Stop the use of "fanboy", please!
First of all, there is (and never well be) anything wrong with strong advocacy of minority groups no matter where they may exist. Minorities must always speak much louder to be heard and not overlooked. This is a fact of life, and strong advocacy has been the Mac communities strategy for years... and because it has been successful, it has also been adopted by the Linux community as well.
The thing that people who don't know any better (ie, the original poster of this thread) seem to overlook is that it is this strong advocacy of our platform that has kept it around all these years. And while Apple may be on a popularity up swing today, tomorrow may bring us back to times not all that different from the mid-90s.
In other words, don't trust in Apple to always make the right choices, specially for the community. Apple (for all it's friendly feel) is a corporation, and as such is selfish and self-centered, and doesn't care too much about the community of Mac users on the whole beyond getting them to buy products.
So, the question that most people ask is how does this strong advocacy help the community?
Quite simple actually, throughout most of the Macs life it has been a minority platform, and developers of applications will (when all things are equal) develop for what they see as the largest market for their products. Vocal Mac users who complained to developers about slow updates or no updates for applications forced developers to continue writing for the Mac platform back when PC pundits had predicted the end of the platform. The old adage
"the squeaky wheel gets the grease" actually works quite well in the computer community.
And the thing is, Mac users aren't the only minority platform that has existed in the computer age... OS/2 had an installation base that rivaled Macs by the mid-90s, but that platform disappeared without so much as a whimper by it's users. In fact, the very lack of a whimper (or any form of platform advocacy) by the users is exactly why it died off.
This is a Mac community site, so if you don't like Mac cheerleaders, maybe you should consider being somewhere else. I don't care for Windows or PCs... and so I don't visit Windows or PC forums. And while majority platforms aren't in any danger of disappearing, I sure wouldn't expect that Windows users in a Windows forum to not advocact what they like amongst themselves.
Actually, the real problem here is not advocacy of Macs, it is people who are new to the platform who think that it only became
worthy when they decided to join. And that their previous opinion of Macs and Mac users were completely justified, but now that they are here something magically has transformed the platform.
But someone did make a good point about the moderators stepping forward more often... and I firmly believe they should as well. I would think that the use of terms like
fanboy (and all it's derivative spellings) should be considered personal attacks and that such terms have no place in civil discussion. So yes, I would like to see moderators restrict or eliminate the use of such derogatory epithets throughout the site.
