I have continued my ethnography on the LGBT community and expanded on the sites I've visited and on my participation in the forums. I've been learning a lot more about online communities in general, and the LGBT community specifically. One of the sites that I spend most of my time on is queerattitude.com, which has the slogan "queer thinking, straight talking." As you can see in the snapshot, it's format is set up as a forum. It's pretty much a free for all of posts and comments from different members of the site, about a variety of different LGBT related topics (coming out, jokes, issues, advice, etc). The target audience of queer attitude is LGBT youth (when joining, it asks if you are 13-25 years old), and the site invites its users to "get support, give advice, chat and enjoy," which is exactly what goes on throughout the forum. The site also states that it has members from 70 different countries. The extent of my participation on this site has been to comment on others posts if I thought it was cool or interesting, but that's about it so far. My next step in progressing my ethnography would be to comment on a post that is a little bit more serious and personal, which I think will be a little weird, but will also help immerse myself as a community member.
Have you ran into any examples of trolling within the LGBT support groups and sites you have participated in? I would imagine that an LGBT community group site could possibly have attracted a few types of trolls, either those just looking to goof around and upset people they know will be very involved and defensive, or people who actually are ignorant and really hate the people who find comfort in these websites. I hope you have not seen any of this activity but I would be interested in finding out if it has become and issue and if you think is in a spirit of jest or hatred.
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