Three Forums
When my husband bought our very first computer when my eldest son was probably five years old, he began blathering on with "introductory" information about it. I interrupted him to ask "How do you turn it on?"
Some years later, I joined two email lists for the very time while living in the middle of nowhere and looking for support for homeschooling my kids because the schools on base SUCKED.
Well before Valorie King put out a call for volunteers for her plot to take a few email lists and turn them into a bonafide tax deductible charity, I made a spectacularly bad first impression on her by asking her for help with my technical problem when I moved email addresses or something and the answer turned out to be "That's not tagmax sending emails to your old address. That's a completely different email list that you forgot you were subscribed to and didn't move."
My participation on tagmax eventually led to me blogging and participating on a wide variety of email lists and other forums over the years. Often, it was a case of one thing leads to another and that's how I ended up on the Autism-Mercury Yahoo group.
My emails to tagmax were seemingly popular with what may have been a vocal minority. It wasn't uncommon for people to email me privately and ask my opinion about something and that's what happened here.
Someone asked what I thought about biomedical intervention for kids with issues like ASD and ADHD and I had no idea what she was talking about and made an ass of myself. She very nicely explained a few things and I asked her where I could learn more so I at least knew generally what people were talking about if anyone asked me again.
People were taking my opinions seriously about how to deal effectively with their special needs kids and I felt an obligation to first do no harm. She gave me a few links and said the Autism-Mercury list had the most consistently reliable information in her experience.
I knew her through tagmax and people there were generally intelligent. I didn't feel this information was pertinent to MY LIFE, no, and merely wanted a general overview of the landscape so to speak and only subscribed to this one list because I didn't want it to be an excess time burden to educate myself on the topic.
I initially didn't introduce myself, which isn't my norm. I'm a chatty person and I'm usually there because I want to talk to people.
Some days or weeks after I joined, my first email to the list was quite lengthy. Someone asked something and I happened to look up a bunch of stuff completely out of curiosity with no plans to reply on list. But people weren't really replying to their question, so I shared what I had looked up with supporting links and made it clear I didn't actually KNOW the answer but since no one else knew either, maybe they would find my email somewhat useful.
To my surprise and chagrin, the reaction from people was to the effect of "HOLY COW!!!!" because I wasn't looking for attention, didn't feel knowledgeable and didn't feel I did anything special.
I ultimately had to deal with some of the same jealous bullshit there as had also occurred on tagmax where people would attack me for bullshit reasons etc. But I also was respected by some people there and at some point the list owner (aka the moderator) asked if I would be willing to take over the list from them.
I declined to do so because it was primarily a chelation list and I had no experience with true chelation and I was quite controversial on list for asking about cilantro, which was a big no no to most people there, and I had been screamed at by people imagining I had diabolical plans to perform unapproved human medical experiments on my children using the forbidden cilantro chelation approach rather than asking questions trying to understand my own mysterious health improvements from eating at Chipotle regularly.
I also declined the opportunity because I was newly homeless and I needed to sort my financial problems out and try to get back into housing. I felt that investing my time in running an alternative health list for free while blogging about health stuff while homeless would likely lead to me trying to find a means to monetize the time I was giving these people and I felt that would go bad places for me and for them.
I still felt compelled to first do no harm, though I am not a physician. But, hey, I was doing alternative health stuff because physicians were failing me and not actually meeting a particularly impressive standard, so whatevs.
Cyburbia
By the time I joined Cyburbia, I knew I was facing a divorce. It's the oldest urban planning forum on the planet and I was dreaming of a career in urban planning.
At the time, it was apparently the only urban planning forum and a space with very meaty discussion on the topic of a sort I haven't ever really found anywhere else.
My experiences moderating the tag lists as a homemaker who didn't need an income convinced me I needed to just STOP all this being nice to people and giving my time away for FREE crap and put my time into figuring out how to establish a paid career.
While involved with the tag lists, I had a defacto unpaid consultancy that I had no means to turn into an income. People would give my email address to other people who had extremely difficult children with intractable problems the paid experts were failing to fix and tell them "Talk to her." We would exchange emails and their lives would get dramatically better over the course of a few weeks or months and they would write me to tell me "My child is doing amazing!!!" and thank me and then I would never hear from them again.
I had zero professional credentials for trying to turn this into a paid consultancy and I decided I wanted to put a stop to giving my time away for FREE while everyone acted like I must just LOVE them or some nonsense and I clearly didn't need anything in return from them.
But I was still a military wife with health problems etc, so I continued developing an online life in the face of having no means to develop an IRL life. So I subscribed to this forum -- Cyburbia -- relevant to my career goals and began putting time into that and giving less time to things like tag lists.
