They are generally great places to hang out and debate, and I have made many good friends through them. Folk I would dearly love to meet in the real world.
There is one thing I find annoying however, even more than the trolls. I like to call them the Mimicks, because they like to believe themselves knowledgable and full of great quotes but its all stolen.
A real cuckoo last week
These people simply turn to Google, that great faux intelligence enabler and copy and paste 'their' ideas and thoughts on a particular subject into a forum thread. Nobodies standing on the shoulders of giants, unable to arrive at an original idea themselves, they hide amongst the writings of people who can. Wordsworth crops up in a particular thread? No problem, head on over to a website dedicated to his quotes and copy/paste them as if you were a learned student of the poet. Something of a medical nature in another thread? Easy peasy, copy and paste your way like you were a real doctor. Result!
The trouble is, its not a result, its pathetic like the spelling pedants that also seem to inhabit interwebz forums.
There used to be a few on a board I no longer frequent. On any given thread one could virtually guarantee one of them would throw in a few quotes by George Bernard Shaw or Churchill in an attempt to show how well read or cultured they were, when in all likelihood they had never picked up a book in their lives. Certainly not ones written by the likes of the aforementioned Bernard Shaw.
Another one of these irritants would delight in pasting medical advice, whenever another member had some kind of ailment. I often wondered if he ever suspected most of us knew he was a fraud and was resorting to lifting articles from genuine medical websites. On second thoughts he probably did not, as the type of person who would stoop to this behaviour is so full of his own self important wind that they no doubt sh!t medals to themselves.
I find it almost vulgar if I am honest. That some anonymous fool with access to the innterwebz can spout off on subjects that he or she has little or no knowledge about, taking ideas that don't belong to them and passing them off as their own. Its like those Walter Mitty type, fake soldiers who attend Rememberance Sundays wearing medals they have not earned.
They claim to be fountains of knowledge and point other forum members in the direction of classic works of literature to read, when they haven't read those works themselves! The most obvious ones are the types who quote Shakespeare because you can tell (well I can being a real fan of the playwright/poet) that they have never read a sonnet of his in their lives. But of course every notable writer or philospher are used by these Mimicks.
It i s a very sad note indeed because at the end of the day, when the computer is turned OFF and the mask of the message board put away for the night, the only one they have fooled is themselves. And its a sorry reflection that looks out from the mirror of a conman.
