True story: I used to post on this poker and gambling site called Twoplustwo. It was huge and not only did they have a bunch of subforums about gambling, they even had a whole ton of sub-subforums about offtopic stuff.
In fact, there was even a subforum called About The Forums. Apologies if this explaining this is condescending, but, in the About The Forums forum they talked about the forums. This About The Forums forum was frequented by people who wanted to talk about the forums for any number of reasons. And for those who didn’t want to talk about the forums, they simply didn’t click on the About The Forums forum. It was a genius system and everybody lived happily ever after.
If you’re not a Captain or a Horseman you’ve really got no purpose being here so kindly fuck off. It just makes it tougher for those of us trying to settle this shit.
WTF are you on about? This is the top thread when I log in. Literally the very top of the page. You think 2p2 operated that way?
Funny you mention 2p2 because world class moron Mason Malmuth was able to figure out how web forums implement moderation practices, yet this place is doing six month ROTATIONS and other REFERENDUMS on modding
Assume I’m biased but here’s the tl;dr version as I understand it:
People really like banning other people, and those people who liked the bannings largely are or were continually embarrassed in these moderation threads because it’s a really bad look for a “left-leaning” forum to be a bunch of authoritarian forum fascists, but, they tried one last attempt to ban a bunch of people they didn’t like an tried to slander a universally loved forum admin, but it horribly backfired, so they made a new site that I suppose is gonna be a carbon copy of this one, just without an About Moderation thread.
That post wasn’t in direct reply to you, it was just a thought I had circulating for awhile. I can’t always post my thoughts when they occur to me because I’m constantly getting banned. My last ban was for saying that I think threads talking about frequent flier miles are boring. Yes, I know that sounds like I’m lying.
Also, exactly, and Mason wasn’t very left-leaning.
I’m not gonna tell people what they should find interesting, and all I’ve ever asked is that they reciprocate and not deride me for what I find interesting. Because the “left-leaning” forum doing “you know, hitler had some good ideas: forum version” is heads and shoulders above the most interesting thing to ever happen in this forum.
But I don’t hate anyone on this site lol. Literally nothing said here would upset me because I don’t think we should be taking any of this stuff so seriously
Internet posting isn’t real life politics though and creating complicated systems with diffused power for running this place has been a total disaster.
I would rather have one authoritarian site owner who 99% of the community trusts to do the right thing just run everything behind the scenes instead of having a constant meta conversation about modding and site drama. It’s imperfect and doesn’t align with how I would build a real life community, but it’s a lot more practical and would head off so much of this stuff.
No argument there, and some of the complicated systems they/we’ve had here almost seem like parody, but what I was getting at was that internet posting and real life politics have one big thing in common, human interaction, and
Man I typed that and got stuck, and I stared at this shit off an on for hours because I felt like the way to properly articulate it was on the tip of my tongue (don’t feel obligated to reply and get roped into a conversation btw lol, but if you do want to say more it’s more than welcome):
The complicated systems are the moderation! This is a group of under 100 adults just hanging out and shooting the shit. Normal actual adults with 9to5s and spouses and children and homes owned and what not. Who have known each other for almost two decades now and sometimes get in heated arguments and disagreements. Thinking that needs to be policed with rules and punishments is the thing that turns it from jus’ postin’ to some real life political structure, whereby community and society will collapse without steadfast active work.
And they’re not totally incorrect! So I’m like, ok, sure, let’s talk about it, it’s your conversation. There’s one real simple way to nix a whole lot of the talk about moderation.
(“We shouldn’t be talking about moderation!”
“Oh, believe me, I know!”)
Barring that, yeah some of the ModelUN was/is silly, but it’s a response to this pathological need for their to be some sort of formal structure to begin with. And the analogues of bigger political structures write themselves:
“If you don’t want to get in trouble and go to jail, don’t break the law” is some wild shit. I’m not exaggerating in the slightest when I say that under the current precedent, your original post here,
would and should get you banned. And that’s absurd.
That works until it also becomes a disaster, we all found out. It’s that whole “the ~entire community trusts to do the right thing” thing that falls apart fast when it falls apart. We’re basically at the stage of the Milgram Experiment where the whole thing was paused, the shocker was informed by the doctors it’s not real, and the shockers are upset and lashing out because they’re disappointed it’s not real.
