Rudeness at Babypips

[Jadzia.Daxtrader]

@Pipstradamus @Moderators @Ananais @Penelopip

One member doesn’t use bots profitably and announces that all bots are fake. That’s his opinion, and it’s ok, but it turns into a pretty bad situation when anyone with more experience, trying to offer helpful comments, suggestions, links and information, is rudely and scathingly dismissed. The rudeness is very unpleasant.

Another encounters a subscription service regulator and announces (many times) that absolutely all regulators are scammers. That’s apparently his opinion, and it’s “fine”, but it turns into a very bad situation when everyone with far more experience, trying to offer helpful comments, suggestions, links and information, just so that he might in future learn to avoid the problem he had recently, is very rudely and very scathingly dismissed. The rudeness, attacks and false accusations are extremely unpleasant!

Another dislikes her post being temporarily concealed by an automated process of multiple member reports and says “■■■■ you and your whore families” to the Moderators, and then even continues to attack members who unsurprisingly object to her behaviour. The rudeness and vitriolic abuse are shockingly unpleasant!!

Those members are all welcome here and they continue to post unimpeded.

That’s why so many others, far better informed, far more helpful and far more valuable to any trading community, gradually stop posting. There aren’t really very many left, now.

The obviously predictable result is that things get worse rather than better, as Babypips continues its one way march to keeping the bad and losing the good.

I acknowledge that “bad” and “good” are subjective terms, of course, but these are obviously widely-enough held opinions for people’s reactions to all this stuff to be decimating the forum.

I do also see all the bots and the spam and promotional posting about which so many other people so very frequently comment and complain, but actually by comparison those don’t often bother me so much: you get a little of that everywhere, online, and I just ignore it.

The aggression and the blatant insults and the hostility here really do bother me, though.

They make the environment so toxic that I don’t want to participate here very much.

And judging by what other people say, I’m far from alone in that.

@Pipstradamus

We always tell our existing members, if we’re not providing the value you expect, you should go elsewhere to find it.

And they do.

Including me.

We can all see the results of that, too. Your main competitor forum - without your School or any of the other value of this site - has at least 20 times as much activity as yours. Some weeks 30 times as much. There’s one single thread, there, which gets far more posts in a day than this entire forum does (even including all the spam posts here!). The reason’s not a mystery, either.

I now want to post my Trading Journal somewhere where I can get feedback from other traders in a friendly environment, so I joined that one recently and found many ex-members of Babypips actively posting there, rather than here.

Like a lot of your other members have said before in this Feedback department, I’m really sorry that it’s so. I think you deserve better. But you don’t seem to think so yourself. That really surprises me. Every day. I just can’t make sense of it.

Do you really want to keep all the rude people and lose the polite ones, like this, all the time, when you could so easily do exactly the opposite?

[SovoS]

@Jadzia.Daxtrader

Do you really want to keep all the rude people and lose the polite ones, like this, all the time, when you could so easily do exactly the opposite?

I also feel (and have felt for a long time) that irresponsible postings (i.e. rude/offensive) are extremely damaging and have been the direct cause of some experienced and valuable contributors leaving BP. I won’t say “many” because I have no idea about the extent of the problem.

The same type of offensive postings can also destroy the continuation of interesting threads and create a reluctance amongst others to bother posting anything. (I have personally often decided not to post on any threads that are aggressive, not that that is any loss, of course!)

One rather simple solution could be to follow the example of other media sites like Discord, where certain trusted posters are given voluntary “moderating” style roles.

In theory this would be relatively easy on BP because:

• a member characterisation method already exists e.g. “regular”, “conversationalist” etc.
• Certain member groups are given limited “privileges” such as auditing thread titles.

The same type of privilege could be created by allocating selected and trusted members with a role that is a kind of “moderating” but has a less emotive title such as “Elder”, “warden” or “veteran”, etc.

Their function could be low or high key:

• Low key: Reporting offensive posts where their report is treated with a higher degree of reaction such as “acted on unless there is reason not to” instead of "ignored unless there is reason not to".

• High key: authority to edit out offensive sentences and replace with an anonymous note such as “edited-unsuitable text removed”.The moderators are informed of it and which “warden” did it but the community cannot determine who acted on it. And the original poster, of course, retains the right to appeal against it, but is unlikely to do so if the deletion is appropriate.

Whilst the specific activity of such “Elders” remains anonymous on the forum there could be a list of such “Elders” that other members can approach if they feel that a certain post requires attention?

This would remove some of the pressure from moderators and cost little or nothing.

Trouble is, whether anyone is willing to fulfil such a role. But if it is voluntary and not requiring any specific hours or duties beyond acting on such offensiveness whenever one sees it, then, well, maybe…

Everyone who comes to a forum wants to share, learn, and/or develop for positive reasons - offensiveness adds nothing and only destroys all of these objectives.

Just some thoughts.

[SchmaltzHerring]

@SovoS

Everyone who comes to a forum wants to share, learn, and/or develop for positive reasons

Apart from the other 80+% of the posts, which are contributed by promotional posters hoping to find customers, or traffic, or something else “commercial” here.

They’re almost all here because this is the only forum that lets them do that without clearly labelling them “vendor” or “commercial”.

For anyone interested: 6 or 7 weeks ago, out of interest, Theo and I jointly did a quick “count up”, for a whole week, of everything posted here. We classified everything as either “normal member post” or “obvious promotional intent and/or bot”.

(It’s possible, of course, that not everyone would necessarily agree completely with how we classified posts, but as one example, we counted all the Valetax thread-bumping, valueless garbage-posts as “obvious promotional intent” because he’s here as a broker, after all.)

