my own internal frustrations.

(Excuse me if a break into stream-of-consciousness for a while.)

Online communities sell themselves on the notion that you need only contribute a little bit, that they can subsist entirely off of people who make only a couple edits/posts a day. But this is a total lie—no community can be built off such piecemeal, scattered contributions. All communities rely upon a backbone of people who effectively treat the site as their second, or even their first, job. This is the key to my ambition: I want to be one of those people. I want to be part of the backbone.

So I worked and worked, and gave and gave, yet I have increasingly felt, well, unappreciated, even looked down upon at times. Trent puts great amounts of work into this site, and people thank him all the time—I worked away at this site, too (sprucing up categories, formatting references, working on site policy, etc.). Yes, the results are less tangible, but still, where was my "thank you", my "we appreciate your efforts"? And I have now realized why that is: no one cares. No thank yous will ever come. I gave all I had to a place that wasn't interested in what I had to offer (can any of you imagine how bad that feels?)

So now I'm taking my ambition, my efforts, and my time, and I'm off to find a place that won't mind the ambition so much and thanks people for their work.

What I leave behind

I have a lot of good memories associated with this place. My first essay, my early, innocent days before I became ambitious, my admittance into the cabal, and the Community Standards revamp are all among them.

You know what my single happiest memory here is? It was a few months ago. There was an edit war brewing, with a couple people going back and forth over whether something was offensive or not. They were, of course, also arguing on the talk page as this went on. A couple of other people had made suggestions for a compromise, but nothing came of it. I saw what was going on, read the talk page, and then, making sure to incorporate previous suggestions and acknowledge the legitimacy conflict, wrote my own suggestion and promptly acted upon it. Everyone accepted it, and as far as I know the page is still that way. And I was so happy. That was when I realized that I loved doing this administrative stuff, that I could do that sort of thing it all day and be truly happy. (All this over an incident which I doubt anyone else remembers!)

I met a lot of good, fun people here. Bohdan, Ames, Theresa, Pink, Andreas, Trent, Huw—even CUR.

This was my favorite site. It was fun and joyfully informal.

To Theresa:

You are one of my favorite people here. Sharp, occasionally abrasive, yet nonetheless amiable and always fun to be around. My only regret is that I tried to drag you into my dramas—I hope you can forgive me for that.

To Pink:

You still remain my best friend—best internet-friend, that is. At your best, you could be sophisticated, quick, and witty. At your worst you could be childish, overly-dramatic, even CUR-like (if CUR was ten times wittier and seven years older, that is : )). Which may be why I find you so damn likable.

To Andreas:

You were one of the greats of this site, Andreas. You always challenged our (generally negative) assumptions about religion and history, you were many times eloquent, and always patient (even when we brushed your points aside). I have a great deal of respect for you. And, though you left the site for reasons entirely different from my own, it wasn't until I spent a month soul-searching that I could finally empathize with your reasons for doing so. I hope to continue talking with you on other sites.

To Trent:

I thank you, personally and from the bottom of my heart, for all the hard work you've put into this site (even going so far as to buy a server to host RationalWiki in your own apartment), and for all the help you gave me in setting up RationalWikiWiki.

*Please skip this section if your handle is not Human or Doggedpersistence.*

To Huw:

I'm not sure what to say. Part of me wants to maintain the tone I used with the others, and the other part wants to pour out all of my spite. Perhaps I can find a middle path...

I don't like myself anymore. There was a time when I could read something I completely disagreed with and would automatically look for the few areas I agreed with the author about, and think of ways to cross the other gaps between our opinions. There was a time when I could get involved in drama on the internet, but never let it become personal or emotional, and I could always keep it at a tongue-in-cheek distance. But being around you taught me to hate. It taught me that everything is personal and the most important thing in an argument is the immediate visceral reaction you have when you first stumble across some perceived slight.

Perhaps the reason I dislike you so much is that you are what I'm afraid I'll be like at the age of fifty: a still unattached confirmed bachelor, living alone with only a few cats and some mannequins, and desperately clinging to a website as the most important facet in my life. (Basically, the wired male equivalent of the Cat Lady.)

During my month off, I realized that your RationalWikiWiki article was more truthful than I had thought—not only are you someone who could be content just having fun on RationalWiki, but you are. To you, this site is not "RationalWiki" as Trent understands it. To you, this site is your personal playground—and woe be anyone who dares touch your play things. (And, like all good, fun playgrounds, rules exist only at your convenience—to you, other people are "attention whores"[1] and "twats"[2][3][4][5]—rules against personal attacks just don't apply to you.) Well, you won't have to worry anymore; you can keep your lame music articles and pointless British comedy pages—no one will be here to treat them like the trash they are anymore.

(Hm. Looks like I failed to find that middle path.)

To Doggedpersistence:

(Not mentioned earlier, I know.)

I never understood how someone who obsessively follows Conservapedia, nitpicking and speculating on the site's every action, and maintaining several sockpuppets simultaneously on that site (each with their own personality), could turn around and pooh-pooh those who dared put the same level of effort into RationalWiki. There is no subtle way of putting this: DogP, you are a hypocrite. And that is in addition to the most blatant case of psychological projection I have ever seen[6] ("you're both bored because of the boycott. Yet another reason to cancel the boycott."? Oh, please).

*Everyone else, please continue on here.*

To ConservapediaUndergroundResistor:

As much as I want to pick on you, you remind me a lot of my earlier days on the net—overeager, often painfully oblivious, and with a penchant for hysteria, but nonetheless a good person with lots of potential. With time comes maturity, and I hope to see you grow into something this site can be proud of.

And finally, to the site as a whole:

You, RationalWiki, are no longer a young site. You are an awkward teenager, growing and unsure of yourself. You have much potential, even as you are irreparably riven with fractured purposes (anti-Conservapedia on the one hand, post-Conservapedia on the other). You are a community that is fun, flexible, and generous, even as you prove wholly incapable of self-analysis.

You want to be both snarky and scientific, but, possessing a user base even less science-literate than Wikipedia's, you have already grown to value snark above science. Not until you take a razor and shear off all your flab—rejecting those who would use you as a convenient plaything, embracing those who seek to build a fun, accessible anti-anti-science resource—will you achieve anything of worth.

Trent promotes you across the internet as a site for debunking pseudoscience and a gathering place for skeptics, but beware the temptation to remain what you started out as: a dumping ground for articles that would never be accepted anywhere else.

I leave you with that thought.

Goodbye. I'll miss you all.

Sincerely,

Radioactive afikomen

(aka Jacob Murane)