alanhart must return to streeteasy

alan must be gratified at this sign of support in the community....

lucille: "no, not really".

Please don't start a new discussion on se about the banished trolls.
Don't create new discussion.

I'm looking out for your best interest, Duchess.

I actually don't understand the greying of alanhart. He does troll bait from time to time, but it ain't even close to the drivel-spew coming from the other greyed-out folks.

truth has forbidden this discussion. Proceed at your own risk.

i don't understand what that means. how might my interests be harmed if i start a new thread? are you saying *i* will get greyed out? that's ok, it's happened before. banished trolls or not, they were an important part of the se community, they'd been around forever. it was wrong what they were doing to you, and they were greyed out for that. but are you saying that even mentioning them now constitutes some kind of offense? against whom, exactly? thank you for looking out for my interests, but i'm just not sure how you are doing that or why it's something that even needs to be done.

it might be easier to grey out everyone.....

I blocked this AH (what a coincidence) months ago. AH usually adds very little value to discussion and then sidetrack it to some inane topic. If you want some AHs in your life, just forward an address. I know a few that I wish I could block, but would happy to send your way

AlanHart is funny! I would much prefer Streeteasy to ban Xenophobes like Stevejx from this forum.

Alanhart is one of the reasons I like to read streeteasy. He is witty and poignant. Free alanhart!

lucille, another brilliant thread, following on the success of the AR vacation thread! Congrats on your success here lucille. Also, very glad we postponed Plan CC until a bit later when it would have maximum effectiveness.

It's ugly to come back yo SE time to time and find out that some of the most intelligent and funny people here are driven away. I met with Alan and AR in the past and I really liked them, I think they added real value to this site. Alan prevented me from buying a couple of months before October 2008. The pace was worth 35% less by the end of the year. I will be forever grateful to him. AR was very generous as well. These are, together with west86 and a couple more posters here, the people I really dig here. Evidently, some bullies use SE as the school playground where they can beat people up and drive them away. Pathetic.

What about columbiacounty?

bjw, my guess is that alanhart had a multiple personality disorder

Maybe it's a shared login

Is that why you were greyed out?

Midtwner, get back to your filing cabinet.

SHARED LOGIN! that's it!! *slaps forehead* that makes so much more sense!

huh....curiouser and curiouser

SHARED LOGIN! that's it!! *slaps forehead* that makes so much more sense!

huh....curiouser and curiouser

crap, I double posted again. sorry lucille.

yeah, i'm still not talking to you. at least not this particular you.

JuiceMan, maybe. I'd be surprised I guess. What's oddest to me is that all the recent greys have altogether disappeared from the site it seems.

"Evidently, some bullies use SE as the school playground where they can beat people up and drive them away. Pathetic."

mimi, while I think ar and ah are/were often helpful, I don't think anyone bullied them off this board. StreetEasy themselves made the decision to grey them, most likely because they engaged the troll(s) a bit more than they liked. That and ar strangely defended cc.

i thought it was because truth freaked them out with her team of lawyers and private eyes

> most likely because they engaged the troll(s) a a bit more than they liked.

columbiacounty did talk to you frequently, but stevejhx talked to you more than columbiacounty. So much for your theories.

>mimi, while I think ar and ah are/were often helpful, I don't think anyone bullied them off this board.

Aboutready said "farewell" last year on July 31, and encouraged people to harangue her if she returned. Then she went to a competitive real estate site, and ultimately that relationship ended.

bjw203,
I think it's this simple. Seeing streams of people fighting back and forth in a puerile fashion is not good for the Easy Street branding. They want this to be a sticky website for people and such antics have the opposite effect. It hurts their brand value to see such things occur.

The real loss is aboutready being greyed out. Anyone who doubts this should go look at a comps thread (any comps thread, for that matter) and see how many hidden aboutready posts there are. It's easy enough to click unhide, but still tedious and I'm surprised that SE thinks this is necessary. That said, I wasn't around when some of the more recently hidden (ar, ah, Wbottom, riversider for a bit) got hidden, so I don't know who did/said what to whom to make that happen.

