Tarm: Yeah well groupthink comes with moderation if people aren't brave enough to push limits and also that's up to the moderator to balance. A wide or narrow forum basically.
That's also why people tend to get cranky and stiff minded. It's how we react to rules. Conformity kills dissent.
hedwards: To a large extent yes, but it doesn't need to be automatic. A lot of this comes down to not having specific subfora for certain common topics, but some of it also comes from inadequate rules.
The rules of a site don't necessarily need to be super-strict to prevent things from going to hell or having excessive group think, the problem tends to be in how good the moderators are at separating their feelings from their work and to what degree the people posting are trying to have a functioning community.
Yes, yes, yes, yes and yes.
Root cause as I see it is no basic community moderation (Simply someone comes in and points a finger/hand/arm/sihlouette in the direction they want the community to be heading.) when the forum got bigger with a large influx of new people. Then that chaos got cemented and created a new community. Communities are people and the internet is much about communication between people. Word got spread and well GOG got the community we had some time ago.
I know I'm stating the obvious and it's been heard way too many times but that's not why we ended up where we are. We did that because GOG/moderators basically added rules that would have worked back in the day. Those people that made that community have mostly left. So yeah the forum got kinda bland when the colourful people that had great voices got a chance to say something after they had left. :P
Tarm: Greetings.
Huh. Interesting crap posts have truly died...
richlind33: I could post a gif from Pink Flamingos, if you're interested. ;p
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