By JOHN FORE
If you are not already familiar with the Truckee / Tahoe people Facebook group, it is an online resource that I created in 2012 to connect people throughout the Lake Tahoe region. The open format of the group allows content ranging from housing, events, recommendations, items for sale, lost & found, storm and road conditions, and general discussion amongst people who are likely neighbors, friends, and acquaintances. To help manage the page, I formed a team of site moderators (Katherine O’Neil and Amie Quirarte) that have worked together to build the social network that exists today. Our team’s main priority is to add new members to the group that represent full-time residents of our mountain community.
The 9,500+ group members are the biggest assets to this useful and popular Facebook network. That said, as winter came en force, more member posts and comments began to take on a less useful tone, which has been a trend as the group has grown. When tourism season began in earnest, member posts asking for helpful advice transformed into rants venting frustrations about the aspects of life that make living here challenging.
I know that traffic and tourism weigh heavily on anyone who experiences the full rush of the Tahoe holiday season. But I don’t believe we need devolve into vitriol. On TTP, we started seeing a daily barrage of bitter and derogatory remarks being posted by some of our members. As the trend continued, we site moderators agreed to take a stand. We felt we had to take drastic action to stop the page from being taken over by negativity and stop the eventual degradation of a powerful community resource. We decided to offer an ultimatum to our community: Be a respectful member to the online community and offer a helpful, healthy perspective or we would just delete the page altogether.
The threat immediately sparked the turning point for what happened next for the TTP Group. We received an outpouring of support for our efforts to maintain the page as a friendly, helpful place for the community to share with each other.
We page admins are volunteering our time and effort to maintain a productive community discussion that we believe has become an invaluable resource. It was a relief to see how many people truly value the page and were more than willing to help change the tone to keep it going. While we have yet to witness how the discourse will continue in the long term, our members have expressed interest in doing their part to maintain civil discussions by reporting member activity that violate the new page guidelines. These new policies are there to protect group members from hostile communications and to support our mission of promoting helpful and positive insight for full time residents.
Since our request for a renewed sense of goodwill on the page, Truckee/Tahoe has gone through flooding, record snow fall, and regional power outages — the TTP Page has been instrumental in keeping the region informed throughout these past few weeks. Community members have joined together to support our servicemen and women throughout the community and used the TTP page to ignite action. A key example is the Truckee Tahoe Pay It Forward project, started by two women on TTP who were inspired by those working day and night to clear roads, restore power, and help people in need. Visit this link to give back to the emergency personnel keeping us safe. (See My Shot piece in sidebar as well.)
We feel the positives of the TTP group far outweigh the negatives. We believe the many good stories and happy endings created by the Truckee / Tahoe people page have the ability to warm your heart on the coldest of days. For example, a local dog went missing back in June 2016. The owner had posted multiple photos of her missing dog, along with her name and information. Unfortunately, for seven months, the dog remained at large. On the week of Jan. 16, a TTP member saw the dog, remembered the post, and contacted the owner. The owner rushed down, called her dog’s name and was greeted by her sweet pooch after 200+ days of being apart.
The mutual respect, love, and compassion are what holds this community together and makes us unique from big city living. Our hope with this page is that we can continue to use it for good. We ask for everyone’s help in this mission.
~ John Fore is a 5-year resident of the Truckee/Tahoe area. As an up-and-coming landscape architect, he originally came to Tahoe seeking refuge from city life and endless powder days; like so many others, he stayed for the summers.