You must be kidding SLS. Her negative posts more than outweighed this contribution.

Not kidding at all. I agree that there are two sides to this, but apparently we see the weightings differently

RS, why were you greyed out? And then why were you reverted? I haven't been following in detail, so apologies if this was covered on some other thread.

No idea. I was, then I wasn't.

you could just click the stop ignoring this person and she will return for you in all her glory. do people really ignore the greyed out posters because se has deemed them offensive?

Can someone at StreetEasy comment here, both on RS and on the others? Some transparency would be nice.

what's not clear? they were obnoxious and got trolled. happens to the best of us. the only thing keeping them from returning is their collective pride, being that they made a reeeeally big deal about others' troll status and multiple handles. they'll be back. wtf else are they going to do with themselves?

truth sent tickets to SE.

the rest is history.

Mimi: I miss the days when I felt that there was a real exchange of information about the real estate market. But things evolve, especially Internet forums. I was one of the early readers of Salon's Tabletalk and still follow a few of the posters on the Well. Tabletalk shut down recently. Very interesting discourse on many topics (and things move IMO in a better direction when there are user names and there were "real" people and issues behind the screen).

People are hungry to connect and talk about NYC real estate, and if I try to remember how I felt when I first went on SE, there was a tremendous amount of useful information and "on the ground" chatter. Part of the slow death of this forum is the fact that many "old-timers" have resolved their RE issue - either bought or moved or decided to rent. There don't seem to be many new" blood posters who are actually looking to buy or rent in NYC, especially in the segment I follow. Yes, there were always side discussions only tangentially related to RE, but the last 2 years, those discussions have taken over and made SE less interesting for me, personally.

10023...come on, man..didn't you recently start a thread about your teeth?

lucille, clowning alanhart. alanhart, don't have a life outside of SE, LMAO.

As I said, things evolve.

"The real loss is aboutready being greyed out. Anyone who doubts this should go look at a comps thread (any comps thread, for that matter)"

Agreed. They were and are very helpful. I think alan made some very nice contributions every now and then as well, on a number of RE issues. I think most people know my thoughts on Wbottom - he had it coming. But I do believe SE has said in the past that this can be a temporary measure if the offenders tone it down some.

"Part of the slow death of this forum is the fact that many "old-timers" have resolved their RE issue - either bought or moved or decided to rent."

That's a really good point. I know since I "resolved" I don't have the time to dig through as many comps, etc. and easily get sidetracked into non-RE discussions (like this one!). Some other old timers have all but disappeared or only show up sporadically. Why the lack of "new blood"? I think some of it has to do with the recently trolled acting like the board was theirs, and telling newbies, roughly, "how things go around here." I think that scares newbies off (even though it shouldn't), or just annoys some people looking for genuine, unbiased (ok, less biased) advice/information. I hope that damage is reparable.

Do you think that huntersburg and Lucille bluth are good for this place?

alanhart was a vile, disgusting racist. No loss.

Bjw: of the forums I frequent with usernames, THS is very much on-topic and doesn't veer off into extraneous stuff. But it is slooowww these days. I once posted a plumbing fixture for sale, and shipped it off the next day. Ikeaforums is great as well. So is Brownstoner. The problem with Tabletalk, which I think mirrors the evolution of SE, is that the initial 2 years of posts (circa '98) were made by posters with genuine issues and openness to discussion. People were still getting to get to know each other and were more polite. As time went on, a few posters on Tabletalk got more entrenched in their views and insulting/belligerent/impatient towards others. Conversation slowly became the few people who knew and liked each other offline continuing their friendship offline, the surviving conversations tried to flow around the comments of the ruder posters. The interesting thing with TT is that the reason why the ruder posters were tolerated is that these people were very, very intelligent, made good points, and drove a lot of traffic to TT to start with.

