>>215
Thanks for sharing your opinion, but if you'll excuse my language, friend, that is a load of poppycock. I see this argument put forth by anons on /kind/ all the time, but it never holds water.
You know how you can tell that the kindness of people on boards like this is genuine? Because out of literally hundreds of other boards, there are probably less than a dozen where kindness and civility are actively enforced, and yet they still choose to post. To give an example using a more established board, by your logic, /kind/ either should be dead, or is in fact a board full of psychopaths, using the pretence of kindness to manipulate other people…anonymously, on a low-traffic corner of the internet, for no conceivable personal gain.
Moreover, if you're going to make the argument that kindness "loses its meaning" when it is enforced, you're going to also have to make me believe that enforcing any kind of community standard of behavior is pointless, on the grounds that enforcing a standard always and instantly renders genuine self-expression impossible. Which means that in every place and every era of history in which public or private decorum was enforced, the behavior of those people was necessarily false and artificial, at all times. Which is, of course, nonsense. If that were true, it would literally be impossible to genuinely communicate any information to other people at all, because a community in which there are no standards of decorum, spoken or unspoken, is a non-entity. Even /b/ has rules.
As for unkind truths, it is perfectly easy to express an unkind truth in a way in which the recipient can understand that you don't mean it to be unkind. It's what's called an 'apology'. To give an example, if you're about to tell another anon that, no bones about it, he is very ugly and there is nothing he can do about this, you might preface your statement with "I don't mean to be unkind, but…" or "I apologize for being so frank, but I feel you need to be told that…" or some other such formulation. What is important in ensuring that interpersonal communication is kind and civil is not that the content of the message make the recipient feel good, but that the recipient know that the speaker has no ill intention. This is why we have the saying "don't kill the messenger", and why traditionally the bearers of bad news always apologize, even though they had no part in causing what they are about to relate.
In other words, anon, I don't mean to be rude, but I simply cannot believe that you believe that you don't feel like posting here because you cannot tell genuine kindness from fake, or that it isn't possible for anyone here to be genuinely kind. That has to simply be a rationalization of whatever your real hangups are, and forgive me for saying so, but it is a poor one.
I think if you just tried posting here or on /kind/ without worrying about whether this anon or that is being genuine, and instead only worrying about whether you yourself are being genuinely kind, you might have a lot of fun.