Are there Gather WMD?

Last Friday I posted an article that linked up a picture of a receding baboon and a slug to a copy of the first page of the most discussed article list.  The articles were all either games or literal pleas for points.  My point was that you have to look very carefully to discover new people who have something interesting to say.

Over the weekend  I received a Gathermail from a relatively new member who asked if there weren't a place for the single minded pursuit of points and writing on the site.  It made me think about it for the first time in months.  Being a frog "of little brain"* I had to think about it for a while.  Smoke issued from my ears and tear ducts and I got a bad headache.  Less discomforting was my conclusion:  I'm ambivalent.

I've devoted my life to the pursuit of cognitive dissonance.  I don't mind having contradictory opinions bouncing around in the extensive empty space inside my head.  When I was a kid my father criticised me for having too much of an ability to see both sides of a question.

The question that caused the headache and particulate emission was "How does point whoring hurt me?"  I've always tended toward the opinion that the shameless pursuit of points by others cheapened my Gather experience.  The problem has its roots in Gather's Madonna-like ability to redefine itself.  Originally a writers' site, Gather changed to a social network in order to attract more members.  As a result people who liked chat soon outnumbered the people who were interested in writing.  The writing group felt that Gather had betrayed them.  

One consequence of soliciting a wider group of members is that people discovered ways to manipulate the point system.  Soon games ranging in difficulty from "Name a Word that Starts with a Letter of the Latin Alphabet" to "Girls' Names that Begin with 'S'" sprung up in large numbers.  Chat threads like the well known "Good Morning, Gather" attracted amazingly large numbers of comments.  The worst aspect of the shameless pursuit of points (technical term "point whoring") is plagiarism.   People cut and pasted articles lifted from other web sites and represented them as their own work.  Some people copied and pasted the work of other Gather members and posted it as their own.  The most egregious example is probably the T. S. Eliot incident.  A member posted a very slightly modified version of a T. S. Eliot poem as his own.  He eventually took it down but before deleting it he defended it vigorously as his own original work. A third aspect of the single minded pursuit of points is the difficulty of finding something to read.  If someone wants to find new people with interesting things to say there's a cloud of games and chat that obscures the other content. 

The best argument for the social network model is that the majority of people on Gather are here for just that.  They enjoy chat, exchanging family snapshots, and quasi-games.  As long as there's no plagiarism involved, what's the harm?

That's the cause of my ambivalence.  I understand why the writer group feels betrayed.  Gather subjected them to an invaision of what H. L. Mencken called the "booboisie."  The social network group resents the writer group because the writer group criticizes them for doing what they expected to do when they got here.  

I've glossed over the Gather War Atrocities.  People have done malicious and hurtful things to other members.  Flag abuse has been rampant.  Some members have participated in conspiracies against other members.   I think the GWA are a consequence of any conflict involving enough people. 

In a perfect world there would be compromise.  Even if it were in the form of the line across the back seat of the car that separates siblings it might be enough.  I doubt that's going to happen.  The situation on Gather is like the Balkans.  This conflict has been going on for hundreds of Gather years and people pursue it through force of habit.

I don't have an answer to the conflict.  I think it was a mistake by Gather management to change directions.  I'm sure Gather management thinks the change was a good idea.  It increased revenue.  I think we're stuck with the conflict as long as we all belong to Gather. I wish there were a place where both factions could meet and work things out.  The only places I can think of are the Big Rock Candy Mountain or Cockaigne. 

* A. A. Milne, "Winnie the Pooh"