To summarize, it seems as if at the beginning of Tabletalk, everyone was a newbie, positions had yet to be fully fleshed out and developed, and there was open and frank discussion. As people's personalities and backgrounds became more apparent and identities revealed, things became nastier and more confrontational.

Harsh. I never saw racist posts. I found alanhart to be amusing. And AR's comps helped me enormously. I think newbies are turned off by the vile trolls, those that engage and encourage the trolls and those that feel compelled to copy and re-post the perverse greyed -out attacks made by the trolls. I don't visit the site much anymore for that reason. I tune in for the insightful postings of inonada, finance guy, urbandigs, w81,ali, and of course, the colorful w67. But it is hard to find the threads that they might be posting on.

Alan is clearly not a racist. RS is making things up and just parroting what Truth says in a desperate attempt to have a friend.

Here is the quality of discourse you now have on SE:

http://streeteasy.com/nyc/talk/discussion/27719-bulldoze-the-new-way-to-foreclose

Not exactly the Algonquin table, is it? Get used to it.

>I think newbies are turned off by the vile trolls,

Or by people with a nasty agenda directed directly at the newbies, like apt23, who attacked a recent new poster because he wanted his girlfriend to contribute to the household.

>I don't visit the site much anymore for that reason.

I thought it was because you bought a money losing pit in Miami, and also because you are trying to avoid NY taxes.

so bj: once again, do you think that hunters burg is good for this place?

All of a sudden columbiacounty values bjw's opinion. Hysterical.

I'm searching Streeteasy, I'm using Google, I even tried Bing ... I can't seem to find the thread titled "columbiacounty must return to streeteasy?

No, cc, hburg is not good for this place.

I don't actually see why ar and alanh were grayed out and they should be brought back. My guess is it has something to do with the personal views of the Se administrators (wbottom I am not really familiar with, so I have no opinion).

But people yelling "troll" all the time just because someone disagrees with them or challenges their facts or analysis are just as bad as trolls, i.e. are themselves trolls, whatever ever that word means. This whole site is way worse than when I first tuned in. Way too many extraneous diversions in otherwise useful threads. Also, this ludicrous thing of saying every other person is hsfcomm1 is lame -- obviously, SE knows who has had paid accounts and can't possibly be a duplicate of another paid personal account.

There are obviously plenty of people that could be grayed on here ....but then the whole site might start looking gray

I also wish I knew how to revive these boards, which were interesting and pleasant (not to mention a nice source of clients) two years ago. I still meet great people here, but now I feel like so many posts are bullying, either in terms of racism/homophobia/sexism etc., or just in terms of sheer bravado ignoring the facts ("X building has gone to hell"-type posts from people who don't live there).

ali r.
DG Neary Realty

I agree with 10023 and f_p. Also, no one is banned - if you want to ungrey them, you simply ungrey them. I still see posts that respond to greyed-out posts. I'm just not curious enough to un-grey them. If I see alanhart, I'll un-grey him. But overall, I think SE could keep on greying out plenty more. It's about tone.

oh no...now, again, we have heartfelt pontificating from bj--yes, bj, likely the producer of the most voluminous, useless commentary on these boards---

and despite her prior alliance with hburg, she now throws him under the bus

and if being busy and productive at work is what i "had coming", my good karma must be paying off

alan hart is anything but a racist--he is a progressive thinker with a smart wit, that smarts when pointed at morons like LICDope; despite that LICDope is such a layup target

work beckons....again

LICDope rarely if ever attempts to say something of substance--when he does, his ignorance glows like the waters of newtown creek, site of his waterfront property

MidtownerEast, tries to act innocent when "he's" amid all the drama.

People who live in glass houses should not throw stones!

A lot of stone throwing taking place on this thread.

