Quote Originally Posted by Bolivar View Post
EoEO is still a pit of intolerance and immaturity, and likely always will be. Except for the personal life threads, those are still really great and meaningful.
You forgot ignorance. Tremendous ignorance. It's a lot of fun, except for all the boring personal life threads which are easy to skip.

EoFF will still exist in 10 years because even if everyone else quits using it, there will be a desperate few who refuse to give up even as it decays around them. Not that it won't necessarily be thriving, too. There's just very little chance of total disappearance. I guess if the page views got low enough, the owners could just shut it down regardless, though.

If EoFF has a failing it is that it isn't very tolerant of 'differentness' from the collective ideal of what an EoFF poster should be and what they should post about. I don't pay that much attention anymore, but it's always been present in things like the strict adherence to rules about double posts, or the interpretation of a post as being "trolling" when it's not, or the complete non-acceptance of anything that even resembles a person attack even when it isn't, in fact, a personal attack. There are plenty more ways in which it's demonstrated, as well.

Now, there's nothing wrong with that in principle - but it creates a very "inbred" (I mean that in a non-offensive way, I guess sort of isolationist) environment in which people who aren't like other people here are driven away, unless they've got extremely thick skin in some regards. Even then, they tend to eventually get bored and leave, which leaves a community that thinks a lot alike (trivial surface differences and a few outlier members notwithstanding).