Once a Kings Fan Too
Rejoint: juin 2018
Messages: 40,253
Mentions "j'aime": 25,172
I purposely chose a provocative title because I want to provoke an intelligent discussion while making a point, which is: there’s nothing any more “wrong” with CapFriendly than there is “wrong” with any social media – the “problem” is natural selection.
Social studies have made and reinforced this conclusion repeatedly. Ask people whether they would (a) recommend a good product or service, or tell someone about a good experience, or (b) complain about a bad product, service or experience, and three to five times as many people will be complainers rather than commenders.
CapFriendly is no different. No matter what the post – be it a comment, a trade or an entire ACGM – more people will take the time and effort to comment negatively than positively. (When was the last time YOU said, “Nice trade, champ!”?) So it just stands to reason that someone is more likely to be criticizing actions concerning his team (or evaluating his own team’s players more highly than a poster has) than approving them. As a result of this inevitable bias, many people on CapFriendly accuse commenters, particularly frequent commenters like me, of being haters of particular teams.
Specifically, during the summer, when I repeatedly and acidly criticized moronic Muzzin-back-to-Los-Angeles trades, I was accused of an anti-Toronto bias. Similarly, when I excoriated idiotic Josh-Anderson-is-worth-the-seventh-overall (or better)-draft-pick trades, I was accused of an anti-Montreal bias. More recently, for offering a rather benign Alex Turcotte for Kaiden Guhle trade formulation, I was told (and I quote) “All you do is always coming to downgrade or undermine an habs player or refering to habs fans as homers.”
Criticizing every trade involving a team that is perceived as having a flawed evaluation, fit or cap consequence consideration is not being biased against a team – it’s just being biased against stupid trades. And sadly, increasing one’s frequency of positive reinforcement is highly unlikely to counteract the perception in less open minds of anti-team bias.
On a personal note, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of people on this site whom I consider “biased” – and it’s bias in favor of, not against, one team (i.e., homerism). So I’m sick and tired of seeing people say things like “{team} fans are complete homers” or “{team} fans are delusional” or “{team”} fans always overvalue their players.” Aside from a few bad apples, I find most fanbases make at least an attempt at constructing rational exchanges.
Trolls are, on the other hand, an entirely different problem, and I have absolutely NO intelligent suggestion about how to deal with them.