Hi Gaf. So I've come back here from the other site. I'm sure most of you won't know who I am. I don't think I was ever really known much here. But I've been browsing and posting on Gaf for about a decade, since around 2008.
Now I have to confess, I was one of the users who left Gaf in Oct 2017. But wait, hear me out!
I came to the whole "party" a bit late and saw all the account suicides. I had no idea what was going on. It looked like Gaf had pretty much died, and so I decided to follow the crowd to the other place thinking "Damn.. oh well I guess if everyone is moving to here, then I should too."
Anyway, at first it seemed fine. I recognised quite a number of users that moved. Everyone seemed to be happy and getting along well. I figured, this is still Gaf, but just with a new name.
But as time went on I found myself engaging less and less. I used to spend hours and hours every week on Gaf, but at reset I found myself only occasionally browsing because over time I realised that I simply just don't enjoy browsing the forum. The people there suck! And all the threads have the same pattern:
- Someone makes a thread about some topic and shares their POV (usually outrage).
- Everyone agrees.
- One person ever so slightly displays some hint of disagreement, or makes a simple joke.
- They get bombarded with "You wanna die on this hill?" "So you condone X evil deed?" "X is not a laughing matter. You should be banned"
- Said person of course gets banned for simply having a different opinion.
- All the rest of the posters pat themselves on the back.
Does that sound like fun?? Hell no! And it's so damn toxic. I swear everyone there is just out looking for an excuse to be offended and outrage, and if you even sneeze something that sounds like "calm down" you get the boot.
I found myself usually disagreeing, at least to some extent, on most threads I opened up, but I never bothered posting because I knew it would probably get me banned.
So then I asked myself "What's the damn point of even being here?"
So earlier this year I decided to come back to Gaf because.. well, quite simply, I missed it. And shit this place is better! There's actual, civil discussions, with respectfully disagreeing parties. There's jokes! The mod's don't seem to be out looking for people to ban for no reason. Sure, it's much quieter here than it was 2 years ago, but I think it actually feels like the older days now, and much better than it was 2 years ago. I guess it's probably because all the #@$ts who were bringing their shitty toxic energy to Gaf up and left to form Era.
Last week I was reading through one of their threads, and I decided to post a few posts in disagreement just to test what would happen (I knew what would happen), and sure enough, I'm banned for a week or so.
So I'm done with that shitty place. I never should have left here. I should have come back much sooner. When my ban is lifted at Era (assuming they don't see this post), I'm just going to tell them they are all delusional and get myself a nice perm.