semi-OT: the various enthusiast communities

[batman1425]

I've started to participate more in an auto specific forum after the purchase of my new car. Lots of good information there and I'm learning a lot though the interactions. I haven't been participating for very long, but it is a different community for sure. Not unexpected. Different interests capture different target audiences. The contrast in my experiences with this new place vs. paceline is interesting.

People seem a lot more... bold... perhaps is a good word. While the majority of the posts are constructive and polite, I see more frequent jabs at posters than I seen here. In several cases phrases like "I'm not trying to be an a**" is used as a qualifier to you say whatever one wants. Personal filters don't seem to catch as much, IMO.

I noticed something similar when trying to sell something in the classifieds section. The first "offer" I got was a paragraph long tirade about how my price is too high, that he isn't sure he even wants it because it is not as good as x or y, he is interested, but will probably just do z instead??? I'm still struggling to figure out what the point of that message really was.

BTW, the price was right in line with like items posted recently (actually a bit less than some of the most recent ones). I wonder what kind of responses those folks got!

Not saying any of this to crap on the other forum, I like participating there, just find it interesting to see the contrast in the communities.

What other venues do you all frequent? Do you see similar (or different) differences in those communities?

[benb]

I occasionally participate in some photography forums. The one I use the most is fredmiranda.com... it is fairly mature like the Paceline, it's almost unheard of to see personal attacks.

Photography has a similar dichotomy to cycling, there are people more interested in buying/selling/collecting cameras and other people more interested in practicing photography. I would say it can be worse though, because cyclists don't really argue about which bike is the "best" because there is more recognition of a bike having to be a good match for a particular rider. Some of the mainstream photography communities like dpreview are pretty low signal:noise ratio due to all the arguing about brand S vs C vs N.

Within the last year I joined acousticguitarforum.com, that is another one that is very civil, perhaps even more civil then here. Guitar playing has that same dichotomy too, some people are collectors others are only interested in playing.

I used to be on several motorcycle forums years ago. They tended to be pretty rowdy. The main one I was on was local to new england, and I had met and ridden with a lot of the other users. It was rowdy online but everyone was super super nice in person and the community really took care of others when for example someone crashed. The online rowdiness might have seemed to get nasty but it was mostly just a place that wasn't politically correct and most everyone knew each other IRL and knew who had a really thick skin.

I've been on a bunch of car forums over the years based on whatever car I owned. They can always be useful if you've got questions about buying/selling/fixing a model of car but they do tend to be the least civil of anything I've been a part of. Car guys seem to really be obsessed with measuring their self worth against "those evil guys" who bought the car from the opposing manufacturer and there is more association with a given brand along with the tendency to really want to defend/evangelize that brand. This seems to be correlated with the age/maturity level of the people who buy a certain car.. the cheaper it is and the more performance it has for it's price the more likely it's owned by teenagers and 20-somethings who are at the peak of this kind of behavior.