I purposely chose a provocative title because I want to provoke an intelligent discussion while making a point, which is: there’s nothing any more “wrong” with CapFriendly than there is “wrong” with any social media – the “problem” is natural selection.

Social studies have made and reinforced this conclusion repeatedly. Ask people whether they would (a) recommend a good product or service, or tell someone about a good experience, or (b) complain about a bad product, service or experience, and three to five times as many people will be complainers rather than commenders.

CapFriendly is no different. No matter what the post – be it a comment, a trade or an entire ACGM – more people will take the time and effort to comment negatively than positively. (When was the last time YOU said, “Nice trade, champ!”?) So it just stands to reason that someone is more likely to be criticizing actions concerning his team (or evaluating his own team’s players more highly than a poster has) than approving them. As a result of this inevitable bias, many people on CapFriendly accuse commenters, particularly frequent commenters like me, of being haters of particular teams.

Specifically, during the summer, when I repeatedly and acidly criticized moronic Muzzin-back-to-Los-Angeles trades, I was accused of an anti-Toronto bias. Similarly, when I excoriated idiotic Josh-Anderson-is-worth-the-seventh-overall (or better)-draft-pick trades, I was accused of an anti-Montreal bias. More recently, for offering a rather benign Alex Turcotte for Kaiden Guhle trade formulation, I was told (and I quote) “All you do is always coming to downgrade or undermine an habs player or refering to habs fans as homers.”

Criticizing every trade involving a team that is perceived as having a flawed evaluation, fit or cap consequence consideration is not being biased against a team – it’s just being biased against stupid trades. And sadly, increasing one’s frequency of positive reinforcement is highly unlikely to counteract the perception in less open minds of anti-team bias.

On a personal note, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of people on this site whom I consider “biased” – and it’s bias in favor of, not against, one team (i.e., homerism). So I’m sick and tired of seeing people say things like “{team} fans are complete homers” or “{team} fans are delusional” or “{team”} fans always overvalue their players.” Aside from a few bad apples, I find most fanbases make at least an attempt at constructing rational exchanges.

Trolls are, on the other hand, an entirely different problem, and I have absolutely NO intelligent suggestion about how to deal with them.

If only users followed “ If you do not have anything constructive or polite to post, please do not post.” ( which is actually a part of the forum rules ), CF would be much better off, unfortunately, you can’t exactly moderate that or else CF would lose like 50% of its posts

Yeah, exactly. Just today -- in fact, in the last hour -- I saw another "Habs fans {do this}" comment. I don't mind the "Habs fans like to trade Anderson for {x}" kind of post because that's transaction-specific and therefore not generalized, but the "Habs fans always overvalue their players, like most fanbases" kind of posts really ought to stop.

Speaking directly from the moderation angle here, we go through spurts where we police this more heavily and it does result in a significant downtick in posts. I'm personally reserving infractions for these kinds of posts for users that should know better and deferring to warnings for those that might not.



To both the credit and discredit of all fans and fanbases, we are going to overrate players and prospects because we get to experience them in a vacuum whereas fans of the 31 other teams in the league do not, and must rely on their own biases in order to measure another player's worth. Blind reliance on fancystats kind of merges into this lane too, and I'm really not a fan of people throwing RAPM charts blindly into conversations in order to deem a player good or bad. Some defenceman look awful in the eyes of their analytics and players such as Puljujarvi look like analytical darlings despite being useless.

In the case of these two elements, and most things in life I've discovered, true balance lies somewhere in between. Somewhere between the biases of two opposing fanbases, between the eye test and the advanced stats, somewhere between opinions, the answers to all of our quandries awaits. The trick is getting there. I, along with the rest of the moderators are committed to doing our best in eliminating the properly vile parts of the community that have nothing else to offer but insults and harshly negative criticism.

I'm again asking the general userbase to practice positive reinforcement. @OldNYIFan sums it up pretty succinctly: when was the last time that any of us go took the time to recognize a quality trade or whole AGM? This community is only ever going to be what we make of it. If the goal is to have a digital space where we maximize our ability to have conversations and formulate genuinely interesting ideas, then each and every one of us needs to take steps towards developing that environment. Banks isn't going to do it for us. The keys are in our hands.