Zac-
ZacAdam said:
*Yes Chase, builds a culture that builds on itself. Thank you! 
*
We definitely get some very high quality people here, which makes it easier to maintain a high quality culture. We have generally excellent senior members, a superb moderator in Franco, and almost all the newer and intermediate guys are sharp, dedicated, awesome individuals too. Which makes maintaining a culture like this easier.
Nevertheless, we get plenty of challenges to the culture too. We had the anti-monogamy thing a few years back, the "women don't want brown guys" thing, and one or two "negativity on the boards is getting out of control" incidents. Any of those could've killed this place (or radically transformed it into... I don't know what it'd be, but probably not somewhere most of us would care to hang out). And we also get random new members who decide they want to specifically target senior members, or guys who join either to knowingly troll or who have such warped views their comments come across as challenging. Those are usually easy to identify and boot out, but if we didn't, and let them stay, eventually they could poison the well enough to damage or ruin the place.
The worst thing is people aren't good at associating emotions to specific causes. They can't easily think "I'm more sour on the Girls Chase Boards because TrollFace keeps calling all the senior members idiots who need to Just Be Themselves and Just Be Alpha, and also because every time I go on there I see a bunch of whiny victim mentality posts from SadJohnny who wants hugs and group therapy from other guys, when I'm just there to learn, not to have a good cry and engage in primal screaming. But it's not the entire Boards giving me these feelings, it's just these 2 or 3 specific people."
Instead people just say "I get bad feelings when I go there, so I don't want to go there anymore" and they go somewhere else.
Likewise, when it's all good, you'll tend to look at it and say "It's all good here, and that's sort organic and natural and stays that way" and by and large it is.
But you do need to weed out the trolls and the Negative Nancys every now and again, or the organic growth goes in the opposite direction.
Much in life is like this. Find the few weeds causing the problems, pull them out, and suddenly everything else gets into this positive, organic, cooperative direction. Whatever situation you find yourself in where things feel bad and aren't going the right way, the first thing to look for is where the major weeds are, then how you can distance yourself from those things/thoughts/people/behaviors/locations/addictions and their effects on your life.
Chase
