Old School vs Neu Skuul: Voluntary Beatdown
By Tom Chandler on Aug 11, 2007 in Fishing Blogs
I’m an old school kind of writer. I’m into capital letters and punctuation the way people in personal ads are supposed to be into moonlight walks on the beach.
Still, I recognize good stuff when I read it, so even though reading the stream-of-consciousness, capitals-and-spell-check-optional Voluntary Beatdown blog sometimes makes my head hurt (the black background doesn’t help much), the ideas are worth the effort.
In a recent installment, they get all medieval on the Internet Experts you’ll find on some message boards. You know the type; the folks with a deeply informed opinion on pretty much everything, and yet when you meet them they can’t cast farther than their rod tip:
at one time or another, you’ve prolly been bored enough to read some fool fishing website (you’re here, fella…) and, in specific, the bulletin boards. we’ve all attempted to sit through the pain of these fishing forums/pits of dispair where people post a question or something, and then four hundred geriatric armchair internet jockey experts chime in with the latest rumors based on no fact and all heresay. i’ll admit to being guilty of reading that shit a few times, clinging to my beer and hoping sweet, sweet death would relieve me from the idiocy and flat-out half truths and really not believing some of the virgin shit these dudes and their misiformation like to spew. it was like watching a compound fracture happen
Compound fracture? Yeah, we’re down with that (see, we’re not without hipness here). Add Voluntary Beatdown to your RSS reader, and then forgive them their rantings about limp-wristed trout fishers.
Technorati Tags: fly fishing, fishing, voluntary beatdown, blog
Nailknot | Aug 11, 2007 | Reply
Cool to read the respect betweens two of my favorite fishing bloggers.
What kinda fella says you can’t have it both ways? The kind that’s missin out, that’s the kind.
KW Morrow | Aug 12, 2007 | Reply
What a spectacular description of the fishing forum experience! There is some true talent there, for sure.
Matt Dunn | Aug 12, 2007 | Reply
One of my favorite forums, the Fly Fisher’s Paradise boards for Central Pennsylvania, recently shut down because people were assholes: “It’s a shame that numerous posters always were picking and antagonizing, but that’s the way it was, so this is the way it is now.”
KW Morrow | Aug 12, 2007 | Reply
The fishing and hunting forums have always had their fair share of knuckleheaded behavior. There are on-line communities that are much worse. But it’s always been a major downer in our community.
My dad always used to complain about how people got really aggressive and forgot their manners when they climbed behind the steering wheel of an automobile. But it’s even worse when they sit down at a keyboard and monitor.
That’s why I have switched almost entirely to the blog format for my own on-line writing and interaction. There is no implied “free exchange of ideas” principle at play in the blogosphere. It’s my blog or your blog…if we don’t like something, we can delete or edit it with prejudice. We can allow comments or not. But the discussion forums, by nature, have always had this “thou shalt not censor” stigma.
Tom Chandler | Aug 12, 2007 | Reply
There are a bunch of interesting, “alternative” Northwest blogs (credit to AHW for being one of the first).
As for message boards, I’ve been studying those for years (partly for work-related reasons). Few survive for long without a meltdown of some significant kind, and those that don’t are typically moderated or very narrowly focused.
KW Morrow | Aug 12, 2007 | Reply
Very true, Tom. They’ve been that way since the beginning in about 1995.
On rare occasions, they can be funny in a watching a train-wreck sort of way. They usually contain some useful information. But it’s almost always buried neck deep in a bunch of schoolyard trash-talking.