Restraining myself from Yahoo Groups

If you’ve followed this blog for a while you know I’ve had my ups and downs with the Yahoo Groups system of “woe is me but I won’t do anything about it” discussions. For some that seemed to head nowhere (leads) I had the sense to remove myself. For others, I questioned publicly how long they were going to keep on taking the disrespectful tone and proceed into obscurity. I made a promise to a friend that I will remain and be a positive influence on the conversation – I nuked a few people that I had just about zero respect for and at the time I felt the fault was with the moderators of the group. Looking back, eight months later, not only was this not their fault to begin with but they have really stepped up their efforts to curb the discussions that headed nowhere. And at every turn they got questioned, disrespected, had personal items hurled at them..

Here is my fundamental problem with Yahoo Groups and IT discussions in the SMB IT consultant/reseller segment overall. It seems like there is always a crowd of people that comes to the table with one and only one objective: to bitch and moan. One of the idiots recently explained this in a very eloquent way: “The only way to get them to do anything is to create a huge public PR nightmare because the only way they will act is if there is a huge smear on their face”; If you’ve ever been to a TS2 event in Florida you know what I mean. Just because someone asks you for opinion or feedback does not mean you have put in a quarter for a few minutes with a punching bag. Some just do not seem to get that.

Sadly, folks, this isn’t therapy – this is a community for sharing technical and business knowledge; maybe at hard times a bit of comic relief. Unfortunately, this is a personal problem for me because Yahoo Groups have over time become a matter of personal addiction – and I just can’t seem to let it go when an idiot is given a megaphone directed at over 2,000 people. So I respond and I try to help folks understand the slightly bigger picture but eight months later it just seems to have gone to no avail. I guess I’ll focus more energy onto encouraging people to blog where they actually have to think before they start typing (though this blog is perhaps the worst example of that)

So… I’ve programmed in Parental Restrictions today not to allow me to look at my Gmail account (where all my community mail goes to) between 6 AM and midnight. If I am so compelled I guess I could look at them on my laptop but we’ll see. There are other OWN people in the groups now, maybe some of them bite the community bug but I kind of feel I have put in my time and failed and well.. time to move on.