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Personal Philosophy -- Online Communities
The internet is full of assholes, idiots, morons, lowlifes, pricks, perverts, and other forms of scum. I speak from experience. In the near 5 years that I've had access to the internet, only one community has ever truly appealed as being worth my time, and that simply being because I rarely interact with those involved. The world wide web is not a friendly place.

If you do ever trust anyone you find on the internet, you should consult professional help. The wonder of the internet is how fake you can be. Some portray their internet persona to be very close to their real-life selves, while others put on more image enhancing aids into use than a hooker uses makeup.

Allow me to explain a few different environments I spend my time in, in order to better explain this.

1. Starcraft Battle.net
Battle.net is an online gaming arena for games manufactured by Blizzard Entertainment. It's a vast environment. At any one time, over 60,000 players may be logged on, and over 20,000 games may be in progress. Starcraft is a loosely programmed game. An infinite ammount of modifications are capable, from custom unit graphics using third party programs, to using the "Campaign Editor" packaged with the game to make your own maps. Inevitably, a load of hackers and programmers have made their way to this environment. That is in no way a good thing. One particular aspect makes this hell-hole even more undesirable. The basis for the community is chat rooms. Deeper than that, players may form their own clans composed of multiple players who gather in a particular chatroom and play games together... Most clan rooms are moderated by a "bot", a scripted program with ban, kick, spam, etc. abilities. Some players take advantage of this and load multiple bots at a time. This allows them to spam chatrooms, fill them up to a point where nobody else can join, and many other things. Blizzard must've predicted this, telling from the "fail-safe" system they set up. An account cannot be created on Battle.net without a "CD-key". So, this is where the hackers come in. Someone needs a cd-key? They sell their soul to a hacker, that hacker gets into someone's sytem, gets the key, and voila! One person is out the ability to play the game, and another person gets the ability to annoy the hell out of someone they dont know who lives on the other side of the planet.

2. Utopia Online Multiplayer Game
Utopia is a pretty calm environment. Large but lifeless. Utopia is a text based game, so you really only get 35 year old nerds living in their parent's basement reading star-trek scripts in their time away from the computer. Although not viscious, people still dont pass up the chance to hack accounts, create multiple accounts, and abuse other forms of cheating. Again, just to get an unfair advantage over someone they dont even know.

3. EzBoard
Online Message Board communities... The youth of the internet. The only way to one-up the almighty chatroom. Topics range from Anime, to movies, to games, to porno. I spend the majority of my time at two particular places in that network. NeoArt, an artist message board. The only community I really come close to believeing what is said there. The other, Bannergy. A pearl jam message board i recently (just today, july 16) left. The moderator's a porn-addicted prick. He refuses to ban anyone. Good thing, because he has no reason to do so... Except for the fact that he has a spontaneous hatred for me. For example:
"I wouldnt ban this fucking loser if my life depended on it. It makes me feel far too good to have him around. Like a bully picking on a little kid to make himself feel better about himself,....except ironically, in this situation, this little fucking shithead IS that much of a fucking loser, and deserves every fucking bit of the abuse....and far, far more." -- "I could write your entire sad biography without ever having met you, you pathetic fuck. "
Truly loving words...