Tall Building Fetish and Forum Post Quality

[citylover94]

That might explain the skyline obsession and the lack of concern for the ground level compared to some others on here. Living there he might not see that as being as important compared to some other members. Of course that may not be it at all. And I really shouldn't point fingers seeing as I currently live in a small town in Vermont.

[SeamusMcFly]

I'm glad my name was mentioned in this thread, but not negatively. Whew!

Anywho, agree obviously on the downward slope of the quality here lately. However, think it also has something to do with how hot the construction market is around here. More to talk about, means more to annoy some of us. That's not all of it of course, although the NIMBY hate and height fetish has been here since the first day I lurked on the old site. Some times warranted, others less so.

Odorono or whatever his name is, has brought plenty of negative baggae, but I will give him credit for his attending many development public meetings and reporting back to us. I have taken a accept the bad to get the good approach so far. His posts are usually short enough to skip when he gets on a crazy doomsday spiel.

Westy on the other hand, I genuinely enjoy at times, and get fully exasperated with at others. There is a shtick in there somewhere for sure, but the example F-Line posted on the previous page is a spot on representation of the biggest thread derailer of all.

I don't like censorship obviously, but those nonsensical, non-related, non sequitur posts need to stop. Whether that is by mods deleting them (too much work), or setting up a new 3 strikes policy to put someone in the corner.

Again, I genuinely appreciate some of what these folks bring to the table, and don't support full banning unless of course people get abusive or threatening.

I also hate singling those folks out, as I know I have made some ridiculous posts in the past.

[FK4]

Originally Posted by tysmith95

Interesting that he continuously bashes and complains about NIMBYs in the city yet he lives in Millis, one of the most rural towns inside of 495.

It's always been obvious to me that he has only a very superficial idea of what Boston is... he may or may not still live in the burbs (I assumed he did), but he sure as hell isn't from here nor did he develop an understanding.

I hesitate to call others out because it seems unkind... though I echo the sentiments of everyone else on here, with the sole exception of Whighlander. I don't mind his posts. They're innocuous at worst and interesting, if tangential, at best. And I've never liked how he becomes the punching bag for the young hostile crews on here... especially when some of the other posters who just repost the same exact vacuous shit incessantly on here are far more annoying to read.

Originally Posted by underground

The quality of the news and photos is as high as it's ever been, but yes, I post and read the discussion a lot less than I used to. Not sure if it's a declining quality or just the fact that there's "The ArchBoston Discussion Cycle" and that I've already been through it a few hundred times.

This. I don't know if it's gotten more familiar or if the discussion quality has sunk a little. I think both. There definitely seems to have been a loss of some of the old heavies who added both architectural & design, as well as personal, nostalgic history to the discussions. On the other hand, Matthew's gone, so we don't have 2 page uncompromising back-and-forth arguments on how all cars are evil.

Originally Posted by Poolio

But I should add that I still come here regularly, for construction photos mostly, so thanks to everyone who keeps us updated on the progress of ongoing projects. There really is nowhere else to go for this.

Also true. So in the end, this place is just fine.

[tysmith95]

Well the automobile does kill over 30k Americans every year and is killing the planet so he has a point. Oh I forgot to add the traffic and blight that they add to cities around the country. I can't really blame Matthew for disliking cars.

[F-Line to Dudley]

1 month since peak exasperation level and airing of grievances in this thread, and certain individuals--perhaps sensing they've pushed their luck to their limit--exercise their rational risk aversion to good effect by stringing together a fairly solid month of restrained, mostly genial, non-abrasive, on-topic, and mercifully image spam-free posting. Which by magic of low expectations should be acknowledged with applause, golf clap, or blank stare...whichever one prefers to bestow for good behavior.

Month "anniversary" passes on same week as Holiday getaway days for forumgoers (and mods) and Christmas mice seem to have suddenly reverted to run-amok mode again re: belligerent thread defacement. With conspicuously tactical timing...almost as if deigned to rub the community's face in it for giving said posters benefit of the doubt and appealing to their better nature. Strange.

[F-Line to Dudley]

2017 begins where 2016 left off in posts 35-56 in this thread: http://www.archboston.org/community/...?t=4365&page=2.


Boom. And another burning-issue topic with hot interest gets DDoS'd to where we can't talk about the nuts and bolts of tackling a major overarching issue affecting all manner of development. With the territorial pissings behind said threadshit reinforcing a self-fulfilling prophecy of board members avoiding the topic as not worth the trouble, then said topic being thrown in the board's face by said threadshitting poster for any and all future references because we haven't discussed at all how we're going to pay for such a complicated solve. A discussion that never happened in the first because selfsame poster will ensure the thread germane to topic never gets that far.

And over and over again this happens...now with a half-year of escalating frequency, abrasiveness, and tactical precision on types of discussions nuked vs. spared. Anyone still feel like throwing this asshole shade for sometimes being on-topic in other threads he doesn't have agenda-pushing reasons to shut down?


