My take on the A’ville incident last year that is still affecting the site. First the ‘villers tend to be older and there are a lot of right fringe loonies. There was a group of players whose only interest was stacking up gold by fair means or foul. There also was a smaller group who enjoyed themselves by pricking the loons and the golddiggers. Several things came together in the summer of 2008 that brought on the August Ambush.
1. A certain person, no it wasn’t me, was known to say what she thought and rubbed some old cats the wrong way. They blew up everything she said until they got a lynch mob mentality going. Some of us defended her and pointed out how ridiculous the whole thing was which turned the loons against us.
2. Askville was a profit center for Amazon and for some reason they decided to make it more profitable by increasing activity. The funnelled people with Amazon customer service questions into Askville so there were scores of “Where are the (product)?” questions. Then they had an arrangement where 100’s of phony “Bonus’ questions were posted. If there was an article online about a tornado in Kansas, it would generate a dozen bogus questions like what happened, how many were injured, what was the name of the sheriff, the radio station, etc. This was easy gold for answering the questions but annoying to those of us who were looking for real questions, So we protested a lot.
3. Politics arrived and the real lines were drawn.
One day I logged on and and found that a group of us had been banished and ostracized. To that point I had never heard of any kind of moderator or guiding force on Askville even when I had been threatened with violence.(Who threatens an anonymous person? lol) All of a sudden ‘Chris’ appeared and banished 17 people for breaking unnamed rules.
This led to an orgy of joy that the liberals had been punished for some unnamed but heinous crime. Of course in a matter of hours I was back asking questions about freedom, liberty and the 1st amendment, As soon as the period of banishment was over, I came over to fluther. Stopping by the ‘ville a few times, I noticed most of the things we objected to were changed but there is still a pall over speaking out against the loons or the powers that be.