A lot of us are "different". I make no assumptions on that score. But until everybody gets immunity from "dogpiling", nobody does. And in that world, people also have to be able to separate "dogpiling" from "said something stupid and is refusing to back down while continuing to post". And we need a way to steer a thread (as a community, without causing headaches for the modmins) in that kind of scenario. Because the way I see it, there's tons of good-faith efforts to explain things. The problems tend to set in in threads made by the same posters who've made the threads before, asking the same questions they asked before, while being completely ignorant of the answers that were previously provided. I'm not singling any poster out here, it's a behavioural thing.Civgeneral is also "different". It's not ideal to look at someone superficially to determine their status.
Lot of folk here do that. Which is ironic because this is an internet forum and we don't even actually know each other or are able to verify anything about each other (well I can verify @Hygro actually has that mustache altho I still don't know for sure that's the guy posting all his messages)
It doesn't change the fact that anecdotes, while valid for the person making them, aren't evidence of anything greater without corroborating data. And the thing is, on the topics you were originally referencing (which I'm assuming are the LGBTQ threads, and so on), there is corroborating data. And it's been provided, month on month, year on year. How many times do people have to politely repeat themselves before getting frustrated?
It's not like this forum has a massive amount of new posters all the time. We're all mostly the same posters that existed when I joined. The only difference is some have left, and not so much have joined.