to be fair, i started a thread yesterday looking for a bit of a mental boost, and STW assisted without the jibes.
This place can be a PITA at times, but it’s the internet, you can’t pick and choose who interacts.
I always think of it like bars: there are LOADS of bars I know to avoid because they are full of ****ts, idiots, agressive retards, pretentious muppets, weirdos, sexual predators etc etc. So I can limit my exposure to them to a certain degree.
On t’internet though, it’s like one big smelly bar, and everyone has the luxury of annonimity, so even if they aren’t actually a complete knob in real life, they can act like one on here 😀
In many ways, MTB is quite a solitary sport (compared to say football, rugby etc), not just when you are actually participating, but in terms of the number of “real” friends you have involved in the sport. I have plenty of friends, but only one who is as daft about MTB as I am. So I think people generally don’t get the whole camaraderie feeling that exists in other sports (which is one of the reasons we all flock to STW to chat about inane bike stuff!).
Also, there are also a whole lot of bike envy/middle age crisis/odd balls associated with our sport, particularly in XC 😉