Sean, thanks for your response, especially because it shows me I must have communicated rather badly, to make myself so misunderstood. When I referred to the "clubbishness" of the site that has alienated me to some extent, I wasn't talking about the presence of staff, or of different layers of staff; I was talking about the sort of in-groupy, clubbish, chatty, atmosphere that pervades the place and can be offputting to a newcomer who is more used to, or at least prefers, a more no-nonsense, information-rich kind of dialogue in a forum.
I'm pretty sure that I said in that post that I don't have an opinion about whether the council is a good thing or not, and that I trust in your judgment that it's something you need. So it's hard for me to see how one could draw a conclusion that I was objecting to the formation of the council.
It's true that the bantering of some of the council members after the announcement added to the feeling of alienation I feel from the site, but that alienation didn't come from the creation of the council, but from the sense that the regulars here form a very tight-knit group; that feeling will persist for me whether there's a council or not.
Maybe an analogy would help. I grew up in a large and close family; we siblings formed our own little society of eight, with our own rituals, customs, language, songs; even after we came of age and had families of our own, we would repeat these rituals and songs and things whenever we got together. We were just enjoying being together; we didn't mean to make our spouses feel left out, but they felt very excluded whenever we all got together. But understand, it wasn't that they wanted to be part of our club and learn the songs and the routines, it was more that they wanted us to stop being an exclusive club and start having a different, more inclusive kind of interaction that they would feel comfortable participating in and feeling included in. Eventually we grew up enough to do that, and we're all very comfortable together now, but I'm still embarrassed, looking back, how difficult we made it for our spouses to feel part of the family.
But when I suggested that if you really want to expand the subscriber base, you might want to discourage the clubbishness and encourage an atmosphere that's more open and welcoming to newcomers, I was supposing I couldn't be the only one who is put off by all the ingroupy chitchat, the contentless banter that forms a sort of constant background on APUG. But in reading yours and the moderators' posts in this thread, it seems clear that expanding the subscriber base simply isn't a problem; it has expanded by leaps and bounds and will continue to do so, so most new people must really like the clubbishness, and there's no incentive on APUG's part to accommodate those who are uncomfortable with it. So I think my contribution to the thread was probably an intrusion and not helpful.
In thinking about this, I remembered a fairly recent thread about hybridphoto, in which it became clear that the people who don't like hybridphoto don't like it for the very reason that many of us like it: no contentless chitchat, no feeling that it's a "home" or a "club" where you can just hang out and shoot the &*$ with your buddies, none of the clubbishness that I find so offputting at APUG.
When I first joined APUG, I read all the forums and participated wherever I felt like participating, but after I was told that I wasn't entitled to an opinion about a particular issue unless I was a subscriber, I stopped reading and participating in the more general forums (even though I did become a subscriber soon after that, that rebuke was terminally alienating for me) and now I mostly just check the alternative process forum, which is entirely free of that chitchat, to see if there's anything I might be able to contribute there. But I supposed that a thread in the announcement forum would be important to read, as a subscriber, so I did. I'm sorry that I read it, sorry I responded to it. Now, it seems maybe the announcement should have been just posted and closed, as most announcements are, without giving a chance for response, because there was probably no response required.
And I can see how my response may have been confusing, because it wasn't really about the council but about how to make the site more welcoming to newcomers, which is a different issue entirely, and as I said, if people are knocking down the doors to get in, there's obviously no need to change anything to make most newcomers happy. Sorry about introducing any confusion to the discussion.
Katharine Thayer
P.S. I didn't realize how awfully long this was going to be, and I don't have time to pare it down, sorry again.
