My understanding is that Nekochan was full of a lot of that, too, though I haven't been around here long enough to say. This community as a whole has so many talented people with a great love for these old machines and I want to see that flourish.
It's amazing how much drama surrounds these old computers!
Also I just wanted to say thanks for being an amazing ambassador between the two spaces. The things you say are reasonable and level headed.
It is an interesting situation... as a community we would certainly recommend against trying to troll or otherwise be incendiary or overly negative. I am actually quite glad how calm and civil things have been since we started the user group. The only two people we have had to boot out were pretty much known issues from the beginning, and from there it has been smooth sailing. A good 99.9% of people in the SGI world genuinely seem to want to be nice to each other, and I am glad about that. If this weren't true, it would be difficult to deal with since I think it is nearly impossible to force people to be civil.
That said, like the others, I think this sort of event was inevitable. Sometimes the way Raion speaks tends to get on peoples' nerves, and I've noticed that going all the way back to the Nekochan days even if for the longest time I didn't really have any issue with it. Eventually he blew up at me due to what I
posted here (which I thought was relatively tame), and so I just had to stop talking to him. For whatever reason I've been randomly approached by other people even in non-SGI venues like the Retro Computer Discord complaining about, let's just say, some of the less "politically correct" and very personal things he says (to put it mildly).
There are a lot of people here who have put a lot of hard work into various projects, and Raion has been very consistently negative, or even snide in tone when talking about those efforts. So I guess it isn't altogether too surprising when that turns into a public, and very personal dispute. This is
classic conflict escalation (a.k.a. Monkey Dance) behavior that is as old as the hills. If one person "starts something," the next person, absent conscious restraint, will usually pick it up from there and hit back harder. This continues until one or both of the participants are on the ground, or until someone backs down.
We should encourage people not to engage in personal attacks, but I think that also goes back all the way to maintaining a respectful and civil tone towards other people and their work even if it doesn't meet our own technical / world view. I think whatever else we can take away from this, it is clear that it was a personal thing. As you say
@kaigan, IRIX Network has changed a lot with the introduction of new staff, and strongly for the better! Just given the patterns I have seen over the past few years, I am not sure if the personal fights Raion gets into will ever end, but regardless of whether those come from within, or as I've seen, outside of the SGI community, I hope they don't turn into some community vs. community dynamic. That, certainly, would be unfortunate.
Edit: As an addendum, I like
@onre 's approach. I think technical counters to any allegations are the best response, although unfortunately expensive to produce.