Can't we all play nice?

I have this vision. One day, there won’t be any war, one day we will all be united as one. We will all strive together and work towards the common goal of advancing ourselves as one people.

Pretty naive of me huh?

I’ve spent the last 5-10 minutes having a quick read through some of the journals that people have commented on the current ‘happenings’ in the community that’s here, one diarist asks ‘you really think i’d pay for this service with all this crap?’ (paraphrased and identity not revealed, you know who you are feel free to leave a comment if you want to identify yourself, not that I personally feel it matters).

My response is this: If you don’t want to subscribe then exercise your right to freedom of choice. We have worked hard to get that right in our society and we should make use of our freedom whenever we can. If you don’t want to subscribe then please, don’t. Everyone should aim to achieve the best value per second from their day because those seconds aren’t coming back. That’s what I really want everyone to do, enjoy your life, because it’s not here all that long.

I’d like it if everybody loved the service enough that they wanted to subscribe and help make it even better but I’m not a counsellor and I can’t help with the emotional baggage – I’m a software developer, so is Steve. We develop these sites because we find it a lot of fun and I can definitely report that atleast for me, a number of you successfully starting to turn Dear Diary into a job instead of a hobby and that upsets me.

All that we can provide is the service itself, we’ll provide the nuts and bolts upon which you can all write your diaries and read the public ones. Diaries don’t have to be real – I’ll let you in to a little secret, the very first online journal (or atleast the one that made online journalling what it is today) was about a woman and her daily life – except the whole thing was fictional.

Do we think that parody diaries are a good thing? Not particularly. But beware the double edged sword you let loose if you insist that we enforce our beliefs lest your diary be one of the ones caught under the blade. (not referring to the diarist mentioned above, i’m just using ‘you’ in the third person sense). There’s something in all diaries to offend everyone and there’s something in all diaries to please everyone. You can either find the diaries that make you happy or the ones that make you unhappy.

We have tried to offer as much as possible for free, and given people as much freedom as we can but there are many people that just abuse their freedom to express themselves by doing so in an unreasonable manner. If reader comments continue to cause a problem for diarists then we will (and at this point it’s looking highly likely that this will happen) make it a part of the service for which you must have signed up and logged in to use (whether you have a diary or not). If that is still misused, maybe Reader Comments becomes a premium service that you have to pay to use – that option hasn’t even been considered but look at it from our point of view, we don’t particularly want diarists getting abused for their thoughts, opinions and beliefs, they have their right to express themselves just as much as you, the reader, does – how about you show some respect and if you disagree then either leave a polite comment or just click the DearDiary.NET logo at the top and find another diary to read.

We cannot control the people that use the system. We expect everybody to be mature enough to either walk away or find a mature solution to any problems they have. If it falls outside our Terms and Conditions then we most definitely want to know about it, but if you just think they’re being an unreasonable ass then deal with it yourself until someone falls outside the Terms.

Frankly there is some incredulously childish behaviour going on at the moment and the response seems to be something even more childish and so on and so forth until finally everybody is in a verbal punch-up yelling and screaming at each other and more importantly from our point of view, dragging us into it.

When two people get into a fight, either one of them will be beaten in to submission or one of them will turn and walk away. Society tells us that we must win all battles at all costs, our principles are worth fighting for and we must change everybody! Bull hockey. If you disagree with me then I will ask you why and I will explain my point of view – if after that you still think I’m so full of it my eyes are brown then I’ll shake your hand and thank you for listening. There is nothing ‘weak’ about backing down, that really irks me about society as a whole. Just hold true to your own beliefs and if someone annoys you either avoid them or ask them to stop and then avoid them.

You’re all unfortunately being hurt by this because the more time that issues like this involve Steve and I, the more time that we cannot spend working on improving the sites. These sites don’t get written or even upgraded in a blink of an eye you know, there’s hundreds or even thousands of hours work goes in to them. If you would prefer us spend our time playing Mummy and Daddy to you all to try and restore peace then sure, I guess we can do that instead.

This explosion of emotions happens periodically, perhaps there is a world wide ‘period’ pain that everybody on the planet is going through, I don’t know. I’m just looking forward to the day when we can all play nice again.

Matt.

Mostly my personal opinions.

Apologies for my tone, i’m just really tired of the bickering and general bad attitudes.

Similar Posts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *