Sailboat owners: people fixing sailboats, often with little experience on water or with common physics. Retired and filling time. Freespeech is limited. Pretty good technical info, but the number of experts suggest a groupthink attitude.
Cruising forum: unemployed and fixing toilets and polluting in third world counties. Ssb radio is broken and cant afford overseas navigation charts. Trying to take jobs from thirdworld counties.
Sailnet: random library of babel. Search for anything youll find it. Answers found cant be correlated to true or false.
SailingForum: people turning yardwaste into lasers and sunfish.
Sailing Anarchy: real humans in a freespeech, free-market presentation of info. Anything after 10 posts is sailing noise, entertainment gold. Idea searches are extremly useful.
What a twisted and myopic notion of "free speech." Vulgar language and denigrating others is not free speech, it is crass and uncivil. Free speech is not license to be rude, misogynistic, or racist.
Free speech refers to free expression of ideas and discussion of those ideas in the public square. Free speech means the government can not ban or punish those who criticize it. Free speech does not mean you can say anything you want at any time and any place.
Free speech means the government and its officials can not unreasonably deny access to the press, there is a pending court case on this as we speak. Free speech means that we can not condone the murder of a journalist who is critical of the state.
SBO, SA, CF, SailNet, et al. are not in the public square. As private enterprises they are free to regulate speech and set community standards. If you don't like the standards, don't go there. Just the same as if someone came to your home and began to carry on in an uncivil manner, you would be perfectly within your rights to ask the person to leave and never come back.
While there is no doubt that there are some decent civil folks on SA, it is not dominated by them. Many may be knowledgeable as sailors, however, IMHO they do little to promote the sport and when the attitudes displayed are carried back to the local level, it drives people away and out of the sport. Knowledgeable and talented sailors they may be, but they are not the type of sailors I want to sail with any more. I've sailed with some of them, it wasn't fun.