Question Posed on Volleytalk

I had not opened that thread because it looked totally uninteresting.

Definitely easier and much more enjoyable to communicate here.
On VT you've got lots of trolls on the PSU threads who always write, "PSU fans are sooo spoiled."

On a more serious note, what did happen to Dorothymantooth?

I posted this reply on VolleyTalk:


As Mike noted, DigNittanyVolleyball.com is not a secret site (Mike graciously did a Q&A for it prior to the Penn State vs. Washington semi-final match in 2013). And noone has ever been banned there. As to why fewer Penn State threads on VolleyTalk this season, one obvious answer (without the "cognitive dissonance" slant) is that some fans are less inclined to talk about the team when it's having less success. There are also fair weather "fans" who simply don't follow the team unless it's highly ranked (I believe every school has "fans" like that), and finally, there are, as Millenium alluded, fans who do want to talk about the team this season, with all its imperfections and challenges, but don't want to be diverted into unproductive and sometimes acrimonious tangents. So actually, the DigNittany Forum is a good alternative for them. It has way more threads, and page views, than last season, and I think the reason is that there are Penn State fans who want to talk about Penn State, without having to worry about getting into arguments with fans of other schools who interpret their posts as arrogant or somehow dismissive of those schools. I happen to like VolleyTalk, and respect most of the posters. It's a great asset for volleyball generally. I don't like the acrimony and sniping. I can play that game, but life is too short, in my opinion, to spend time on that.

One phenomenon I believe occurs is that as a team (any team) enjoys more success, a segment of its fan base becomes more vocal and, sadly, sometimes arrogant, abrasive, and dismissive in their interactions with other fanbases. We'll call them the Rude Group. Another phenomenon I believe occurs is that as a team (any team) enjoys more success, the fans of other teams become frustrated by that success (separate and apart from the bad behavior of that team's Rude Group), and simply don't want to hear from the fans of that team about the success their team is enjoying, their distress when it doesn't succeed, and their hopes that it succeeds in the future. I don't believe those phenomena are limited to Penn State or Penn State's fans, it's just that the extended run by Penn State magnified and exacerbated both of them (IMHO). Of course, I am probably totally wrong, distracted by the concept of anti-quarks.

Read more: volleytalk.proboards.com/thread/65577/happened-ladeda?page=3#ixzz4KuMTZx8l