I think we were days away from changing Internet providers and so I expected my email address to change and I was planning to join Cyburbia after my email address changed when I read an offensive remark about homeless people on Cyburbia. I subscribed immediately that day, several days ahead of my planned schedule, to reply to that and then spent the next six months behaving myself to walk back the bad first impression I had made.
I don't clearly recall exactly when I joined but perhaps it was right after GIS school. GIS school saved my life because although doctors blew me off when I was a bedridden homemaker worried I would literally DIE if they didn't do something for me, once I had a $19,000 student loan backing up why I NEEDED good drugs, they gave me every single drug I asked for and threw in a few more they thought up for good measure.
Unsurprisingly, GIS school was followed by twenty-two months of drug withdrawal where I sometimes was awake for more than 24 hours straight -- the longest was 39 hours -- and an utter LOON. And I'm fairly certain I was on Cyburbia during this time and they were mostly unexpectedly kind and supportive to me.
I eventually founded a Citizen Planners sub forum on Cyburbia completely unintentionally. It was a class assignment for some college class or other to write up a proposal of some sort and I ran it past the forum owner, Dan Tasman, wanting FEEDBACK on it and he apologized for not being able to implement it immediately or some garbage.
So with exactly zero plans to do so, I ended up a low level moderator on Cyburbia for a time. My mod powers were limited to just MY sub forum and nowhere else on Cyburbia (because I was a doped up LOON and they very reasonably didn't want me fucking up the forum).
Thanks to my open door policy and having so many private conversations with people, probably a third of the members of tagmax knew I was getting divorced before it was mentioned publicly on tagmax. So when one of my critics on tagmax tried to turn this into drama, it failed to get traction because no one else jumped on the bandwagon of big reactions.
In contrast, I was new to Cyburbia and a student, not an urban planner, and not a long time member. Maybe two or three people learned privately I was facing a divorce before I mentioned it publicly and I did so because other people were talking about their divorces.
To my shock, this was vastly more drama and I put substantial time and effort into shutting this nonsense down. Plus one of the two men getting divorced became obsessed with me and began making ugly threats and at some point accused me of lying about getting divorced because my divorce was long and drawn out.
I have serious health problems and two special needs kids. I was getting divorced to make my life work, not to conveniently become his bitch on a schedule that served his agenda.
I was still homeschooling my two special needs kids and hip deep in the tag world because of it. Dan Tasman, the owner of Cyburbia, was both an urban planner and a programmer -- something I haven't run into anywhere else -- who was open about being ADHD, adopted as a child and he wore a mountain of personal baggage on his sleeve.
So he was clearly a very intelligent and talented but twice exceptional person and the evidence suggested I was a completely uncredentialed expert in helping people exactly like him.
So I quietly made a point of helping him personally put down some of his baggage and I also quietly made it my mission to support his work in ways I knew only I could do.
He bitched constantly about Cyburbia not getting the recognition it deserved and him not being able to monetize it. He also complained it didn't have much international membership even though at that time there were no other urban planning forums anywhere online.
Most active members were from the US or Canada and, because it was a professional forum, it was a running gag for them to joke about being losers with no life if they were posting to Cyburbia outside of normal workday hours.
This meant that the site was mostly active from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. US East Coast time, Monday through Friday because 8 a.m. East Coast time was when people started working on the East Coast and 8 p.m. East Coast time was 5 p.m. on the West Coast and planners on that coast were getting off work then.
I was a seriously ill college student and homemaker suffering horrific insomnia. I posted at all hours and our one active Australian member was happy to sometimes have live conversations with me, the only person ever online when he was posting.
It was clear to me that we had no international members because they would have been posting at odd hours on a forum where people openly mocked themselves as LOSERS with no life when they did so. I set out to actively murder this site-specific meme and gave people absolute hell for making such jokes until it stopped.
Six months after I joined, with no mod powers and while everyone treated me like an unwelcome outsider because I was a student not a professional planner who had made a very bad first impression that I was still trying to intentionally live down, membership for Cyburbia began to skyrocket, especially INTERNATIONAL membership.
No one ever gave me any credit for that and I never bothered to try to claim credit. They were a bunch of misogynistic disrespectful assholes who all treated me like a piece of ass.
They also were my friends and a source of important support while I was extremely ill, going through nearly TWO YEARS of drug withdrawal while making an absolute ASS of myself and they helped me attend a professional planning conference in San Francisco on the cheap where I met several of them in person at a group dinner we arranged, including my Australian buddy.
Once, I gave Dan Tasman a piece of my mind publicly about his complaints about lack of monetization. It was an incredibly lengthy, detailed reply outlining all the many ways he was strangling monetization and how it was his fault the site made no money.
