Stop everything you’re doing and read this

[nferno]

There are 6 or 7* posters on here who I absolutely cannot tolerate in regards to their negativity. I know ignoring them is a simple solution, but it's tedious then having to go through threads where every second post looks like someone is talking to themselves.

It definitely wasn't as bad here last time we went through a low spell (2012-14), and it has definitely affected how often I use Spurs Chat.

*I say 6 or 7, in reality it's probably closer to 15 or 20.

Spoiler

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[al_pacino]

It's a good article and quite clearly could've been written about any teams Twitter or forums.

 

[Sp3akerboxxx]

A forum admin, posting a bloggers article, complaining about online fans.

It's so meta it hurts my head.

 

[Dougal]

A forum admin, posting a bloggers article, complaining about online fans.

It's so meta it hurts my head.

I’m not admin.

 

[carmeldevil]

Great article.

Edit: especially the part about transfer mania. It's getting worse and poisoning the debates but that's just my opinion.

 

[Metalhead]

Liverpool chat? In Spurs Chat!?! It actually relates to many many fans and perfectly puts into words a problem I, and seemingly many others, have when discussing the modern game. Whole conversations descend into drivel due to the appearance of the sort of fan mentioned here. I’ll shut up now and let this gentleman do the talking.

The Cold World of the Extremely Online Liverpool Fan

The odd existence of the digital football supporter who doesn’t care about football

dean-magazine.ghost.io

Amazing article. Cheers Dougal.

 

[Albertbarich]

It veers off about transfers and capitalism which lost me as I was obsessing about us signing new players on teletext when I was 8 . It always has been and always will be a thing.

But the stuff about twitter is so true. The Mourinhoistas ' were the strongest thing Ive ever seen . A group of people obssessed with Jose mourinho who swamp whatever club he is at all over their social media defending their idol.

As for the moaning and people on here using it to defend their views on levy well I totally disagree Liverpool fans may have a point in saying it being the trophies they have won. Enic have achieved nothing like it and were back to the mid table. There is loads of other stuff too that has been discussed to death but the owners deserve more stick not less. There is a reason levys nickname is Teflon.

 

[Sp3akerboxxx]

I’m not admin.

Forum staff is "admin" for tossers

 

[Metalhead]

Twitter is almost the perfect storm for this kind of thing. The character limit makes reasoned posts harder to make, so people have to get their point across quickly, soon this becomes just blurting the emotion out. Couple this with the algorithm that pushes like minded people to see these kind of posts more and you get a cyclical echo chamber where every post feeds another, and on and on it goes.

It kind of reflects modern society - a low attention span and a need for immediate satisfaction.

 

[Metalhead]

It veers off about transfers and capitalism which lost me as I was obsessing about us signing new players on teletext when I was 8 . It always has been and always will be a thing.

But the stuff about twitter is so true. The Mourinhoistas ' were the strongest thing Ive ever seen . A group of people obssessed with Jose mourinho who swamp whatever club he is at all over their social media defending their idol.

As for the moaning and people on here using it to defend their views on levy well I totally disagree Liverpool fans may have a point in saying it being the trophies they have won. Enic have achieved nothing like it and were back to the mid table. There is loads of other stuff too that has been discussed to death but the owners deserve more stick not less. There is a reason levys nickname is Teflon.

That's true but I think that he was also making the point about fans being obsessed about 'winning the window' like it's a competition unto itself. It's also quite tiresome when you go on the Spurs Instagram page during the window and all you see is fans demanding that the club sign so and so player or my pet hate - demanding that the club 'announce' so and so player.

I take your point about the Jose fanclub though. Not long time Spurs fans who wanted him from the beginning or wanted him to be given a chance but the ones who literally only followed Spurs because he was manager.

 

[sly1]

Very good article.

It is remarkable and surprising how closely the “extremely online Liverpool fan” maps on to the Spurs fan who: always thinks this is the year where one or two big signings will make us a contender; calls everyone who disagrees with them a BSoDoL; and thinks everything bad that happens is “so predictable”.

 

[fishhhandaricecake]

Liverpool chat? In Spurs Chat!?! It actually relates to many many fans and perfectly puts into words a problem I, and seemingly many others, have when discussing the modern game. Whole conversations descend into drivel due to the appearance of the sort of fan mentioned here. I’ll shut up now and let this gentleman do the talking.

The Cold World of the Extremely Online Liverpool Fan

The odd existence of the digital football supporter who doesn’t care about football

dean-magazine.ghost.io

Good share and interesting thread this guy put a ton of effort into that.

Twitter is so toxic, I personally don’t do any social media and Twitter especially attracts a lot of these types of ‘fans’ who just moan about everything and anything and really don’t have any substance or points to back it up they just like to feel important by moaning and being negative.

I think having a strong opinion and being very passionate on a forum or other mediums is great and that’s what fan debate is all about but completely agree these types of fans are just drains and as you say they just are negative about everything to do with the club but there’s no positivity about anything else to balance it out.

A lot of this hate seems to be towards the lpool owners in this case and there is certainly some of that towards ENIC on here, some rightly so but again some is just moaning for moanings sake and not seeing a balanced view.

