I'm not a prolific poster but I have been here for 16 years now so I've seen almost the entire lifespan of this forum and the last few months is the only time I've ever seriously considered walking away. I hope I'm not speaking out of turn here, but for me its a question for the moderators and owners, and that question is 'what type of forum do you want this to be?'
Its a fine line, because there absolutely should be free speech but this is after all supposed to be a pro-Manchester United place to be and its anything but that at the moment. As has been said threads such as 'predict the date of Oles sacking' and multiple others are unnecessary and add nothing other than yet another thread to bash something, anything, everything. Its tiring to read, and yes those individual threads are easy to avoid but they generate negative momentum and it spreads. Positive threads are quickly overrun by those who feel differently.
I get that sport is reactionary and I get that people like to vent sometimes, but there is no need to be so short-sighted. The Ole-backers were labelled deluded, puppets, on the payroll etc etc for most of last season. Then our form turned around and so many of those posters simply disappeared. Nothing to complain about = no point in posting. We mock Glaston for only coming here when Spurs are winning, but a huge section of posters only come here when United are losing. Its unhealthy and there has to be a better balance. The season has barely started and already people are losing their minds, and its not going to get any better until we start to remove some of these threads that are only there to spread the negativity.
Just my opinion
Hear hear. I agree with everything here.
Too many people believe that free speech means that they should be allowed to post anything. No, free speech means you are free from prosecution of the Government for voicing your opinion.
It doesn't mean that a privately owned forum (like redcafe is) have to allow all voices equal room if they feel it's bringing their forum in a negative direction.
I'm not necessarily advocating for us doing this here now, but as an example:
I work in an industry where there are people very vocal about what we are doing, and as such there are communities around elements of it. At my last company we had a discussion forum that had turned very toxic, where a core group of members were feeding off each others negativity. Since it had been left alone and nobody dealt with the toxicity, it had turned so bad that they were the ones creating most of the discussions, scaring away anyone new coming in.
The owners of the company were quite reluctant to deal with them as some of the worst ones were the most longstanding fans that had been the most supportive from the beginning.
It wasn't even part of my job to deal with this, but I saw how it was negatively affecting the communication and vibe around our company (and thus the employees tasked to interact with it). I persuaded the managers to finally ban certain members after repeated warnings, and within weeks the forum grew to become much more active with lots of new people coming in that wasn't immediately put off by the toxicity and behavior that those "hardcore" people knew better cause they had been fans for longer.
I'm not saying that just banning a few people will solve our club, I'm just pointing out how negativity feeds on negativity, and can actively block other positive discussion from happening.