Some of them say I'm mean like it's a bad thing. Some of them wallow in it. Back in the days of yore (a few years ago), there was a general forum on a bulletin board on a porn site. Gasp! Porn! It's still there, but I rarely go. vBulletin designed the board and adults everywhere populate it, probably some minors, but they pretend to be adults. The only things censored on that board are personal information, spam, and physical threats. It was several incarnations of vBulletin ago, back before people could be "ignored" with the press of a button. If you post it, they will read it. It was a mentat gesellschaft surrounding a road accident. It was a minefield of politics, religion, economics, and boobies. Flame wars were stuff of legend to be wallowed in, savored in drawn out exultation. I was usually a step out of the muck of trolldom.

My name is KillerMuffin and I am a cyberbully.

No, I don't feel better now. I'm not recovering, either. I moved people to tears. I moved people to therapist couches and Valium (unless they were lying, which is a possibility). I moved people to pretend I didn't exist. I'm sure I did other stuff. I...miss it. I go back, once in a while, to see the old place. But the good ol' days are gone with a single button: ignore.

Flaming isn't about reducing your opponent to shreds with your vocabulary, though it's a nice side benefit. Flaming is about playing to the audience. They are ultimately the ones who decide the winner and loser, when one or the other doesn't flounce off with quickly broken promises of "I'm not coming back! Ever!" The audience usually never wanted to participate. Flame wars are just as much forcing others on the peripheries into the fighting as much as it is about the fighting. It didn't matter who was right or wrong, all that mattered was finding the underbelly of someone's online psyche and ripping it out. It made a lovely trophy to thrust in the faces of those too horrified not to watch the war. I sometimes won because I was right. I usually won because I was more aggressive and that much meaner than anyone I fought with. Sometimes I lost, but not often enough to admit to.

So in my now, flame wars on a porn board are a thing of the past. And I am so very glad to see it. As much as I hate how "ignore" has changed the social landscape of one of my favorite hangouts, it's made do something odd. It made me shut up. It made me back up a few steps. It made me look at myself and I didn't like it. Yes, I am an inherently mean person. I enjoy my aggressiveness. I enjoy fighting with people. There's something wrong with that. Of course, we haven't even gotten into the whole pathetic issue. How pathetic is it that so much of my time, little as it was, was devoted to arguing on a porn board? Do I need therapy? Medication? A straight-jacket? Nah. I needed a dose of reality, I think. I needed to take a hard look at what I really was, not what I thought I was. Cyberbully, not debate champion. And I changed the way I did business. Underneath the helmet sticker on my monitor that says, "I can't go to work today - the voices said, 'Stay home and clean the guns.'" is a taped index card that says, "People have that right."

I can be nice, I was nice most of the time back then, and I think I've gotten a lot nicer since. I just hope I've gotten a bit smarter about people. Still, at Yahoo Answers, where I go to talk about stuff because I'm arrogant that way, the meanness creeps in and people don't like it. Sissies.