Online it’s not uncommon for when there is a drama on the board, the mods don’t care who started it and who the victims are, they only care about the drama. They penalize all members whom were involved in it. On a Bravenet forum that happened in August 2003, I was on a teen forum and I was still in my teens then. I then started to get insulted and attacked by two teens who were 14 and 13. One of them was my online friend and he had stood up for me in the past on a different Bravenet forum when someone made a post telling me to leave the board because I “rarely posted what was on topic” and everyone else had posted off topic things sometimes and I didn’t do it often but I was targeted by some random stranger and many users there stood up for me. But on this teen forum, something snapped in my friend and he started to attack me and harass me along with his girlfriend. They would reply to my posts calling me names like “bitch” and I fought back when I could have just simply ignored it, it wouldn’t have made me weak at all and everyone else would have just thought I didn’t give a shit what they say and those two were just immature kids. But instead I was too sensitive to even ignore it so i got sucked into their drama and another user decided to create a new board to get away from us and said we wouldn’t be allowed to post on it. I didn’t care at first because I didn’t need a alternate board but later on it did become my problem because everyone left and went over there and the current board died even though the drama ended and the 13 year old was begging for my apology and said I am a nice person. I am thinking she was only doing it to suck up because she didn’t like the consequence she was getting. The forum was unmoderated so I couldn’t like report it and the owner wasn’t around. I thought the person who created the new board was an asshole for how he treated me because that was how I was treated my whole life with bullies.
Even these things happen in real life, a kid picks on another kid, kid fights back, they are both in trouble. Sometimes only one of them is in trouble which is the victim because they had let themselves get provoked so they escalated to violence.
Even online if someone is vulnerable to abuse so people tend to pick on that user and know how to push their buttons let’s say or a bunch of people get annoyed with that person so they tend to attack that person and insult them so there is always chaos on the board, what do the mods do or the admins, they might ban the person instead who is always being bullied on the forum, why? Because it’s easier than throwing out a bunch of ban hammers all the time so if they can just remove the cause of the chaos, then things are better and their jobs are easier. It sucks and it’s unfair but it can happen. I have not actually witnessed this nor heard of it but I am sure it can happen and it seems plausible it could, also if someone is such a target for it, it would mean the victim has some issues they need to work on so they can get along better with other users online and most of the time, these people leave the board than staying so this never has to happen and sometimes people are just mean and some places have meaner people than other places. Sometimes you do fine on one board but don’t do good on the other. But…… I think if you run into the same problem on every board, the chances are it’s you so it’s time to look at yourself to see what you are doing wrong and fix it. I know a woman online who is in her mid fifties and she clearly has mental issues. She has been labeled as a schizophrenic, narcissistic, Bipolar, and Borderline Personality Disorder by people online and she will just get real nasty and hurl out insults and she sees insults in posts that are not there and she said real hurtful things and really knows how to push peoples buttons because they have a hard time ignoring her and she will ask a question and then get nasty when she is given a answer she doesn’t like as if she doesn’t want to know the real answer. But she was always a victim. On a forum, it was fun to pick on her and spam her threads because that was the only way to get her to fuck off. But I doubt she will ever take notice why people are so “mean” to her. Plus she also accuses people of things when there is no connection and it’s clear she doesn’t care who did it, she will just decide it was you. But fortunately I have not seen her around in four years and I hope she stays away. I would ban her so fast on my forum if I owned one. No warnings and nothing, just a ban hammer after the first offense and some places might not want her at all if they knew her history. Also she hates being ignored so if you ignore her, she gets worse so that was why we spammed her threads and some even teased her, I teased her too. Then she fucked off. Okay back on topic.
I remember years back on Wrongplanet, someone posted about her autistic father being a boss of a business. One day he had an employer who was possibly on the autistic spectrum but the workers there would bully him and because they would get distracted doing their work because they just had to bully him, it was easier for the boss to just lay the victim off because he was too much of a distraction for his employers. Instead of firing a bunch of people and then having to hire new ones, it was just easier to lay the victim off. This was upsetting when I read it and it was unfair but it happened and even autistic people can treat another person unfairly like a normie.
This also happens in real life too with bullies. Instead of stopping the bullying and punishing each kid for bullying, they tell the victim to change instead and they may tell the victim to stop doing certain things. One example was a My Little Pony Lunchbox. A boy in third grade was told to stop bringing it to school because it was a “distraction.” Kids were bullying him about it so what does his school do? Tell him to stop bringing it to school. It made their jobs easier if he doesn’t bring it to school. This struck a issue online in the comments about victim blaming. People are starting to become more aware of bullying and the affects and how we should start doing something about it instead of telling victims how to avoid it.
What would have happened in August 2003 if I didn’t respond to the insults, would the kids have left me alone then thinking it wasn’t getting my attention or would they still have done it and I wouldn’t have been given a consequence for it by someone who created the alternate board? These are very good questions. But I have learned that defending yourself can get you into trouble so it’s best to take it in and it doesn’t always make you a weak person. Sometimes fighting back does work when the person sees how tough you are but sometimes that doesn’t work either. Fighting back sure didn’t work when I was a kid because I would always get in trouble for it so it taught the other kids that if they wanted to get me into trouble, they knew how to push my buttons, they knew the triggers so they would just simply do it. I was never beaten up in school so seeing how some kids have it worse like getting beaten up makes mine look like nothing and how lucky I had it. Perhaps if I was tough and took in the verbal abuse and mental abuse and the harassment, maybe they would have left me alone. My school principal was no help because she said I had to toughen up despite that she had a rule in her school about respect. Uh teasing and harassing someone and egging them to do things is not respect.
My World 