nowaypablo had a similar question that also deserves answering, even though he deleted it.

Is it possible that the 'strong personalities' like yourself mght be controlling the expressed desires of the community? Perhaps Hubski is due for a shift in tone or content focus, but once old users notice new ones trying to kick things up they load a clip of mute buttons and fire away.

Let's inspect this notion, as well as the compartmentalization of Hubski, to put a handle on it.

These discussions usually have me as the target. It can be argued, then, that the tone reflects what I want because I'm the strongest personality. I say as much:

I'm the biggest asshole there is. I can crush you like a bug. When it comes to in-the-mud combat, the only guy I ever ran across that was better than me was violentacrez, and that's because he wanted it more. Think about that for a minute: the guys that can beat me in a bar-room brawl are the guys that will happily go on Anderson Cooper just to be told what subhuman scum they are.

Nobody wants to tangle with that. Nobody, that is, except the folx who drove me off Reddit. So theoretically, Hubski's content is what it is ONLY until those muthafuckas come and kick my ass out of here and drag this place down to /r/circlejerk or worse, right?

Also theoretically, when I showed up I should have driven off a whole bunch of people and changed Hubski from what it was to what I want it to be. Therefore, a pre-kleinbl00 Hubski should be radically different from a post-kleinbl00 Hubski.

Practically, however, the arguments don't hold water. For one thing, the asshole-in-chief beat me here by eight days. Whatever attracted violentacrez to Hubski, it didn't attract him enough to interact with it. On the other hand, I pretty much found a new home.

For another thing, the very guys who drove me off Reddit followed me here.

The most important thing to consider, though, is if I'm the strong personality, and Hubski didn't originally match what I wanted, who won that battle?

It's worth noting that Reddit made me the bare-knuckle brawler I am. There was no forum that rewarded invective and rhetorical WMD quite like Reddit. I was active on a few other forums at the time and I absolutely had to switch gears to interact there; what flies on Reddit is shitcamel behavior everywhere else.

It's also worth noting that when I came here, I did that very downshifting. The culture that was here was the one I wanted to interact with, so I accommodated it. Not always, not all the time, and there were fireworks to be sure... but the fireworks drove me away for the most part. And it's not like I didn't have my full rhetorical fire available:

That's the last time _wage and I interacted, yet she lasted another two years after that. It took an asshole like grendl to drive her away.

Meanwhile, my interactions on Hubski have mellowed me a bunch. I mute as much as I do because I've entirely lost my appetite for flame wars. 200 days after the above, I had this discussion:

Can you spot the difference? To me, the first was a backhanded pseudo-insult to which I set phasers on annihilate while the second was a full-frontal character assassination to which I gave it a gentle ear-boxing.

To me, the evidence suggests that Hubski's social structure actually fosters politeness. If true, that's FUCKING AMAZING because it means that the virulent hatred that places like Twitter and Reddit engender disintegrates once it makes its way here. If you read the posts from the CIRCLEJERKERS they aren't even particularly mean... yet these are the guys behind /r/coontown and /r/rapingwomen and /r/picsofdeadkids and worse.

That growth point you hypothesize? I think we've reached it a half-dozen times and pushed through, and the community that remains is this one.