draelyc wrote:GuitarBilly wrote:Yeah Dave is no longer a member here. I know him IRL and I can tell you that guy does not have one mean bone in his body, he just have this dry/harsh sense of humor that doesn't always translate well online.
I get it. I spent my teens in NYC and grew up with a group of guys that constantly gave each other shit for absolute no reason. You just couldn't win.
And these guys have been my best friends for decades and we still give each other shit all the time. One the guy's daughter just turned 18 and the "she's fair game now" jokes went through the roof for a few days. Obviously no one would really do anything to his daughter, but we wouldn't miss the opportunity to fuck with him about it either. When I married Kimmi (she's much younger) I had to sit through weeks of "Billy's going through a mid life crisis and can't afford a Corvette" type of jokes. Didn't bother me. I know they're happy for me.
So yeah, I get it and I think it's funny af, personally.
But it doesn't translate well on the internet with relative strangers, specially on a smaller, tight knit forum like this.
On a forum like gold age HCAF where you had a million posts an hour or on facebook, stuff like Dave's gratuitous shit giving gets diluted in a bunch of other crazy stuff and it's fine for the most part.
But for a smaller forum like this one, it's just too much and it just caused constant problems. I think a lot of people like moderated forums like this one precisely because it's not the free for all of mainstream social media. As an admin I have to make decisions that benefit the whole group.
So there was no fall out or anything. Its never an easy decision to ban an old timer but I do think it improved the overall vibe of the forum and helped it refocus on gear etc.. So it's all good on both ends.
I am sorry that you ended up in a position of having to make such a decision involving a friend. I knew it wasn’t a decision you came to lightly. Fwiw, although I think your description of Dave is pretty much spot on, when it came to me, I don’t think he was joking or playing an internet persona. Though I never met him in person, I’d known him online since the early days of HCAF and had been Facebook friends with him too for several years. We’d never had an issue until very recently — in particular after the Charlottesville riots and especially after my career change. At one point before he was banned, he made it clear that he thought I had “gone after his family” in some argument. Of course I hadn’t. The closest I ever came to anything like that was once, in the heat of a really ugly exchange, when I crossed a line and suggested his divorce had upset him. It was uncalled for and I apologized for it in my very next post in that thread. It was out of line, but it was hardly going after his family. But there was no convincing Dave of that. In his eyes, I had committed an unforgivable sin against him, and that was that. No amount of apologizing from me was going to make any difference. By the end, he despised me so deeply and so aggressively that he could not stop attacking me, even when he knew it was going to get him bant. The whole situation was thus extraordinarily sad, imho. And again, I’m sorry it ended up having to involve you, Billy.
Well I don't want you to think it was an "you over him situation" because it definitely wasn't. There were issues with other members and it just affected the overall vibe of the forum.
As far as your particular situation goes, I think both of you made mistakes/crossed lines at some point and who started what is not really all that important, since it almost always takes 2 to tango.
It amazes me that we're 25+ years into online interactions and sometimes people still don't get it that certain things/topics are just not a good fit for this particular form of communication.
I've seen time and time again things that could be completely harmless in a personal interaction get completely out of hand in an online interaction. But the things is, most of us have almost 3 decades of forum/online experience by now. At what point we just realize that some shit just doesn't fly online as well as it would IRL? It's not like we started using forums yesterday.
Also I have to say that the above post is merely your version of the situation and I am sure Dave has his, but since he's not not here to post his side, it's a dick move to post something about someone who is not present to explain his side of the story. So please that's enough with this subject altogether.
At the end of the day, both of you could have conducted yourselves better on this situation and hopefully can learn something positive from it moving forward. But I don't remember the last time 2 wrongs made a right. Oh yeah... that would be never.
Let's close this topic on that note and move on.