I'll say it again: this is how online communities die. Let a cancer metastasize so whole tracts of topic fodder get systematically nullified by someone's agenda-pushing, and the range of topics--and interest in them--shrinks to a banal multiple choice. It doesn't matter if that cancer used to be a uniformly upstanding member of the community or if the bad behavior is part-time and gerrymandered to only certain topics some board members don't read. Malignant behavior destroys the organism from within. It's rapidly destroying the Infrastructure sub-forum, and if you think that's no skin off the Dev forum's back you obviously haven't been paying attention to the much-reduced recent posting activity and number of posters on the main page of late...and the mind-numbing proclivity of dead horses being beaten to gelatinous goo there. The drag effect from discouraged discussion is exerting itself across the whole damn board.

[tysmith95]

^honestly, in that instance, the rant was related to the topic. I acutally found it sort of interesting, it's far from the worst rant on this site. However I agree that a certain member of this fourm likes to disagree with the rest of it in a troll like way, though he does give interesting insight.

[DZH22]

Originally Posted by F-Line to Dudley

.........I'll say it again: this is how online communities die......

Here are a few reasons why this one won't die so soon.....

One Dalton
South Station Tower
North Station podium/complex
Congress Street Garage complex
Winthrop Square
Casino
Never ending stream of Seaport projects
Massive MIT surge in Kendall
GE Headquarters
North Point buildout

Those alone should carry this place through 2020 and beyond. Throw in 1 Bromfield, Harbor Garage, Air Rights Parcel (12? the 600'+ one) plus everything else going on and the interest will be there indefinitely. People will still want the pictures and other construction updates, regardless of their personal feelings about specific posters here. This forum will thrive as long as Boston continues to.

[Suffolk 83]

Originally Posted by DZH22

Here are a few reasons why this one won't die so soon.....

One Dalton
South Station Tower
North Station podium/complex
Congress Street Garage complex
Winthrop Square
Casino
Never ending stream of Seaport projects
Massive MIT surge in Kendall
GE Headquarters
North Point buildout

Those alone should carry this place through 2020 and beyond. Throw in 1 Bromfield, Harbor Garage, Air Rights Parcel (12? the 600'+ one) plus everything else going on and the interest will be there indefinitely. People will still want the pictures and other construction updates, regardless of their personal feelings about specific posters here. This forum will thrive as long as Boston continues to.

Jesus Christ you people just cant help yourselves with these lists can you?

[DZH22]

Originally Posted by Suffolk 83

Jesus Christ you people just cant help yourselves with these lists can you?

First of all, the list was a perfectly reasonable response as to why this forum isn't dying off anytime soon. Most of those projects, by themselves in a vacuum, would likely keep over half the forumers around.

I have already caught you attributing things to me that I had nothing to do with, such as creating renders. I confuse you all the time with the likes of statler, seamus, shepherd, and stellarfun, among others. What I don't do is, say, erroneously blame you for pissing me off on the Harbor Garage thread. (that's SF) If I choose not to like someone, AND to go so far as to document it, I at least make sure I have the right person and am attributing the accurate reasons.

You say "you people" but I am actually just one person. There is no collaboration; there is no team of "us." I am a singular rogue member of archboston.

Originally Posted by Suffolk 83

I'm getting tired of DZH.

I chose to ignore this for almost 2 months but I'm getting pretty tired of your shit too. At least I post pictures on top of my often polarizing opinions. What the hell do you have to offer to this site besides rampant negativity and criticisms? This place really would be dead in the water if all the posters were like you. What do you add to this community besides finger-pointing and mindless chatter? Maybe I'm wrong so please, by all means, point me to your positive contributions.

[F-Line to Dudley]

Originally Posted by tysmith95

^honestly, in that instance, the rant was related to the topic. I acutally found it sort of interesting, it's far from the worst rant on this site. However I agree that a certain member of this fourm likes to disagree with the rest of it in a troll like way, though he does give interesting insight.

Meanwhile, the backup thread for this is getting simulcast-shitsmeared with the same exact drivel. Exactly how much worse does this very specific pattern of behavior have to get before people stop making excuses like ^that^ for him?

The behavior is maliciously designed to shut down discussion of things the poster doesn't politically agree with by making it too fucking hard to carry on a conversation around all the chum, deflection, and ad hominems. But the stuff said poster does like to ramble on upon semi-earnestly...A-OK! The fact that you personally find some of those rambles of permitted discussion interesting does not earn that poster a cookie...because it's the stuff that can't be talked about without swimming through a river of shit that's suppressing discussion. Excusing that because one of the off-topic deflections was kinda interesting is like being coated in shit from an exploding porta-john and going "Oh, neat! A peanut!" Does burying that lede make up for the fact that you're still covered head-to-toe in shit? How about if being covered in asploded shit were a weekly occurrence? Still going to admire each peanut stuck to your shirt?