The transfer window one is an interesting one, unless you support Chelsea, Man.U or Man.City then all the other clubs to an extent will always find the transfer window difficult in terms of both ins and outs, the reality is real life football transfer windows just don’t work like fifa or football manager for 95% of the clubs in Europe so these fans get frustrated when their club hasn’t offloaded 10 players and signed 10 world beaters every summer.

I do get the impression these posts do tend to more often come from a younger audience who maybe haven’t experienced football of how it was in say any of the 70’s,80’s and 90’s, fans who picked up the premier league product from mid 2000’s onwards let’s say the Chelsea oil money period onwards that era has produced a very different type of fan imo.

 

[whitesocks]

In my lifetime, being a pessimistic liverpool fan must be a hard path to tread.
Likewise being an optimistic spurs fan, as every glory they predict every year is based on nothing and proven wrong again and again. But I didn't use the optimistic rating to say someone is stupid - they just want to think the best of things until reality has caught up, and they obviously have found a knack of crashing without harming themselves.
And one day they, in theory, could be proved right, and will be able to rub everyone's nose in it.

I respect all opinions.

 

[fishhhandaricecake]

People need a way to vent their frustrations, that tends to happen the match thread when things aren’t going well.

Tumultuous times will always garner lots of interest because people want to know what’s happening and naturally have their say. But at the same time, you only have to look how busy the Bale thread was when he came back last September to see that good times mean things get busy too.

So true mate also add to this the fact that Spurs fans were treated to some pretty big highs and good times under especially Redknapp & Poch for a combined period of about 7-8 years after a period of about 15 years where the club was a complete mess so when things haven’t been so good lately and/or look like they aren’t too likely to get much better or anything close to what they were when the good times were rolling then fans will naturally want to voice their opinions on this.

Like you say when things are good like the transfer window the summer before last under Jose and the bale signing happened and some good individual results etc then there can be a lot of great positivity in here.

I think the key words here are balance and substance. Like Dougal says it’s fine to be passionate or have a strong opinion about something to do with Spurs but if your spouting negativity towards absolutely everything all the time, the board, the manager, the players, the transfers AND with no real substance or balanced points from both sides of the coin then that’s what forms these Twitter type toxic negative fans who are actually often pretty clueless.

 

[Flynn]

Reflecting where I sit.

I took an 18 month sabbatical from the game to avoid Jose ball as I was pissed at the club and knew I couldn’t enjoy his football or him being attached to the club. The day he got sacked I came back full of optimism. I’d only watched about 6 games in that 18 months and not all of those spurs but I was ready to invest again.

I manage a team of engineers and I have a smattering of polish, Hungarians, Greek, Romanian, …. They all support Chelsea and city etc. They like to give me shit about trophy’s and I’m always telling them that I’ve been a Spurs fan since 87. It’s never been about trophy’s. It’s about being entertained and Spurs have always entertained, we might of been shit but he had a ginola, a vdv, a gazza, a bale. I give them back how morally corrupt their clubs are. Something (because they only know football through sky) they are completely blind to.

I still maintain and believe I’m not bothered about trophies. Sure it would be nice, I just want to be entertained and see Arsenal, Chelsea, West Ham. That what hurt about the palace game. I’ve so looked forward to getting my club back from Jose to find we’ve got another one. I don’t want to turn into an internet wringer and I’ve taken 18 months off and would do again. Is it too much to ask for an entertaining team I can be proud of?

 

[hellava_tough]

I take real life much more seriously than anything that happens on the internet.

I think that's probably because of my age and that I lived through the 'rise' of the internet, when forums and fan sites were considered the refuge of odd-balls and kooks. More, er, 'innocent' times.

Trouble is, more and more people are getting more and more invested in their online persona.

There used to be a sarcastic meme "THE INTERNET IS SERIOUS F****** BUSINESS".

We should probably use that as a guiding principle and go and find something to do in the real world.

 

[hellava_tough]

PS The phenomena of the 'online fan' is certainly not limited to football.

As massive nerds, my brother and I frequent boardgame and rpg forums regularly, and we're always noticing the number of opinionated 'gamers', who quite blatantly have never played the game their pontificating about, because of the obvious rule errors they make in their posts.

I think people just want to feel intelligent, or important, or heard in a world that increasingly is ignoring them.

I don't say that to be snide; I think it affects everyone and it's a real issue.

 

[dudu]

It veers off about transfers and capitalism which lost me as I was obsessing about us signing new players on teletext when I was 8 . It always has been and always will be a thing.

But the stuff about twitter is so true. The Mourinhoistas ' were the strongest thing Ive ever seen . A group of people obssessed with Jose mourinho who swamp whatever club he is at all over their social media defending their idol.

As for the moaning and people on here using it to defend their views on levy well I totally disagree Liverpool fans may have a point in saying it being the trophies they have won. Enic have achieved nothing like it and were back to the mid table. There is loads of other stuff too that has been discussed to death but the owners deserve more stick not less. There is a reason levys nickname is Teflon.

Well done for making the point of the article in real time.

 

[nattydredd]

That article is the reason I don't post here very often. The levels of toxicity thrown around on days when we lose is just beyond a joke. The almost crazed obsession to scapegoat certain specific players time and time again is poor. I realise it's modern football society and the natural progression of things..it's just not for me.

Sorry to be blunt, but this place depresses the hell out of me these days..and what's more it'll probabaly get worse over this season.

 

[Albertbarich]

Well done for making the point of the article in real time.

Thanks mate , love you too