[X-Post] Closure of the CWCki Forum's Private Discussion Board

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I don't really speak up unless I have something to say that I think no one else would say or notice, which is why my post count will probably never rise about the single digits, but I would like to speak my mind here.

I've been following Chris's antics for years, more years than most. I found him (quite accidentally) when I was being stalked, sexually harassed and threatened by someone with autism and, as a filthy neurological normie, was attempting to understand the disorder. I quietly watched the early trolling days, seeing so much of my tormenter in Chris I absolutely delighted in every moment that brought his ego down, every online discussion about how fed up others were with his attitude and was relieved to know I wasn't alone or insane by being frustrated with that kind of behavior.
I never said a word, I never 'liked' a video, I never attempted to contact him, I would just come home after a long day of discussing my stalker's behavior with my professors and watch a video, read the outrage and breath a sigh of relief that I wasn't so alone.
Then my stalker hurt someone and was sent to a special group home.
I lost interest in Chris around that point. His antics were still amusing, but I no longer needed an outlet for my own fear and frustration. I didn't need to see someone else get picked on/get what he deserved (depending on your perspective) to feel better about myself or my situation. I kept watching, but now I wasn't watching Chris.

I was watching the in fighting, I was watching the trolls compete, I was watching all the cool kids dangle little bits of information over the heads of others and laugh as they snapped at it. I was watching people get possessive over Chris, over his information, over his videos. They loved to control him and the people watching him. It was so stupid, so horrifying and so goddamn fascinating.

but I did realise very quickly that there was a hierarchy of trolls and some inner circle that you couldn't just be a part of.

That goddamn hierarchy. I've seen it in action, I've seen it speculated over, I've seen it lorded over people.
And I hated it, and loved it, more than I ever hated or loved anything Chris had done.
I actually may have had a chance to be part of it back in the day, when 'unnecessary piping' became a pretty big problem on the CWIKI. I had an email all typed out, ready to offer my resources of vbulletin and webspace to build a dedicated forum for all the speculating outsiders, I've done it before for other sites so it would have been pretty easy. But I didn't, and I'm so glad for that. I've watched numerous versions of this board come and go and I've watched each person who built said board either join the inner circle or become a slave to it.

To speak honestly, I dislike pretty much anyone who has ever had any 'power' over any Chris related material, or has been in a similar position (like a few members on here with 'their own' lolcow). I'm not saying they're bad people, hell some of them seem really nice, but after the first few years it was obvious that nothing could really help or change Chris for the better (and you'd have to be pretty naive or ridiculously optimistic to think otherwise) so really there was no 'noble' motivation to continue the trolling. Everyone left was just bullying or on a power trip, which I fully admit I found terribly fun and had absolutely no interest in discouraging even if I'd been in a position to do so.

Yeah yeah, I know, we're just documenting, not trolling. We're not the bullies etc etc. Trust me, I've been here long enough to have heard it all but lets call a spade a spade here; you don't call a kid fat and then justify it by pulling out several colour coded flow charts illustrating every moment in their lives they've eaten something that's over 200 calories and come out as the hero, even if they lose weight. You may be right, but you're still a jerk.
We're all still jerks.

So this announcement? It genuinely surprised me. I had to check the OP several times while reading through it to make sure I was seeing things right. Mostly because this is pretty much right on the heels of this:

>moral imperative

This is a fucking forum dedicated to the borderline-stalking of retards. I don't see any moral imperative anywhere. It should be a treat when we go out of our way to help someone, like with the fire drive, not the day to day operations. This vade guy is a loser and I don't know why people are coddling him like the gift of life is so important we need yet another DID schizo walking around.

Am I wrong? I didn't realize this was a spastic rehabilitation center. You people shouldn't feel so comfortable going on about your mental health problems. This isn't an insane asylum and I'm tired of being the man in the white robe.

