I have been quiet lately on Facebook due to being away for odd jobs and have been processing much… Tonight, I am feeling overwhelmed with so much gratitude-- deep thanks to all my friends who reached out when they saw a recent online situation getting rocky and uncertain and then stunningly incomprehensibly, crazily cruel, painful and out of control via bullying comments via my community social media platform from strangers and some people I thought were friendly neighbors or acquaintances on the community page I created more than two years ago as a free virtual community bulletin board meant to help neighbors and strengthen community and which now has over 1800 members. So I think I am also suffering a bit of PTSD and have to get this out and off my chest for therapy… Since I cant and wont do it on my community page….If you dont want to suffer through my gory details… skip to the end paragraph and just focus on my thanks…. It only took a few hours of me being away from my computer for a thread and reactions of certain people to explode into incredible ugliness. This was all a response to a post I made giving list members the opportunity to make an entirely optional donation/gift if they felt they had benefitted from the resource I had created and have put a lot of time into managing for over 2 years. The majority of the people on the list got what this request was all about…There have been many individuals who use this page to post requests for help or free advertising and I had finally garnered the courage to ask for a little of this myself, especially given for the first time since 1999 I didnt have an active photo research project and our family needed some supplemental income right away to meet basic bills. One individual (who has always had a bee in her bonnet and bone to pick with me on the list) took it upon herself to analyze and misinterpret my post-poisoning the thread by saying I was requesting payment from members for moderating the page (A salary via donations)…. This was not the case at all and anyone who took the time to carefully read my original post would get that this was not the case… But it caused a literal frenzy like sharks who smell blood in the water and people right and left were dispensing negative opinions based on the false assumption that I was asking them to pay me to use the page and bashing my character (which if they had read and followed the guidelines would know this is not allowed for anyones post). My computers system had frozen up the night I had posted disallowing any comments from me and then the next day I had to leave early and had commitments to people outside the house until mid-afternoon…So it was a perfect storm where I was unable to attend to the thread to be able to correct some of the misperceptions. By the time I got home it was too far gone and still afire with other rude threads happening as I was trying to put out fires with people via private messaging… People then got upset I was removing people from the list…just because they were expressing their opinions. I so wanted to publicly post the verbatim outright hostile or rude comments that got people put off the list (which were generally vile and rude or in clear violation of the guidelines) but realized that was just playing their game. Even though the thread did get deleted by my co-moderator I have copies in emails of all the comments from deleted threads to send to anyone who feels they were treated unfairly or got thrown off for no good reason. I dont think anyone will be able to argue with the words in black and white in front of them. Anyway…. I cant thank all the people who supported me enough… I was so very lucky to have caring people surrounding me who understand kindness and compassion. I cant imagine how one would have endured in isolation what basically was a virtual public stoning by some very misdirected, angry and hostile people. The psychology of the group behavior of a certain cluster of individuals was horrific (especially since so many seem to be individually quite nice but turned so nasty in this situation) and not worthy of this community. The same person who caused the thread to turn poisonous went and started a new group like mine and many people who were friends of hers and of like mind went to join to leave the drama on my list… Ironically… THEY have generally been the main instigators of any negativity or drama on this list!!! Her starting a new group is divisive to the core and is profoundly counter to what the idea of community resource should be.…She has created an us -- them situation that serves a smaller group within the community. It is quite sad, actually. On the positive side, my groups page has been mercifully calm and quiet of drama since the core group of complainers defected…and most importantly, my faith in human nature has remained intact in largest part due to the counterweight of the loving and selflessly generous kind acts or words of support in one way or another I received from caring friends and neighbors and some even anonymous…. You all know who you are … You have saved me in more ways than you can imagine. Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!!!
Posted on: Sun, 23 Mar 2014 08:20:15 +0000
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