I remember the vile thread created by stevef, calling for somewhereelse to be banned from SE for "cyberbulling." Unlike midtownereast, who's an erudite, I've never called for anyone to be greyed. The report abuse function is abused, which I never used. bjw2103, told me he would spit in my face and this guy tells people to stay classy, SMH. I would rather be an imperfect writer than have perfected the art of lying like, bjw2103. aboutready, don't see her issues, SE'ers know a lot of her personal business which is sad. It's sad how a few stone throwers want to be victims; sitting on both sides of the fence. Get real!

I remember when the Curbed forums were actually pretty useful, that didn't last long though. I discovered SE about 3 years ago and it has been very useful in growing my new biz model and I have met a lot of wonderful people along the way.

One comment I hear from many of my clients is, "Oh we love to check into the forums on SE, but would never dare to actually post". The boards are well watched, but I think the heightened level of "drama" keeps a lot of the new blood from actively participating. This is too bad because I meet so many well informed buyers from diverse and interesting back grounds, many would add some new vigor to the community.

Keith Burkhardt
The Burkhardt Group

MidtownerEast, your discourse is that of regal loin?

keith, you are right. About 2 weeks ago a guy posted about buying here vs CT, and how his relationship with his girlfriend should work out in context to contributing to expenses.
\
Within that discussion, apt23 takes it upon her hysterical self to attack the character and actions of the poster. But apt23 is the righteous one, right?

The Righteous Ones, SMH; LOL!

Mutombo -- Thank you very much for calling me "an erudite." I will convert it to the adjective form and tell you that I truly appreciate the compliment.

hburg

arbiter of righteousness

Wbuttocks, small, grey, depressing and smelly.

I thought you didn't read what I wrote.

MoldtownerEast, the erudite only knows the one usage of erudite; LOL! If being rude a compliment I complimented you!

Wbottom, arbiter of "heartfelt pontificating" and "useless." Seriously, you're obviously entitled to your opinions, but that's a bit of a haha considering it's coming from someone who's greyed out to someone who isn't. You have much more in common with hburg than you think.

Actually, you were being quite complimentary and I appreciate it:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/erudite

I can't be "an erudite," but I will accept being "an erudite" person. Thanks again! SMB (Shaking My Booty)

MidtownerVirgin ... oh snap?

I knew you were going to do that and not go beneath the surface, strawman, LMAO.

Check this out:

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/erudite

Please stop shaking your Wbuttocks, small, grey depressing and smelly, LOL!

bjw, who do you have anything in common with? Please enlighten us with another 200 post thesis on the value of LinkedIn in Italian, while justifying how you don't even know the difference between principal and interest.

Are Wbuttocks and MidtownerVirgin the same person?

h'burg,

bjw2103, don't know the difference between principal and interest? LOL!

h'burg, you are nothing like wbottom.

h'burg,

midtownereast, don't know the different usages of erudite.

NYC10023, KeithB and Front Porch have basically said it all. And, on this thread, still the name calling. The urbanity has been compromised for just a bad vibe.

Bill,

I'm imperfect, but "The Righteous" continue the nonsense then throw stones.

alanhart would post highly anti-semitic comments. That combined with his adding nothing but dumb insults to every discussion make this a better forum without him.

The Pen name is an offensive reference and if there was a different explanation it was never offered to the best of my knowledge.

Mutombo -- There is one usage and here are the synonyms from your own source (as well as usage in a sentence):

"learned, lettered, cultured, educated, scholarly, cultivated, knowledgeable, literate, well-educated, well-read

I found him a charming and erudite companion."

I think you are confused by the root word "rude." It means to eradicate the "rudeness" (i.e., the unlearned nature of man). I hope no one mistakes this for name calling since I am instead pointing out that you paid me a compliment. So, again, thank you.

[Middle English erudit, from Latin rudtus, past participle of rudre, to instruct : -, ex-, ex- + rudis, rough, untaught; see rude.]

Word History:

So now we're creating our own definitions of words here on SE? That's useful. Since when did historical meanings have any bearing on current, common usage.

A historical usage might be the reason someone still use the word in a certain context. Definitions do change and amend, do you disagree with that statement?