There's a Globe article today about the sea level rise risk assessment juxtaposed against Boston 2030's Top 5 ID'd development zones. 4 out of 5 of B30's targets are in areas of maximal flood risk, calling into question how much the institutions behind B30 are paying attention. Rich discussion fodder there...but are we being given one inch to get a word in before the trollbait starts flying? Pffbt! The fact that you find a few bits of wisdom interesting in one of the sidebars questioning the very existential validity of the topic for further discussion is irrelevant. The whole point of the game was to make it too big a fucking exercise in abject frustration to even get as far as the Globe article, much less delve in from there. And that's how one poster has decided he's going to win his ideological dick-swinging contest: nuke a thread before a not-his viewpoint ever gets the chance to gain traction, and never have to back up his own wild proclaimations amid the unnavigable smoking ruins.

This is why we've got a shrinking listicle's worth of permissible forum topics on-repeat: letting avoidance of two or three chronic bad actors box the forums into a corner. Because those bad actors know they can get away with it and still have folks make ^excuses^ for them.

It's gotten worse, not better, since things came to a head in Nov.

[bakgwailo]

Originally Posted by tysmith95

^honestly, in that instance, the rant was related to the topic. I acutally found it sort of interesting, it's far from the worst rant on this site. However I agree that a certain member of this fourm likes to disagree with the rest of it in a troll like way, though he does give interesting insight.

Except now it is diving into politics which we should try to keep quarantined in the cesspool that is the National Politics Thread.

[Suffolk 83]

What the hell do you have to offer to this site besides rampant negativity and criticisms? This place really would be dead in the water if all the posters were like you.

When Beeline was on hiatus I posted pictures, I would post more but others seem to have it covered. I actually live in the city so I see things going on and I will report on them here. Sure my architecture opinions are uninformed, I realize that so I dont spam the board with useless bullshit lists and heights and cheerleader nonsense like some other people. Almost all of us are here quite often, I dont need to see a list for the 1,000th time about things I already know are going on.

[F-Line to Dudley]

Awesome. Now the dev forum's being systematically bombed and people are making excuses to be nicer to him in hopes he'll stop. The monster inside the Nat'l Politics toxic containment thread's going to break its chains and run back amok all over the place within days for all the misguided encouragement this behavior is getting, and put the forums back at square-one like it was before the election. I don't care if somebody's got different--even crazy--ideological bent. We've all got something germane to say, and if it's germane it's worth being heard. It's when ideology is weaponized to be anti-germane to topic and used belligerently to shut down the topic that it becomes scorched-earth WHARRGARBL. Is it that hard to tell the difference when somebody is doing that???

This is fucked.

[BussesAin'tTrains]

People are fucking on edge and need to calm the goddamn down. This site is meanest I've ever seen it. We need some moderators to crack the whip if this place isn't going to turn into just another cesspool that survives because of the pretty pictures (thanks to those photographers btw).

[bigpicture7]

Ok, I hate to do this, but I think the forum post quality / height fetish thing is rearing its head again. Threads being bumped with no new news, just to complain about Boston's lack of height. Certain posters w/ obsessive behavior about it.

Heck, I am on the pro-development end of the spectrum, but I find this totally obnoxious. And we've seen some of the better quality posters leave or reduce their activity on the site lately.

What can we do about this??

[budman3]

Originally Posted by bigpicture7

Ok, I hate to do this, but I think the forum post quality / height fetish thing is rearing its head again. Threads being bumped with no new news, just to complain about Boston's lack of height. Certain posters w/ obsessive behavior about it.

Heck, I am on the pro-development end of the spectrum, but I find this totally obnoxious. And we've seen some of the better quality posters leave or reduce their activity on the site lately.

What can we do about this??

I have to agree here. I've been following since the Skyscraperguy days and some of the posters whose insights I most looked forward to have either moved on or gone quiet. It's not even just height-fetishists making some threads unreadable, either. Why when I hop into a newly-bumped thread regarding Jackson Square do I see a non-sequitur screen cap of the 5-day forecast for Chicago, then a description of the wind speeds on Lake Michigan in the next thread up -- equally out of the blue?

It's disheartening to say the least, because I used to always learn something here, whereas I'm more likely to avoid threads if I know there aren't going to be pics or renders to avoid getting punched in the face with garbled English. I'd like to know where online some of the old guard went to chat/share/educate so I can follow them.

This is still THE BEST resource/forum I know of for Boston development, and I'm sorry I'm just adding to the chorus instead of proposing solutions. But even though I don't contribute much on this forum, it and its members have given me a whole lot over the years, and I just hope some of those great contributors are still at least lurking and can hopefully be lured back in.

[JumboBuc]

Is there a way to filter out any posts that contain the word "turd"? Just blocking those would go a long way towards improving forum quality.

[KentXie]

Can we also filter out post containing "NIMBYs"?

[bigpicture7]

Originally Posted by KentXie

Can we also filter out post containing "NIMBYs"?

No because that is a very real and valid phenomenon of stakeholder biasing when it comes to development projects.

NIMBY, turds, etc, are terms that have been hijacked by aB abusers. Why should we let the abusers dictate our vocabulary?