I appreciate the question. I've been on the site for many years - it's one of my daily four, that is, the four sites I check regularly throughout the day. Two of the four are my email accounts, which means that RAWK is one of two non-email sites I deem essential. But I feel that's becoming an increasingly symbolic gesture rather than a meaningful one.
I've been on here throughout the arguments over Houllier, Benitez, and G&H, and there were many good discussions in those days. Maybe the forum users are becoming younger, maybe a difficult season makes us tetchier, but I feel the good discussions are thinning out. Increasingly, the site is governed by something akin to Godwin's Law. I've felt it was coming, but for me the hysterical elastic limit was reached when we drew Everton in the semis this year and a poster remarked that it was like the good old days again, 'Merseyside!' he exclaimed. He was pulled to bits immediately. Why? It made absolutely no sense whatsoever. I loved the eighties, when football was ruled by the city of Liverpool. I joined my friends when Everton did the cup homecoming and they joined me when the Liverpool bus went past Stanley Park with Brucie hodling the European Cup. That was something we used to do. We were a united city. But the discussion turned into an online version of Lord of the Flies and went completely unchecked. Why? What is the editorial decision process that allows a mob to silence a perfectly reasonable comment?
David Foster Wallace argued that the internet needs more gatekeepers, and I feel that's lacking at RAWK. We can get page after page of 'is right' or smiley faces or posts that actually carry no comment at all but simply repeat somebody else's, or any of that empty bullshit that helps push up a forum users comment count, but a comment that expresses a divergent value is wiped out. There is nothing gentlemanly about it, it feels like walking past a gang of hoodies outside Threshers. It's neanderthal, aggressive, and endlessly predictable.
Conversely, I feel that topics that people obviously have big opinions about are too frequently dismissed out of hand. It's good that transfer topics are closed outside of the transfer window, but there are bigger things that should be open to discussion this year rather than endless pages of team formations. It should be possible to discuss whether Kenny is up to the job. It should be possible to say 'actually, I think what Suarez said was racist and he should never have said it' - which, for the record, I do believe. It should be possible to accommodate a little bit of hand-wringing, because that's the nature of being a football fan and certainly the nature of supporting Liverpool and it should be possible to discern which comments are worthy of reflection. But too often the RAWK editorial process is a blythe one, where maybe it could be more, well, editorial. Cutting out rather than closing off. There should be more room for comment and opinion and less room for the empty-vesseling that too often happens here.
