Dudley Henriques wrote:

"Rich Lemert" wrote in message
...

Dudley Henriques wrote:

.......or what has come to be for me at least; the ultimate mystery of
Usenet......that being the existence of people out here who actually will
wait patiently for a particular poster they don't like to post
something....ANYTHING......and then check every word...every
statement......every meaning....in the twisted hope that the poster they
don't particularly like very well will make a mistake.....no matter how
tiny a mistake or error...that THEY can jump on immediately to use as
"absolute proof" that the object of their "exposure" is flawed!

Consider yourself lucky if they're actually waiting for you to post
something so they can try to embarass you with it. I've been a regular
in sci.research.careers, and they've got a guy over there who doesn't
even bother waiting for me to post something in order to mis-represent
my views.

Rich Lemert


It's become more or less expected on these groups by many who post on them.
It's no big deal really, but it takes a lot of the fun out of posting and
eventually runs a lot of fairly well qualified and experienced people off
the groups, or as it has done in my case, turns them into totally hostile
posters.
My Usenet persona has come 180 degrees from when I first arrived on Usenet 6
years ago, especially on this group right here. I used to assume a neutral
or even friendly atmosphere from posters until shown otherwise. I now assume
a totally hostile environment unless I know the poster I'm dealing with (and
there are indeed some very fine people here) or the people posting with me
demonstrate to me that they are not hostile.
Dudley Henriques

I've been using usenet for 10+ years and have found that people tend to
come across as more hostile in writing than they really are in person.
This happens in email as well. You don't have the inflection and other
nonverbal cues that you get in mano-y-mano conversation and it is easy
for things to escalate well beyond what anyone intended.

Sure, some folks are that way naturally, but I think fairly few in
reality. I think much more is inadvertant than intentional.

MAtt