Re: Sam Vaknin - Narcissist or Psychopath?
More mismanaged help sites we know of:
Dr. Irene's Catbox (Dr. Irene is a right wing psycho and a sychophant of Vaknin's. Keeps a number of "just lay down and take it" moderators around; much like Evans)
While Dr. Irene's site has also suffered from mismanagement, the rest of this is a long way from the truth in my observation. There's no way I'd call her "psycho." I think what this illustrates best is what I mentioned in an earlier post: that too many of the
posters on this type of site are pretty unstable too! All this ranting rhetoric about "right wing psychos" and the like obviously originated with one of the flakes who used to be on that Catbox site and afterwards couldn't find anything better to do with herself than spew her petty spite at the owner for booting her and her bullying sidekicks off the board. Unfortunately sources of that kind are not to be trusted.
I already discussed that incident in an earlier post, so I'll only recap the relevant points here. Dr. Irene is not a "sycophant of Vaknin's," only one of many people who have chosen to publish some of Vaknin's writing (along with many other people's writing) because it's useful in its way. She's not only pointed out that Vaknin has no formal qualifications or experience in mental health, but also expressed some specific points of disagreement with Vaknin.
Also, the remark about the "just lay down and take it" moderators is just one more example of the many distortions being spread around by disgruntled ex-Catbox members with an ax to grind. This example is significant because it illustrates the gulf that had opened up between the crowd of CRUMBUM sufferers who had largely come to dominate the Catbox under the
ancien régime, and the more reasonable and moderate positions espoused by the new management. It wasn't even a "number" of moderators that these ex-members were carping about. It was one in particular who often discussed the possibility of "radical acceptance" of a "difficult" partner. Incidentally that moderator seems to have resigned. All this is a long way from pretending a whole team of moderators were telling abused people to "just lay down and take it."
The comparison with Evans is instructive. I hope that remark about the moderators wasn't meant to apply to Evans, because my experience of Evans's site is the opposite: that its problems have been due to the
absence of moderators. Although both sites have suffered from mismanagement in the past, the immediate causes of problems on the Evans site have largely been the
opposite of those on the Catbox site.
The problem on Evans's site is that she never would do what most message board owners do with a relatively large membership: that's to say, appoint a team of volunteer moderators to keep the board running smoothly and trouble-free. I'd guess that's because Evans is too darn controlling to want to delegate any of her power to anyone else! She wouldn't want anyone else to upstage her either! She's alleged in years past that she had a so-called "professional Web editor" to help her run the board, but nobody has ever seen or heard from this person and many doubted her existence. As a result, Evans's board has had to stagger along with "moderator" intervention (from herself) that's been minimal and sporadic at best, not to mention arbitrary. Evans never spent that much time attending to her board.
Dr. Irene on the other hand did appoint moderators from quite early in the history of the Catbox. The problem was that after a time she left them to run her board almost entirely by themselves and didn't keep a close enough eye on it herself. As a result, bullies became entrenched on her board and her previous moderators failed to control them as they should have done.
So the historic causes of the meltdowns on both boards--Evans in 2002, the Catbox in October--were the same: bullies on the board, and lack of attention from the owners
in person. However, the
immediate causes were the opposite. Evans's meltdown happened because she
still didn't seem to have a clue what was happening on her own board when she intervened to deal with the problems the bullies were causing. As a result, she stupidly ended up taking the side of the bullies against the large majority of her own good posters! A meltdown was inevitable.
Dr. Irene faced the converse problem. When she did start paying attention to the trouble on her board, she could see who the bullies were all right, and she very properly kicked them off. Indeed, their outrageous rudeness left her no alternative. The trouble was the bullies had been entrenched far too long on her board--a matter of years, no less--so they couldn't be gotten rid of without significant loss of other posters. A job of that kind is like cleaning out the Augean stables. But at least the Catbox can grow again into a healthier site than it had been, while a board like Evans's will always have problems of some kind as long as she's running it!
In fact Evans seems to have given up altogether trying to run her board on any scale. After her "Purge of '02" she progressively restricted the board in certain ways, leading people to criticize it as increasingly "cultlike." But she was still having trouble on it from time to time, since she wouldn't appoint moderators to police it. Finally at the start of 2005 she stopped letting any new members on unless they
personally telephoned her for an interview! The result was predictable. Recruitment plummeted; the board's membership dwindled away over time, and the volume of posts dropped to a fraction of what it used to be. So Evans capped years of mismanagement by virtually strangling her own board to death!
