Well, (moridinamael hemmed and hawed, debated whether to open his big dumb mouth) there have also been a few huge disaster-threads recently that really damaged my personal affect regarding this community. When everybody in The Rationality Club (tm) starts acting like children, defect-defecting on each other and statusmongering and basically looking indistinguishable from my Facebook feed, one begins to feel that a Rubicon has been unknowingly crossed somewhere. It reduces my unconscious impulse to contribute; it reduces my expectation that my contributions will be received in the generous spirit that I feel they would have been received in, oh, two or three years ago.

I hate writing posts like this, mainly because I hate complaining without suggesting solutions, so I will end with a solution: let's be more generous to each other. To each others' arguments and possible meanings. To the moods we might have been in when we wrote the posts we wrote; users aren't bad people, they just have bad days. (Fundamental Attribution Error should be in bold at the bottom of the Reply button.)

Maybe we wouldn't all feel the need to hide in the Open Thread if we were nicer to each other.