GeniesLoki

For the record I've not been a member of any of these, but you probably wouldn't like the tone of some of the IRC channels and forums I hung out on as a kid either (most of them were fine).

Sometimes the sort of community and social support that is needed by people who don't fit in won't be all shiny and nice like you want it to be. I'm not going to claim any of these things are *good*, but they all have good elements that were positively life-changing for some.

Ultimately you've got to accept that one of the following is true: 1. You're going to have to include "problematic" people in your community in order to help them learn to socialise. 2. People will form communities you don't like in order to support their needs.

It's kinda the community version ofhttps://twitter.com/vandeRede/status/1315447863409741824 …

If you demand perfection from a bunch of people who haven't learned to socially function yet, you're not actually helping them get better, you're just asking them to go away and die quietly somewhere they won't bother you.

Similarly, if you condemn people for having been members of these imperfect communities in the past, you're not actually helping you're just demonising people for coping with their problems as best as they knew how with the resources available to them at the time.

This also ties in with what I was explaining in https://twitter.com/GeniesLoki/status/1316118376251621376 … People who have been through this sort of process are often going to be sensitive to the kind of language that was used against them.

The way a lot of SJ talks about people's imperfect strategies is very much a tone of "If I were you, I simply wouldn't have these problems in the first place". It's precisely the request to go away and die quietly.