Etiquette, the Internet, and You

For the second consecutive season, the Twins have been a pretty awful baseball team to watch. As long-time Minnesota fans, we at Twins Daily understand that. I'm not a Vikings fans so maybe I don't understand it quite as much as some of you saps, but I still understand the sentiment behind being very, very angry at your favorite team. Some of this frustration boils over into the comments section of articles and into the TD forums.

Lately, it's been a bit of an issue and that's going to stop. We've had a rash of posters who have stooped to calling each other names and that isn't the type of environment we're trying to foster here at Twins Daily. So, as of this point, if you see someone calling another person names or insulting their obviously rich family lineage, let us know about it. It's really easy. There's a "Report Post" function under every post made on TD (it's the little triangle with the exclamation point in it).

Now that I have that out of the way...

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To the offenders of this policy. Listen, you're frustrated. We get that. But do you really need to call another person you've never met a ^&%$ing *$%#face &^#wipe because they think Joe Mauer should be traded for a pitching machine and an old Phillie Phanatic costume? There's a much more polite way to make your disagreement with that kindly gentleman on the other side of the keyboard known to all. Challenge him to a duel. Pistols at dawn is always a classy touch. Go create a website and yell at him there. GoDaddy offers cheap and affordable hosting for such a thing, if you can stomach the non-stop Danica Patrick ads long enough to find out how to buy something over there. The point is that if you're going to insult someone on the internet, you better find a different place to do it.

Or, better yet, stick around Twins Daily and learn to disagree with the idea, not the person. Everybody has the occasional insane idea of what constitutes "smart baseball". VodkaDave thinks the Twins should explore signing Morneau to a multi-year deal in the offseason. Do I agree with that? God, no. I think it's completely insane to even be thinking about it at this point in time. But Dave's a pretty smart guy who I agree with quite often on several subjects (particularly all things adult entertainment-based). So I go after the idea, not the person (also, Dave is a very sensitive person and I'd hate to upset his delicate sensibilities).

Not everybody out there is as smart as you, SABR guy with a post doctorate in mathematics... or it's also possible they haven't yet been exposed to new baseball ideas. Or maybe they're just a little kid and you just sent them back upstairs, crying about how the bad Internet people don't like Nick Punto and asking his mom what she really did for a living before she met daddy. Nobody wants that. We were all baseball morons once and Twins Daily is doing its best to invite baseball fans of all knowledge levels and varieties to this great sport. It wouldn't kill you to show a little restraint once in a while and teach something instead of blasting the person out of the water like a drunken Hunter S Thompson fishing in a dynamite pond.

In short, stop with the insults. We're not going to put up with it but we do encourage civil (or, mostly civil) discourse on the state of the Twins. Again, it's a really simple rule:

Go after the idea, not the person.

PS. Forum dwellers, we're also keeping an eye on consistently negative posters. Again, we understand frustration but if you can't post anything but negativity for 150 consecutive posts, consider yourself warned. If you see someone who is consistently dragging down every thread they enter and derailing the topic with endless rants about how bad everything is about the Twins, do not report it. That will only clog our queue for forum violations and could cause us to miss legitimately insulting posts. Instead, feel free to PM myself, John, Seth, Nick, or Parker with your concern. We will certainly take your opinion under advisement and we thank you.