He spoke constantly about not wanting to do "a PBS style begathon" and spoke of things like ads as being "a morally bankrupt sell out." I pointed out he was a government employee who didn't need to make his employer money to get a paycheck -- his paycheck came from taxes -- and told him bluntly he should plan on winning the lottery as the only acceptable means to monetize Cyburbia in a way that fit with his picky ethics.
In reaction to my book length critique, he created an entire new sub forum about the future of Cyburbia and made it private (members only, not visible to the public) and forum changes followed. Nonetheless, I was still treated like an outsider who did nothing and was of no importance and etc.
My divorce was long and drawn out and men got dumped left, right and center because it just made no sense to keep them hanging on hoping to marry me SOMEDAY while I continued to fail to get my act together. Dan Tasman appeared to have the worst crush on me and was perpetually a "desperate for a date loser" and I remained nominally available because I wasn't advertising on Cyburbia that I actually had a series of long distance relationships during that time.
At one point, a friend of mine on the moderating staff tried to ask Dan Tasman what kind of woman he was looking for and Dan Tasman gave some high minded description and my friend said "You mean like Michele?" leaving Dan speechless.
Dan once told me he WOULD put time into the relationship IF he thought it would go somewhere. I was quite plump at the time and he routinely went on about liking petite little women in a manner that amounted to insulting me to my face without calling me by name while at the same time whining and crying about no one wanting him.
He put me in a position of being unable to both tell him I found him attractive AND keeping my dignity. I chose my dignity.
He seemed to feel like our mutual attraction was some really big deal. I have more social savvy than he has and I was clear the impression that we were both strongly attracted or something was a side effect of circumstances that meant we were both single and hanging out together for YEARS.
As my divorce progressed and I began job hunting, I did apply to a few planning jobs but I wasn't qualified for very many and never got a planning job. Most planning jobs require a master's degree and I was still working on my bachelor's.
I ended up with a job in insurance and I eventually started a file titled something like "The why Dan Tasman is an asshole file." After making my peace with working in insurance for the foreseeable future, I decided I didn't really need to keep participating someplace where I was keeping a file like that on the forum owner, especially when the forum wasn't really pertinent to my life anymore, and I stopped participating.
I returned briefly some years later because I had applied to a community development job and was trying to develop a website for the town in question while local movers and shakers strung me along and told me I might yet get the job. Luckily, Dan Tasman wasn't around at all during the few months I was there again.
He had -- le gasp! -- gotten married and just stopped having time for the forum. This was probably largely a consequence of the many things I did over the years to help him put down his baggage while he added to mine and loudly announced without saying it that a fat ugly bitch like me should just get her vagina removed because it would never see action again.
After I got what I needed from them and decided Cyburbia was vastly worse than it used to be and I didn't really need to waste my time there, I finally got banned after all those years of not bothering to put up with their shit for publically saying (roughly) "Hey, tell your corrupt mod who used to treat Cyburbia as his personal flesh pot to get tested for trypanosoma. That's what I think I have and he didn't supply a condom like I told him to."
Shock of shockers: Sexism, misogyny, corruption and double standards are alive and well.
The negative reaction was a tad stronger than I expected but I wasn't really shocked because I'm abundantly familiar with the research that says girls who try to get help are routinely told things like "You're a slut who seduced your uncle!" and "Stop telling LIES about your uncle. He's a good man and never touched you, you lying little bitch!"
Sometimes they are told BOTH of those things at the same time and never mind that makes zero logical sense.
Cyburbia was a shadow of its former self anyway and I eventually threw in the towel on my dreams of a career in urban planning or similar. Que sera sera.
Metafilter
I still had my corporate job when I originally ditched Cyburbia. I was homeless by the time I was gifted a membership to Metafilter and, in fact, was gifted the membership because I was homeless.
Some seemingly sincerely Christian who knew of me through Hacker News offered me a membership a few months after I became homeless to try to help me sort my problems as someone who wanted to sort my problems and wasn't looking for charity.
It was probably at least a decade old by the time I showed up and it had something like ten thousand members. There's a lot about Metafilter I never really understood and likely never will.
It was founded by a guy named Matt something or other that I never really got to know. My understanding is that his very first employee was Jessamyn West and she had substantial influence on shaping the forum.
But then while I was there, she officially retired, saying something like "I want me to be less about Metafilter and Metafilter to be less about me."
So some months after she officially retired, when Matt decided he didn't really want to do this anymore and it was time to get a day job, this nominally cis het White male allowed Josh Millard, another nominally cis het White male, to become the forum owner instead of Jessamyn West who had been so central to the development of Metafilter for so long.
