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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Man, den of vipers sounds about right:

[twitter]https://twitter.com/kidneygate/status/1449015807741157380[/twitter][/quote]

Man, I used to be part of a community like this. Creative community, people very "online". People were publicly suuuuuper supportive of one another and also self congratulatory about it. It was very normal for me to see FB posts like "Wow I just feel so blessed to be a part of such a supportive community -- thanks to all my friends in the [redacted] world for being amazing!" And it would get a billion likes and be a love fest in the comments. I definitely participated in it, too.

But the longer I was there, the more I saw that people were MUCH more negative in person, and would often just totally trash "members of the community" in private. It was almost like a rite of passage. At first everyone would be very rah-rah-we-all-love-each-other, but once you'd been around a while, they'd start with the gossip and dirt. It was disconcerting but also flattering in a weird way ([i]oh wow this person must really trust me to tell me what the really think[/i]). It took me a little while, maybe a year, to realize it wasn't about trust at all. It's just that people were gossipy, jealous, competitive, cliquish, and weird. Just a lot of unprocessed insecurity that came out in a billion different unhealthy ways. The loving community vibe was a front. What most people really wanted to do was get together for drinks with their "real" friends after an event, and then talk sh!t until 3am about all the people they'd just been hugging and cheering on earlier in the evening. Every time.

And the way a lot of these folks are reacting now to criticism from outsiders about this culture? The "whatever, everyone does it, the gossip isn't a big deal, I'm sure there's all kinds of offensive stuff in your group chats too" defense? That's how my old artists community would respond to criticism too. There was very little introspection about this behavior and how hurtful it could be, and particularly how it impacted newcomers or people who were vulnerable to this kind of thing (people who were different, who were not socially savvy, very young people, etc.). So much damage was done and the instigators would just shrug or roll their eyes -- too cynical to acknowledge that it doesn't actually have to be this way.

Ugh, ugh, ugh. This whole story is a trauma trigger for me.[/quote]

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