Erudite while meaning learned and scholarly tends to be used in a negative fashion with a bit of sarchasm. I would not consider this a compliment. An explanation described as erudite conjures up being educated in a showy artificial way. Diane from Cheers would be erudite.

"A historical usage might be the reason someone still use the word in a certain context. " If historical usage is never used in current usage then dredging it up to use is incorrect, and equivalent to creating your own special new meaning. If the historical usage is still, at times, found in current usage, it would be ok.

"Definitions do change and amend, do you disagree with that statement?" I agree. However, this doesn't give one person leeway to go back to defunct historical usage or forward to something new they might feel like making up. Evolution in usage only takes hold , and becomes a new "definition", when lots of people start employing the word in this new usage.

Wrong, Sam Malone/Riversider. Look at the synonyms: "Learned, lettered, cultured, educated, scholarly, cultivated, knowledgeable, literate, well-educated, well-read." Whatever it "conjures up" in your mind is one thing, but it is not among any of the commonly accepted usages. The word you are looking for is "pedantic" and that would be Frasier Crane.

As RS said tends to be used in a negative fashion. I've only heard and used this word in a negative fashion. People need to realize, words are made up all the time. Did computer words exist 100 years ago? How does a word become a word? Please come off that elitist platform and come down to earth, you are a commoner.

"Erudite while meaning learned and scholarly tends to be used in a negative fashion with a bit of sarchasm. I would not consider this a compliment. An explanation described as erudite conjures up being educated in a showy artificial way. Diane from Cheers would be erudite. "

Riversider, erudite can certainly be used sarcastically, as can any word, but personally I don't think it is generally or often used in a sarcastic fashion. I also don't think it is used to describe show-offy people. Perhaps the most common usage is in written profiles of people who are, well, erudite. Can you give an example of actual sarcastic usage of the type you are referring to?

Agreed, he seems to be thinking of the word "pedantic". And of course, that isn't sarcastic use of that word, that is its actual meaning.

LICDope posts moronic crap like this most of the time. Exception being when he seeks to find greater fools for his at-peak purchase of an apt in LIC.

alanhart is not remotely anti-semitic (or racist). he differs with much of that produced by the Israeli government, as do many Israelis. It's hannitized, fox-owned morons like LICDope who equate this to antisemitism. in fact, most of LICDope's offerings are scripted fox beck hannity garbage. He's a perfect example of a not-so-well-off idiot, sitting underwater in his class D real estate, espousing policies scripted by the welthy and powerful, that reinforce his continual failure. Rove, Koch and co play him like a fine violin.

But alas there is justice. LICDope's little piece of the American Dream is in a neighborhood ruined by poorly regulated corporate polluters, soon to be shared with working class union members who will live at 1/5 his cost in better-located subsidized housing.

karma rocks!!

"Erudite" does not tend to be used in a negative fashion. From Merriam-Webster:

"the most erudite people in medical research attended the conference"
"an erudite lecture on the latest discoveries in astronomy"

wrong redbaiter--you are confusing pedantic with erudite--erudite connotes a respected status, period

It just ocurred to me. When you guys say you've seen "erudite" used in a negative fashion, was that at Tea Party meetings? In which case, it could hold its actual, current meaning (well-educated, etc.) AND still be considered negative. Just wonderin'...

Speaking forensically, this sentence by Mutombo suggest the Tea Party context: "Please come off that elitist platform and come down to earth, you are a commoner."

I've been called an erudite twice, one time on SE for calling bloomberg a millionairess. At that time, due to the thread, calling me an erudite did not pertain to being a scholar. In HS I was called an erudite for talking reckless to an elder. I've only heard erudite used in a negative fashion. Erudite not a word used too often.

'tomboy, this should help: http://www.englishclub.com/grammar/parts-of-speech_1.htm

mutombo...those uses of erudite don't appear to make any sense, in any way, and are confusing. Recondite, even.

good point re teabagger usage...funny...but true

burn them damned books!!