This is the attitude I expect to see from anyone involved in the 'inner circle'.
This is nothing new.
This is the attitude I thank the Internet Gods each night that I have not adopted. So reading the OP, well, it was surprising of course to see that Null is, in fact, a multi faceted person who is more than the sum of their post history, which is always good news, but it leaves me with one lingering question and the reason for this 8 page essay I am now naming Chris and I: One Man's Journey into Internet Autism.
What the hell did you expect?
Everything else makes sense, given the entire "Christory", even this (seemingly) sudden public display of remorse, but I just cannot figure out what the hell any of the remaining/new 'inner circle' thought would happen if not this. You could see this coming years ago, hell, that's why most people walked away after that failed, pathetic attempt to start a lolcow war. Even in his moments of triumph back then he didn't have the heart or the energy to gloat like he used to, his lows got lower and his highs barely registered.
So what did you honestly expect to happen, if not this?
 
14 pages and no one has show the intestinal fortitude to fess up on being a major league ween.

Funny that a lot of you saying that "this was the right choice" were the same people who were patting Skyraider on the back for digging through Chris' garbage and talking about how much he loathes Barb.
 
I want to preface what I'm going to say with I agree with Null's decision and I'm glad he's come clean.

A lot of what was posted was kind of a "no shit" such as:

-A secret board for the VIP or Elite or whatever. The Mods as well as a few people I suspect seemed to work together a little TOO well with publishing information and information gathering.
- Catherine being a troll. I mean, come on, duh. Even the 1% chance that she was real then why would she just throw away a CD for a forum member to just happen upon so they can upload it? Most women would be repulsed by his unhygienic disposition, misogyny, racism, etc. that they wouldn't tolerate one date with him and if they did to soon realize what a creep he is, they would have told him to fuck off. See Megan, the Wallflower, see pretty much every woman he interacts with other than Barb.
-Any documents gathered post fire including school documents, photos of his burnt out house and his rental house I had suspected were some sort of troll effort.

Things that I may have been too naive to see:
-People impersonating people he knew in high school.
-People impersonating an injured firefighter

I'm going to echo what everyone else is saying: There needs to be a strict "Look but don't touch" attitude to the forums. If you want to buy a medallion, whatever. You want to donate to whatever fund they have, whatever. If you want to buy overprice, "original" art, whatever.
You want to pretend to be his heartsweet, gal-pal, high school friend then that's your prerogative but THIS forum shouldn't be involved at all. This should also go for people stalking him to his house, to Target, and dumpster diving.

I found going through his garbage to be creepy. Even though, it's legal, it's begs the question, "Should you really do that?" People photographing his rental house was a line crosser for me because it meant that someone a) happened to be neighbors with him and were spying on him or b) they saw him in a public place and followed him home which is the more likely scenario. Where is the line?
I was unaware of anyone impersonating an injured firefighter which is also a line crosser and I honestly shouldn't have to explain why.

I'm just going to out and say it, impersonating his old gal-pals or a heartsweet is pathetic weenery. We get it. He's a grown man that dresses, poorly, in drag with a more than likely infected taint piercing who lives with his horrible, aging mother in a decrepit home while living on welfare. He smells bad, he looks terrible, has no friends, no girlfriend and never had a girlfriend so it's not funny when you kick the already very dead horse. Trust me, he does plenty of funny things without anyone's involvement.

I really think I'm preaching to the choir here because I think 95% of the people on the forum just want to watch and not get involved.
 
14 pages and no one has show the intestinal fortitude to fess up on being a major league ween.
My thoughts exactly unless a lot of them got banned because it went too far. Who knows?

Funny that a lot of you saying that "this was the right choice" were the same people who were patting Skyraider on the back for digging through Chris' garbage and talking about how much he loathes Barb.

I think a lot of people were wanting new content but I don't think they knew what extent it took to get the new content. Even I had to take a step back and go, "Yeah....this is kind of fucked up."
 
