A-Stump said:
If this thread has taught me anything, it's that the new users are vicious
As a new user, let me be brutally honest about my impressions.
This forum is heavily sanitized compared to what often goes on and is said on the Internet, especially in regard to people like Chris. There's a pretty heavy degree of self-censorship and a community willingness to label people A-Logs or Weens, both of which seemed to me at first almost reminescent of Chris's own behavior. It comes off as catty elitism on the part of the moderators and established users (although moderators seeming catty is part and parcel of being on an internet forum; probably a large part of that is them leaving brusque answers in an attempt to stay neutral-ish).
Many other Internet forums, and the venues from which most people first learn about Chris - ED, 4-Chan, websites that make fun of idiots and the like, are significantly less likely to enforce "playing nice" than the people here. Though A-Log was a self-hating sperg trying too hard to be cool, the first reaction of people who come across Chris - ween or otherwise - is contempt rather than pity. So when some people first see the "Forum Rules" in red, they might as well be seeing "Don't be a big meanie!"
This isn't a condemnation of the way this board is run. It makes sense and has probably developed along necessary lines as a precaution against incidents that plagued this place. Discussions about Chris are inevitably besieged by the stupid, the immature, and 'trolls' pretending to be more stupid and immature than they are to get a reaction from others (successfully or otherwise). For long time users and moderators, both of whom have some degree of emotional investment in the CWCki forums, nuisances need to be rid of, and it becomes practical to treat anyone with a dumb remark or two as a ween until proven innocent. It could be annoying to see people insult/berate Chris without having anything new to add, reinventing the wheel with ill-advised trolling plans which have long been rejected, etc., etc.
The thing is that this attempt to not be negative - discussing Chris in neutral and almost hypothetical terms - isn't natural. It's not the natural state of the internet and it's certainly not the natural state of the places from which people interested in Chris are drawn. People will say some dumb shit like "Chris is the dumbest, fattest fuck ever" or "This lazy guy needs to stop leeching off society and die". People with this particular forum's philosophy ingrained in them react negatively because they've tread this road many times, seen "weens" with nothing to contribute spout the same lines before, and more importantly have seen these situations degenerate into undesirable clusterfucks. But people say things like that all the time in other places without really meaning it; the automatic response to seeing a phenomenon like Chris is to point out how stupid and lazy he is. It's part of our psychology as social animals. And the automatic response to learning about his inability to empathize with people while doing whatever the fuck he wants with welfare he doesn't need is anger, possibly even a desire to see him punished or at least face some consequences for once.
When I tell people about Chris, a lot of them react by saying something like "Wow, this idiot is a waste of space" or coming up with "new" plans to troll him that have already failed or rejected as too likely to fail. They are well-adjusted and fairly intelligent people who are reacting in the same way I'm sure many of the older users did when they first saw this guy drinking his
or heard him talking about
It's good that this board is policed the way it is. At the same time, this policing is quite contrary to what many people, ween or otherwise, expect and desire when they enter into a discussion about Chris. You can't legitimately expect newcomers to not seem vicious to Chris when, from their point of view, the standards of this board seem second only to asspatters and white knights in terms of sensitivity to Chris. Yeah, idiots will need to be rooted out. Not everyone who's just heard about Chris and says "Wow this fat fuck is a leech" is an idiot, though.
The TLDR version: Newcomers to the CWCki forum aren't more vicious than the average Chris-follower. The long term users on this board are more gentle, possibly for good reasons.
