user 16756
Senior Member
- Joined
- Feb 5, 2015
- Messages
- 2,645
- Reaction score
- 3,942
I think it depends which threads you frequent. If you spend a lot of time on this thread or the covid thread, KKF will seem as you describe. But on a lot of the threads there's a strong interest in getting better at making/sharpening/buying, in helping others to get better, and in laughing and ****ing around together. Even buying and selling has a community feel to me. I often buy and sell multiple times from/to the same people and use f&f when appropriate.
I think there's a lot of cost sharing here. There are a ton of us here who do sell at a pay-it-forward price, either decreasing the price of a knife with every sale, or at least sell at the same price as before, despite it being a higher value item. These sales just don't get airtime in the flipper thread. There're also all these really knowledgable people like Kipp, Dalman, Steampunk, Dave M, etc... that give so much of their time to the forum, teaching us newbies how to tie our shoes. (I mean, I give a lot of time too, but my contributions have a lot less content.) That's totally a sacrifice too.
That said, I totally agree with you that it's sad that KKF is so overwhelmingly white/asian male, and it's especially sad (at least to me) that by and large this is not really something that people want to change. See e.g. all the pushback in that knives of wives thread. Don't think that makes it not a community, it's just something that I'd change if I could.
Anyway, I guess my point is just that it depends how you interact with KKF. I've met some people on here that I consider real friends at this point.
Ian, I do always appreciate your reasonableness even when we don't 100% agree.
I guess that I tend to judge behavior when it's not easy. This is not to dismiss the specific individuals you mentioned at all btw, but more generally, my observations will be focused around how people act when it's hard. Or sometimes around here the slightest of inconveniences but even then that's often too much. You correctly ID that this thread, the COVID thread, etc. highlight the behaviors I'm talking about, but this is more or less my point.
If the basic premise is "fine as long as there are no stressors", that's not a community IMO. Frankly, things work around here for me as they do for some others too. But while other people believe that's enough, I'd like to see it work for everyone and that's what would have to happen for me to call something a community.
A perfect counterexample for me is a discord Im on for a very small food youtube channel. There I am basically an omniscient knife god while here I'm just another patzer (albeit a well financed one). However, because that community has lots of people from varied backgrounds, and people treat each other with actual respect and not just politeness, I find myself spending more time there, and just wishing that it had the level of knowledge this place had and maybe a few of the folks I actually like around here (company which includes you FWIW)