I usually just lurk here %95 of the time. However I've been following Chris' antics since 2010. I do think that this a great decision on Null's part.

This basically feels like a relationship that's been dragged on for a year or two too long and now you just want to let it go and appreciate it for the years of good times it has brought.

Like many others have said before, these forums have introduced me to so many other lolcows, but Chris was the first that I've followed this much.
 
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So what did you honestly expect to happen, if not this?
At the risk of sounding edgy, I like to consider myself a chaotic neutral. I don't really have goals that represent any larger order. I don't care about the forum's cliques and I have no desire to get in with the people who surround Chris.

When I was more curious and naive, I probed those waters, and I found it lacking. In the world of trolling and abnormal psychology, there are no winners and no completely trustworthy people. The only way to win is to define your own rules, set your own goals, and play by them. In the last 2 years I've discovered a lot about myself in trying to appease as many people as possible.

The Private Discussion board was my attempt at giving trolls space. I wanted to see what would happen. What happened was nothing worth bragging about. There was a lot of good effort from a handful of smart, organized individuals, but the results weren't what you'd want. It did not satisfy the ratio of effort to reward. We got information, we obtained video and audio, and we learned a lot. What we didn't get is entertainment that other people would enjoy. What satisfaction trolls did get came from their successes and how much they learned about Chris, but what they could share wasn't something that would appeal to people. It just wasn't funny. The whole thing also made me feel kind of shitty.

I didn't comment on this until now, but there was a moment where I got super paranoid. I thought someone had leaked information and I began probing staff to see if any of them would be responsible. I had to make a difficult choice: protect the content stash by cutting off staff members from it, or deal with the leaks. I went with the latter and took it a step further. I decided I wanted a harmonious board of friends and people getting along, rather than a society with levels of secrecy and distrust. This is one of the outcomes of that.


Shortly after the Vade thread came around and I realized how people had gotten too comfortable at the same time I had grown skittish. That also pissed me off. I like objectivity and emotional distance, I want to see people understanding the psychology of lolcows. There are ways to weave your personal experiences into your posts without making a lolcow's thread all about you. Again, to reiterate, the reason why I fucking love DeagleDad, Introman, and Marvin so much is that they don't make it about them. Marvin never came out and said he was the Pickleman. I had no idea until 2 months after I started hosting and asked, "Why does Marvin know so much?". Alec was the only person to have the Christorical Figure badge for a long time. I like that shit. I like objective, informative people and I don't want to see a bunch of babies crying on each other's shoulders because some fucking loser threatened to kill himself.

This event furthered my understanding of where the forums were at, and where I wanted to be. I'll see if I can illustrate this.

The forum's community sits inside a triangle.
At the top is normality, and typical discussion.
The bottom left corner is troll-shielding, and group therapy discussion.
The bottom right is trolling, and outright malicious behavior.

There is a center to this triangle that sits in a gray area. People are treated with respect with an understanding that they have the right to exist, but at the same time, they are allowed to fall, and they're allowed to be criticized and ridiculed for it. There's an understanding that each person's human experience is something different, and the most interesting people are worth observing, but fucking with them to synthetically make them more interesting is wrong. That's why a person like Gail will never be funny. She's fake. That's also why someone like AFemininePad is allowed to be on the forum. He's interesting and polite, so there's something to be gained from having him around.

When we have trolls like GamerFood and the Private Discussion join, it slants to the bottom right too much. People act out of character and are more willing to tolerate things that are just kinda dickish.

When you let people publicly sob over something as ridiculous as some Tumblr kid's cry for attention, it makes you look pathetic and breeds the idea that we're here to help people, which isn't the case. As awesome as I think a lot of people here are, we're all in this weird forum that would never exist in an ideal world. Just by being here, you encourage the malicious folk to generate content for attention, and you're in a way responsible for it.

Also, I'm now of the opinion that nobody is here because they're perfectly normal. I'll never have to worry about the top corner of the triangle being too big because it just doesn't exist. This isn't a medical board about human psychology, it's a gossip girls forum for Internet losers.


