Found this article online and felt like it would be relevant to state of affairs here. Normally I hate moderation as it often becomes a way for people to push narratives, opinions, etc. of one side while limiting what the other side has to say. However I think this article did change my mind about that. I hope we can have a civil discussion about this and I am open to getting this thread locked down if that isn't the case.

1) Okay, the very scary scrollbar simply takes the comments in account.

2) Yup.

3) But : standards are subjective. A humanist wandering on a nazi forum is a troll to moderate. But yeah, this may just mean that a forum should have a pre-defined identity and "artificially" stick to it, whichever it is. I'd probably agree with that. Thing is, gog forumers disagreed on the identity of the gog forums : we old timers saw and appreciated different qualities in it when we arrived, and I can't recall which ones were real or imaginary. But which ones of us should have been driven away by the mods, when the forums were changing ? My opinion is merely mine.

4) The conclusion is "yay downvotes" ? Hm. I can see a flaw in that. I can see it all over the gog forums, actually.

5) But yeah, I nitpick. Good article.

Really, "if I don't like what I am reading I will get the thread locked", why even bother starting it in the first place then. Can't even be bothered to read the link after that.

I tried to read the article but fell asleep after a few lines of text. Could they make a movie of that article that I could watch instead?

Was the gist of the article about good old times when there was only intelligent and respectful discussion in Usenet, while now it is just fools flinging shit at each other? If so, that guy remembers wrong, there was lots and lots of heated arguments and petty bickering also in the Usenet. I especially remember The Big Sound Card Wars where Gravis Ultrasound and Roland SCC-1 fanatics went on head to head, or the massive Rendition Verite vs 3Dfx Voodoo arguments which made a grown man cry.

I also remember one pro-USA patriot in the PC flight simulator discussion forum who always seemed to be saying "f*ck rest of the world, only US matters", and one certain Ferrari fanatic in the Formula One discussion forum who really seemed to hate Mika Häkkinen to the bone (a Finnish F1 driver who won the F1 championships, robbing it from Ferrari and Michael Schumacher).

Good times.

To counter the article, if taken too far it can create an echo chamber. At which point, the introduction of a few "fools" might save the place.

My thing about moderators is when they're held us as gods and can do no wrong.

One of the torrent sites I use, they have that power. I caught a user reuploading my torrents as their own, getting my uploads labeled as spam and getting them deleted. (For reference, we're talking decades old science fiction and RPG material that is no longer published.) I reported the user, explained my position and asked for help. Turned it out was the dummy account of a moderator themselves and I got banned for harassing a moderator. I contacted admin and was told the same thing.

We teach moderation to our clients who are interested. One of the things we teach them is to ask questions if they are in doubt and get a second opinion. Our sub forum for that is filled with "What do you think about this post?" threads. Many of those are spammers but many are also folks raising valid opinions. usually the issue is with how they raise their issue or concern. The (not really) anonymous nature of the Internet makes people think that they can get away with anything.

*snip*

I lost my train of thought since I just had a phone call so we're just going with that and if I think of my other point, I'll add it in later.

Power corrupts....

Having a moderator is sensible. Having a downvote button is a sure way to build a lynch mob mentality. I don't get how the author can directly compare these two.

They tried not doing any moderation for years and it pretty much destroyed the forum. I no longer bother logging in most days to see what's going on as all the interesting stuff pretty much got pushed out by the trolls.

Realistically, you kind of have to have moderation on most fora due to GIFT. Sometimes if you've got a niche topic, you might be able to get away without it, but once a forum goes bad, it can be very hard to rehabilitate it. Pretty much. I've never seen a site that had that where it didn't get abused.

The worst implementation I've ever seen was over on a fitness site where they allowed users to attach explanatory notes about the modding. I was on there for a few days and I've never seen a site with so much rampant trolling. You'd get uninformed jack-a-ninnies modding other people down for being uninformed and then modding people down that they'd modded down for modding down their nonsense as retaliation.

deleted

I think we all learned how moderation is something no one wants untill it becomes necessary, but it does become necessary. There was a time when we had no moderation and this was just about the best online community I've ever see, someone occasionaly being an asshole notwithstanding. Then eventually things started getting gradually worse untill we've reache The Age of Manure- everything went to shit, so bad that many regulars left and never came back. And like it or not, moderation is the only thing that saved this place. It may not be as good as it was, and the very fact that it now needs moderation means that in a way it can never quite return to how things were, especially when so many people left or limited their activity, but that's just how it is. In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress.

I've found that there are certain topics that can't be discussed without good moderation. For example, feminism: Whenever feminism comes up on a forum like this one, there will be tons of men (and it is mostly men in this instance) who will try to derail the discussion.

Would like to comment on my general dislike of threads with unclear titles, followed by OPs with an unclear position, followed finally by yet another link with still more reading we must slog through just to understand what the hell this is all about.

Downvoted

Yeah, but all gardens die eventually and my rose bushes can't do jack with a katana.

Moderated forums are eventually strangled into bland conformity that turns them into a stodgy internet purgatory, whereas unmoderated forums tend to burn out. Everything dies regardless because time is an indiscriminate serial killer, and we're all technically cyberhobos who are a single capricious thought away from disappearing forever and screwing with the balance of personalities.

Couldn't have said it better myself - time and the great leveler "take care" of all things eventually.

Regarding moderation, my thoughts are we should all moderate ourselves - anyone can focus on productive discussions or on pointless arguments/rants as they wish, but remember that time is the most precious thing we have in this world and nobody is going to give us back what we waste.