It’s an age old problem: for every good community there will be young participants who ruin it. In a young community like cubing, we have quite our fair share of younger cubers who are perceived by others as annoying and toxic to the culture of cubing.
While I could go on all day talking about how this notion is completely ridiculous and that young cubers should be accepted despite their flaws, that’s not what this blog is about.
*Phew* you were just saved from a huge lecture!
What this blog IS about, is understanding boundaries between cubing and the general public and how we can bridge the gap, so what gap exists as a result of “toxic cubers?”
Elitism.
An important distinction to make here is the 2 types of elitism present in competitive communities like cubing.
- Elitism from highly competitive, cocky cubers
- Perceived elitism from young cubers who yearn recognition.
We will be talking about the second one. There is no better place to find perceived elitism than YouTube. Go to any YouTube video of a celebrity solving a cube and you will find comments that all read about the same.
Do you see them? They boil down to, “I am faster than you.”
The unfortunate truth is that young cubers seeking recognition and acceptance for their skills come off as elitist, turning off the general public from the hobby.
What can we do to solve this?
Non-cubers:
Nothing. There is literally no role that you play in this. Perhaps maybe stay skeptical and keep in mind that comments like these are usually just young kids looking for attention. In fact on the Justin Bieber video one of the top comments is from one of my good friends. The comment is objectively obnoxious but guess what, she was 11!
Show me one 11 year old who isn’t an obnoxious attention seeker looking for recognition. Doesn’t exist.
Young cubers:
So you want to post on a YouTube video of a celebrity solving a cube. I get it. But please do it respectfully. Believe it or not there are good ways to accomplish this that will succeed in informing the non-cuber viewer. Try this:
“I love seeing famous people solving cubes! The Rubik’s cube community is fantastic, the Rubik’s cube is surprisingly easy to pick up and many cubers are speedsolvers who can solve the cube in under 10 seconds. My personal record is 11 seconds. I urge anyone who’s interested to give it a shot, cubing is full of great people!”
Recognition… check, advertising cubing… check, respectful… check.
Experienced cubers:
Please don’t make fun of these annoying comments. New flash: you were once an annoying kid too. A lot of these cubers are unaware the elitist message they’re sending. Maybe inform them respectfully that changing their tone may allow them to have better success in convincing people that cubing is great.
Conclusion:
I find myself repeating this a lot ever since I’ve since I’ve switched to discussing solutions to cubing problems: just be respectful. It’s not hard, the solution in the first place for young cubers is to be respectful. The solution for older cubers correcting them is to be respectful.
If everyone stops making fun of everyone else and instead provides constructive criticism we might be able to stop sending the message to the general public that cubing is full of cocky people who only care about how fast you can solve a plastic children’s toy.
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