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On the subject of unregulated discussion forums
VeritasVR
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I enjoy my time spent browsing and posting on the PA forums. I'm not ashamed to say it. What I am ashamed about is not fully understanding why there is a lack of such enjoyment in browsing other forums. Obviously these forums and the SA forums (or so I'm told) are well-moderated and intelligently managed for the vast majority of the users.
I happened upon a discussion board for a Facebook group that had half of a million people in it. Immediately, I noticed the elementary threads like "Bush is the worst president ever" and "Prove to me that God exists" and "Would you bang the person who posted above you?" There is rarely an intelligent thread about a single topic to have a discussion, and it's like this for every freakin large group. It's astounding when compared to our D&D, G&T, and hell, even our SE++ which have a ton of character and awesome threads. Sort of like they have not evolved into sentient beings in terms of using this series of tubes.
Unfortunately, there are so many of these individual forums that literally millions of people are a part of. There is no way to moderate these boards. People are posting at a rate of over a reply per minute at almost any time of the day. Sometimes, actually OFTEN, the sports teams' boards will erupt into a completely juvenile flame-fest like some of the ones we have seen when forums and message boards were still a new concept and some people used type in all caps. I witnessed it during March Madness last year. It was an abortion I wish I could rid from my mind.
The difference with these Facebook boards compared to some other shitty, unmoderated board, is that 99% of the people use their Real Name when they flame each other. It reminded me of ege02's thread on a non-anonymous internet. To many people (unfortunately,) Facebook is where the majority of their time is spent online. The idea that you aren't a user name has apparently not stopped many ignorant people from descending into complete anarchy on their discussion boards.
And they keep posting. They keep the flaming and trolling alive. They don't know that to stop trolls, you have to ignore them. We are lucky, as we are essentially "in the know" about forum etiquette while these people have no goddamn clue.
It kind of throws a kink into Gabriel's Internet Fuckwad Theory and the idea of a friendlier, non-anonymous discussion forum. My question is, why are these Facebook forums even in existence? Would there be a point to even moderating/regulating them, and what would happen if they were?
I happened upon a discussion board for a Facebook group that had half of a million people in it. Immediately, I noticed the elementary threads like "Bush is the worst president ever" and "Prove to me that God exists" and "Would you bang the person who posted above you?" There is rarely an intelligent thread about a single topic to have a discussion, and it's like this for every freakin large group. It's astounding when compared to our D&D, G&T, and hell, even our SE++ which have a ton of character and awesome threads. Sort of like they have not evolved into sentient beings in terms of using this series of tubes.
Unfortunately, there are so many of these individual forums that literally millions of people are a part of. There is no way to moderate these boards. People are posting at a rate of over a reply per minute at almost any time of the day. Sometimes, actually OFTEN, the sports teams' boards will erupt into a completely juvenile flame-fest like some of the ones we have seen when forums and message boards were still a new concept and some people used type in all caps. I witnessed it during March Madness last year. It was an abortion I wish I could rid from my mind.
The difference with these Facebook boards compared to some other shitty, unmoderated board, is that 99% of the people use their Real Name when they flame each other. It reminded me of ege02's thread on a non-anonymous internet. To many people (unfortunately,) Facebook is where the majority of their time is spent online. The idea that you aren't a user name has apparently not stopped many ignorant people from descending into complete anarchy on their discussion boards.
And they keep posting. They keep the flaming and trolling alive. They don't know that to stop trolls, you have to ignore them. We are lucky, as we are essentially "in the know" about forum etiquette while these people have no goddamn clue.
It kind of throws a kink into Gabriel's Internet Fuckwad Theory and the idea of a friendlier, non-anonymous discussion forum. My question is, why are these Facebook forums even in existence? Would there be a point to even moderating/regulating them, and what would happen if they were?
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
VeritasVR on
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Stop Penny Arcade's 'Open Border' policy! Build a border fence surrounding the site's URL, quick!
You joined in 2007. You're out. Noob.
No, that's retarded (also, you're new enough and definitely annoying enough that you'd be first against the wall). The facebook forum structure does not give mods the capacity to enforce standards. The programming of the site prevents any oversight from being practical or possible. That's the real problem.
No, what we need is a Guest Poster Visa. You have to prove that you can intelligently post for several years by writing posts for other forumers before being granted your own account.
Like real civilizations, some forums self-organize into structured heirarchies with laws of increasing complexity. I remember older forums where there was only one form of punishment: banning (much like Hammurabi's Code's single punishment of death). But now most forums have almost byzantine codes of conduct with jailing, warning percentages, infractions, etc. Forum laws evolve just like real-world laws, in 200x speed.
Unlike real civilizations, forums deal only in the world of ideas, not physical needs. So banishment from forums—and anarchy in forums—is entirely survivable, since forums do not provide you with food or protect you from physical violence. Also, the punishments for going against forum society are non-physical, and hence proportionately trivial to how much one cares about the forum itself.
I also wonder to what extent "forum authoritarianism" corresponds to the attachment-level individuals in the forum feel to the forum as a whole. It seems like the more forum members care about their forum, the more authoritarian it is. I would characterize Penny Arcade forums as highly authoritarian. Its moderator hierarchy is well-defined and its rules are strictly and dispassionately enforced; rulebreakers are not tolerated and are often socially derided by ordinary "citizens."