To elaborate, I do not think all people should be like me. I understand there will be people in every extreme, and in every place between the extremes. People visit the boards for different reasons and they get different things out of it from different people. This is healthy. My point is that the overall culture of the board should strive to be as neutral and emotionally detached as possible. People should feel OK existing on the board without fear of being cannibalized and attacked, but they should understand that public on-topic boards are not about them and not a therapy circlejerk.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, if you're actively trolling, and going out of your way to set stuff up, you're probably not really that grounded in reality. Regardless of motivations, having trolls on the board causes drama -- see DeagleDad and how people insist that he is somehow every person in Jace's world, or at least scripting them on Gail levels. Every time Jace cries about his dad on stream, people start up a lynch mob and say Ivan Komarov and DD should be banned. This shit's exhausting, and while I welcome content contributors, I would never want to set up the forums to be a trolling circle because it causes conflict I don't want to deal with and that is not healthy for the forums as a whole.


We'll never achieve this weird harmony that I envision, but it's an ideal. It's something I can work towards and so far, expanding and moderating has worked, and it's introduced me to a lot of interesting folk. Growing the board is my priority because it's what I want to do. I don't take sides and I don't fall into groups. Exercising a bias is not the goal.
 
I think a lot of people were wanting new content but I don't think they knew what extent it took to get the new content. Even I had to take a step back and go, "Yeah....this is kind of fucked up."

They knew someone was digging through his garbage and acting shady as fuck.
 
14 pages and no one has show the intestinal fortitude to fess up on being a major league ween.

Funny that a lot of you saying that "this was the right choice" were the same people who were patting Skyraider on the back for digging through Chris' garbage and talking about how much he loathes Barb.

Quite. There's a lot of back-patting going on here. While I agree with what's happening from a policy perspective, I think a lot of the outpouring of support is more of a pile-on reflex than real understanding and appreciation of what the community has been and will be going through as it distances itself from Chris.
 
They knew someone was digging through his garbage and acting shady as fuck.
I think it was because people knew it was fucked up, but it was the stuff they wouldn't do themselves so they were impressed.

I think it also has to do with the perspective at the time. People wanted to see these documents, he had the documents, and they weren't going to NOT look at them just because he went into the trash.

For another example: I think about 75% of the people here can agree that what Bluespike did was borderline crazy. He was a 13 year old boy who had phone sex with Chris, he pretended to be two people at the same time, and made Chris do some unsavory things for nothing. So yeah, Bluespike is one of those people a lot of people can say "yeah, he went too far"... but that doesn't stop us from listening to the Bluespike call and watching "Jullaaaaay" videos.
 
I think it was because people knew it was fucked up, but it was the stuff they wouldn't do themselves so they were impressed.

I think it also has to do with the perspective at the time. People wanted to see these documents, he had the documents, and they weren't going to NOT look at them just because he went into the trash.

For another example: I think about 75% of the people here can agree that what Bluespike did was borderline crazy. He was a 13 year old boy who had phone sex with Chris, he pretended to be two people at the same time, and made Chris do some unsavory things for nothing. So yeah, Bluespike is one of those people a lot of people can say "yeah, he went too far"... but that doesn't stop us from listening to the Bluespike call and watching "Jullaaaaay" videos.

Nail on the head. The information was interesting even if the means of obtaining it were pretty shifty.
 
Funny that a lot of you saying that "this was the right choice" were the same people who were patting Skyraider on the back for digging through Chris' garbage and talking about how much he loathes Barb.

So? Skyraider's dumpster diving unearthed some interesting (and some really lame, to be perfectly honest) stuff and gave us something new to talk about during long stretches of low activity. It's not inconsistent to appreciate that and at the same time recognize how unhealthy it is to manipulate Chris, especially in his current emotional state, to the extent some people have done.
 
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