That week, the “normal member posts” were less than one third of the total.

I’ve just done the same thing again, now, using the same criteria, for the whole of the last 7 days, give or take an hour. I ignored the “Amazon book spam thread” from last Friday in which seven of us (whom I know of - maybe more?) had to complain and report posts so repeatedly for nearly 4 days to get it removed. But it was actually removed, eventually, after that huge joint effort, so it doesn’t count.)

The “normal member posts” are now less than one fifth of the total. You read that right. The promotional posts were over 80% of the total.

There just aren’t so many normal members left, now.

The few still here are mostly silent, too.

Most of the few “real members” who do join also seem to leave pretty quickly.

That’s really sad, especially when you think how easily it could have been avoided, and how many people have (according to the contents of this “Feedback” section) been saying the same things, so consistently, for so many years.

When promotional posting is allowed relentlessly to take over a forum, and the forum protects the spammers and even actively removes the people complaining about them, what you end up with is inevitably like that Hitchens book about former President Clinton: “No One Left To Lie To.”

Pretty soon, it will be just a pure spam-house, with nobody left to complain, or to try to improve anything.

I also agree with @Jadzia.Daxtrader ‘s irrefutable point above that the unchecked rudeness, hostility and trolling also don’t help at all, of course.

Babypips continues to lose the real contributors, all the experienced pro-traders like the Flamingo, like Jane Malin, like Theo, and all the nice, friendly, polite, well-intentioned people like Fliss-pink-hat and her friend Jackie, (both of whom were a real asset to Babypips).

All the real value-providers who could have helped to build the forum back up, and wanted to, and said so, and were actually trying to.

All gone.

Well done!! . . .

[Jadzia.Daxtrader]

Thanks.

@SchmaltzHerring

many people have (according to the contents of this “Feedback” section) been saying the same things, so consistently, for so many years

Right!

I’d looked through some of this, but only briefly.

Probably too selectively and I’d found what I looked for, as one does.

Since posting yesterday, I’ve now read a lot more there, (even from 2017!) just by following links between threads, and been quite shocked, tbh.

But learned a lot too.

So, thanks for both the replies above, gentlemen, but my perspective has changed. I’d naively imagined the situation might be resolvable but obvs that was totally unrealistic. It was identical in 2017 and countless people (almost all removed at some time after that) were saying even then that it had gone on for too many years without ever improving!

The issues then, and apparently for years before that, were all exactly the ones we’ve all said, just above.

Anyway I no longer care.

Like all the others, I’ll just take Pipstradamus’s own intransigent advice -

@Pipstradamus

We always tell our existing members, if we’re not providing the value you expect, you should go elsewhere to find it.

[SovoS]

Personally, I am really very much surprised at how much time and effort you people are spending on this. I mean, its just a forum! There must be surely more important things to spend one’s life thinking about?

If the number of true postings left after discounting the garbage is really that small then what are you all still here for? Why not simply go somewhere else? Especially if one feels it has been going on for years now and is not likely to change?

Another alternative is simply to browse the new posts and just look at anything that interests you and simply ignore the rest. Afterall, it is not our responsibility to guard other people’s gullibility.

Either way, it certainly doesn’t interest me at all what percentage here is rubbish. The only things I don’t like are the offensive writings and the plague of sockpuppeting that leaves one doubting who one is actually talking to! So I spend very little time reading much here at all. There is very little of any value to be gained here anyway - and if there are apparently so very few to whom one can be helpful then there really is no point in wasting so much of one’s time here at all…

So I guess it is over and out!

And for goodness sake try to find something more positive to spend your lives on!

[Jadzia.Daxtrader]

@SovoS

There is very little of any value to be gained here anyway

I guess. Yes. Disappointing but true. As the Herring says, the value providers don’t stay.

I originally intended this thread to address the reasons for that (especially the one in the title) and whether they might be changed.

But since starting it I’ve learned that actually those reasons (and that result!) have always been this way here, and that however many members clamor for them to be changed, for however many years, they never have been and obvs won’t be now either.

So I give in.

@SovoS

there really is no point in wasting so much of one’s time here at all…

So I guess it is over and out!

From me, also.

Thank you for your occasional posts here, SovoS, which are certainly an exception to what you said above. And stay warm in that terrible Finnish winter coming your way any day now, even further north than mine!

[SovoS]

@Jadzia.Daxtrader

From me, also.

Very best wishes for your future, both trading and in all other things…

@Jadzia.Daxtrader

And stay warm in that terrible Finnish winter coming your way any day now, even further north than mine!

One thing I love about this country is its seasons and the way they dress the forests. From the nightless summer days through the autumn colours to the bright white of the winter snows and the new spring-green life that follows.

I love the winter. Right now we are seeing the migration of the swans etc south and the first snowfalls could come anytime further north in Lapland.

Winter walks in the forests:

[ponponwei]

@SovoS

Personally, I am really very much surprised at how much time and effort you people are spending on this. I mean, its just a forum! There must be surely more important things to spend one’s life thinking about?

I MEAN TRULY!

I’ve not visited this place for a long time but wow, I see it’s still the same old – AND quite literally lol. Am I still the only one that can sense the um, sameness in these posts. I feel like for a long time this is what I’ve been calling out but everyone else is just oblivious.

Jadzia, just say it, you’ve had (and still have!!!) so many other accounts in here. SovoS and I are the only actual unique humans in this thread.

I’m waiting to see which among your many other accounts will come here trying to defend you. I don’t want to call it out though because I feel this is actually part of what you desire in your life: forum drama. So if this makes you feel fulfilled… by all means.

Meanwhile, as they say…

[SmallPaul]