Poetry boards, families, churches, workplaces: no group is free from petty I-have-more-social-power-than-you gamesmanship. Some groups tend to be better than others at dealing with the negative stuff.
But the culture of a poetry workshop can change quite a lot over time. As Heraclitus said, you can never step in the same river twice, and the same community of people is not here even from day to day, let alone from year to year. Eratosphere under the Editor from Hell (see an excellent essay on that part of Eratosphere's history
here) was not the same Eratosphere as now, for better and for worse.
I feel uncomfortable criticizing any other poetry workshop's vibe, knowing the sort of gratuitous, frat-style hazing that sometimes went on around here, for years. There was enough positive interaction to offset the negatives for me, but many other newcomers who might have been valuable contributors to this online community decided they didn't need to put up with abuse and humiliation in order to learn how to become better writers. That's our loss.
That said, we've been a little too gushy around here lately for my taste. (And yes, I realize that I have a pot/kettle problem, having just gushed uncritically in Jan's thread on Non-Met.)