Newsflash: Sexism and misogyny, corruption and double standards are alive and well. And THIS bullshit is what it looks like.
However, women seem to struggle with the public versus private life thing, which I write about elsewhere. So maybe she needed that break to be prepared to do things right.
Eventually, she did become the owner of Metafilter. Exactly how and why that happened, I have no idea because I didn't realize it until well after the fact, what with having been banned ages ago.
I'm glad she's the owner. She's vastly more qualified than Josh.
In addition to being the first employee Metafilter had, she was interviewed by the Obama administration about library stuff and she's on the board of Wikipedia. Meanwhile, Josh's other identity seems to be dilettante and musician you've never heard of.
I wasn't shocked when I was banned. However, I was surprised at the bizarre and neurotic manner in which it happened.
Metafilter is a bastion of upper class conservative Christians AND simultaneously a bastion of feminists and the LGBTQ crowd. It had disaster waiting to happen written all over it and long before I was banned, I concluded you had to wonder what was really going on with Josh Millard or ANY nominally cis het White male who spent substantial time there.
Josh Millard is either fourteen or sixteen years younger than I am, I can't remember which, and he began squeeing at me in front of our ten thousand closest friends regularly in a manner that made me cringe.
He probably thought he was crushing on me. I thought he most likely was a closeted gay guy from a toxic homophobic wealthy Christian family in a heterosexual marriage to a woman from another toxic wealthy Christian family and their single biggest bond was trying to cope with their two toxic Christian families.
I was homeless and very ill and I'm always looking for good role models. Having zero personal designs on the man and merely hoping to soak up good role model stuff, one week while too sick to do any paid freelance writing, I went through his public photo album linked in his Metafilter profile, so it's not like I was stalking the guy or DIGGING up information on him.
The album begins before he got married and I initially found it interesting as an exercise in managing PR because it was filled with ADORING photos of Secretariat (her Metafilter handle) and you could kind of track the journey of him introducing her to his Metafilter people and eventually marrying her and trying to not let this become drama.
He would post photos and she would comment on them and laugh at him making a more sexual framing than she expected when she was just trying to show off the skirt she had sewn or something like that.
And then one day the adoring photos of her STOPPED and the photo album largely died not long after. So I infer SOMETHING happened in their marriage before he ever met me.
I once did a post about Christianity and Secretariat, Good Christian TM and wife of the mod, was a bitch to me, homeless loser on Metafilter trying to make my shitty life work.
They had no children that I knew of and he nominally supported her career and they nominally had a modern two career couple marriage, but her relationship to Metafilter existed solely because she was his wife and her primary relationship was via attending in person meetups while not much participating in the forum per se.
She was a civilian version of my participation in Army Wives Groups back in the day and the epitome of the Christian concept that women exist solely as help mates for their men.
The photo album had evidence of the extremely upper class background they had, showcasing cruises paid for by parents and bullshit like that which just screamed "This young couple still get a LOT of their money from their parents and have no hope of escaping the parental psycho controlling judgy toxic Christian bullshit without ending up homeless themselves."
Given her bitchy attacks on ME because her HUSBAND was squeeing at me publicly and the fact that when I tried to give him my attention that he obviously craved as someone with multiple walk in closets worth of upper class skeletons, he acted like I was demanding his attention and told me he didn't have the bandwidth for my sorry needy ass, I not only wasn't surprised when I got banned, I had been expecting it.
The neurotic part is he didn't ban me himself. He hired a new person who hated me and she was probably the person who banned me.
I have no idea why he didn't want to pull the trigger himself but I felt absolutely certain he hired her TO ban me, she knew it and fairly promptly complied, giving him some kind of plausible deniability for reasons I cannot comprehend or even GUESS at to this day.
Whatever Jessamyn's shortcomings are, I'm fairly certain she's less fucked up than Josh Millard and Metafilter is likely vastly better off without him at the helm.
I like to think I somehow had a hand in her ultimately getting her just desserts and becoming forum owner, but I'm incapable of making a case suggesting that's true. If it is, only she would know or be able to say for sure.
Footnote
Because obviously the entire planet is filled with RETARDS and all of the smartest people in the best of the best of the best sir groups everywhere cannot for the life of them add one and one to get two, I will state the STUPIDLY obvious that shouldn't require stating:
Jessamyn West QUIT and shortly thereafter Matt doesn't want to do this anymore. In other words, without her, Metafilter doesn't work anymore and is no fun anymore.
Rather than rehire her or give the damn thing to her and give her the recognition she deserves, he gives the damn thing to another nominally cis het White male.
Because LOGIC.
Mmmhmmm.
Fucking retards.