Unscrupulous restaurants

[DonJuane]

It's funny and I guess I’m one who, being an active online outspoken individual , seems to run into this quite often. The Mexico online groups appear to have more than their fair share of quirky people and dynamics that are sometimes difficult to get used to and are even more difficult to understand. What I think though is the best way to endure the plethora of “not always so helpful info with a shade of nastiness thrown in” is to realize that most of these online entities were established initially as a club or group of individuals who met on social terms and moved it online and with that comes the club mentality. And in general the best way I have found to deal with clubs is to look to what the late Groucho Marks once said …. "Please accept my resignation. I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member".

What makes up the available odd mix of online attendees and their online social structures? I don’t know. Perhaps it’s the unique situation of Gringos relocating so far out of their element and thus landing in Mexico which serves as the catalyst for craziness down to just plain old-school odd. I do have to say that from my own experience that GTOlist seems one of the most difficult to capture the dynamics of. On one hand it seems almost abandoned when it comes to discussion or anyone providing an answer to the many questions, but then you look at the “views” column one must ask how could that many people have looked at something and yet no one bothered to respond? But I think that is answered by what may be along your and my observations here which I call the “pseudo intellectual viper strike”, which may keep a lot of people lurking on the sidelines. Still there are some that strive to help (Barbara, Doyle, others I may have missed) who don’t mind dodging lurking serpents. But I do agree it would be nice if GTOlist were a friendlier environment.

Still the “what the F” element doesn’t end here. There are many Mexico-based Facebook groups as well with different strains of the proverbial question. There is the Canadian network and not that I have anything against Canadians because some of my very good friends are from Canada but it’s interesting to observe that they like to stick together promoting each other’s Mexico businesses which is evident if you hang around Canadian-owned Mexico Facebook groups long enough. These major player Facebook groups and the individuals supporting and following them often produce their own brand of comedy and quirks.

For example, the Facebook group “On the Road in Mexico” is established originally out of a group of Canadians who used to caravan to Mexico’s NW coast. This group as many others has a subset of overall nasty’s dishing out what I like to call “nursing home humor” with frequent put-downs with dancing GIFs and other grade school like humor. Within this group are also members of the original caravan group who remain loyal to the caravan owner turned Mexico car insurance salesman and they jump to his defense whenever any debate crops up involving a conflict with the owner’s opinion. There’s also “Expats in Mexico” which is another sales front for San Miguel de Allende real estate and immigration services. Then there’s “RVing in Mexico” which is an ad front for a Mexico RV Caravan company. All of these manage to block the free flow of information via person to person discussion about Mexico which is mainly accomplished by the non-stop ad traffic. And the caveat with these groups is that if one opens a Facebook group based on marketing one’s own services, that often makes it morally difficult to stop other advertisers who begin to pelt the Mexico Facebook groups with ads as the groups become more popular.

Then on the opposite end you have Facebook groups like “Living in Mexico, Pros & Cons” which barely exist. These are great in my opinion but strangely, once all the advertising and nasty talk is banned and immediately taken down, not many seem to use them as frequently to make them worth a great deal. So what is the answer? The Canadian network groups seem to get all the activity and are chock full of disinformation in the form of people’s food plates, condo ads, nightclub acts, real estate rentals and homes for sale, even vacation opportunities to other countries, yet they seem to remain more popular. It’s my opinion that there is no good answer today and that the near-perfect social media platform has yet to be invented. So for the time being, we just have to deal with what we’ve got. We're stuck here.