tsurara

I would argue that we do run popularity contests (judging by a lot of the SoTW voting), encourage cliques (Zoints), and build up appearance-based judgements (our most popular gallery seems to be devoted to young people taking pictures of themselves in mirrors and collecting "Yum you're so hawt" comments) :P

Though I would agree that making any official vehicle for staff to pat themselves on the back would be taking things to the extreme.

If there is a problem with user-staff relations, they should be addressed with more than "distractions". If the users -genuinely- hate us: there must be a reason.

But I'm not convinced they do.

Point 1) People don't come to boring forums for very long.
Point 2) People don't learn anything or change through interactions with people just like them who agree with everything they say.
Point 3) The world is not fair and no one is perfect. This is a reality of the world as a whole. A forum's as good a place as any other to learn it.

As long as the mods -attempt- to be fair, do what they believe is right and hold a genuine affection for the site... I'm not sure there's a problem at all.

If people want to complain about it: let them...

We don't need to all panic and institute group-hug time to counteract this imaginary wave of discontent.

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