The same can be said for Christian and Islamic forums I've been on. Except in these forums there are "rogue elements" (like me, an atheist) who are not really trolls but who are there specifically undermine the forum's explicit goals and convert forumers to an opposing ideology. I'm having trouble thinking of an analogue on Penny Arcade, or in real civilizations—maybe missionaries. Rogue elements are tolerated warily, usually in the interest of "open discussion" and I imagine many forum members like the element of conflict. Some forums, on the other hand, do not tolerate rogue elements at all, even if the rogues take special pains to obey all their laws.
I'm having trouble thinking of an analogue for unregulated forums. They're social groups but not like any existing social groups because there's no hierarchies or laws. I wonder if they are the only form of sustained anarchy in humans. Seems like they should be studied more.
Dotting your t's and crossing your i's makes any dumb idea for a thread seem 10% classier.
EDIT:
Bathroom walls?
:P
Christians.
Exactly. My point was to drive home that your real name is there when you post in Facebook.
Forum civilization I agree with you and Qingu, but (to me) it's a different idea when anonymity is removed from the equation. Why people still act like asshats?
I mean, I use Facebook for almost strictly academic reasons, with the other part to keep in touch with old friends from long since past. But to troll on a huge board... guh.
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
Actually, I think we might be able to draw some interesting conclusions about religion itself from how it relates to online discussion forums. I think it's very interesting that religion is the only topic that is explicitly limited by fiat on PA D&D (as far as I know).
Whoo, tangent.
If anything, the lack of anonymity means you know who's face to punch in (it's called being accountable).
If I wanted to troll PA, it honestly wouldn't matter if I posted as "Qingu" or with my real name, since it's highly unlikely anyone is going to track me down in real life using my name and kick my ass for trolling.
On the other hand, I imagine people who interact with each other on Facebook do often know each other in real life and could very well kick each other's asses for rude online comments.
Maybe it relates to the idea that your online persona is not just a way to be anonymous but also an inevitable re-invention of yourself into a celebrity-like figure. Posting on a forum is fundamentally different from having a conversation in a bar, or even talking on IM, because your conversations are read and re-read by everyone on the forum, including yourself. Even if you use your real name and stay true to your personality, you become a character in a narrative as you post. This character's emotional style is not defined by posture and voice but by writing style and so is fundamentally separate from yourself, no matter how much you try. I know I often think of "Qingu" as a mask, both to hide who I am and as a sort of separate character to sink into. I think this is how many people view their facebook and myspace profiles already—self-celebrity. Maybe it's this concept of celebrity, of becoming a character apart from yourself, that emboldens people to act aggressively more than anonymity.
I don't know. I want to see a sample of this asshattery you're talking about so I can evaluate it further. I'm off Facebook though, because it scares the fuck out of me.
On facebook, the self-acting isn't as explicit or even intentional as it is with comedians, but it seems to be there all over the place.
Also, I would say that while the PA forums as a whole may be highly authoritarian in nature, the D&D boards seem rather less so, though there's a strong moral code (perhaps in part created by actively culling those who unrepentantly oppose it) that keeps the actual use of authoritarian powers at a comfy level.
It looks right up my alley, actually. I have a huge boner for emergence theory nowadays.
Examples of enormous groups. These were taken about 5 minutes ago. For the first one: yes that is the name of the group. In all caps. Demanding and paranoid. (And they're not.)
"THEY ARE TRYING TO SHUT DOWN FACEBOOK - PETITION TO KEEP IT! INVITE ALL!"
"Six Degrees Of Separation - The Experiment"
"10 Commandments of College"
I'm not in these groups, I just happened upon them because of their numbers. I wasn't able to get the sports pages because I don't have those optional applications, and they took down the public ones.
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
You don't need a dictatorial sheriff when he has a giant vigilante posse riding around town.
Facebook is just the web 2.0 version of geocities and AOL. What you're seeing is Endless September, 2.0 in action. Particularly given the infancy of widespread broadband connectivity, meaning that the social atmosphere of various upstarts is still being consistently inundated with internet newbies. It'll be another 10-20 years before the sort of standard rules of etiquette, like don't use all caps, come even close to being truly universal/ubiquitous, let alone the more advanced ones, like don't be a gigantic douche.
Exactly. Except that in the case of strong moral codes, actual physical punishments (in this paradigm that would be banning, jailing, etcetera) need not be meted out. Bestowing a social pariahship on people who step out of line, and respecting and exalting those who meet and exceed expectations of conduct tends to keep behavior regulated without explicit legal regulation.
My understanding of posses is that they tend to keep with the physical punishments. They just don't necessarily get, I dunno, paid for it or whatever.
If Facebook developers wanted they could easily implement a forum moderation system on Facebook groups. That's a technical triviality, and it's not the real problem.
The problem is that the vast majority of Facebook users do not demand such moderation. They are quite happy with what they have, and don't want it changed.
Besides, think about it this way: if there was forum moderation on Facebook groups, and it was as strictly enforced as, say, the SA forums, the number of people who use the Groups functionality of Facebook would simply plummet.
How does this pertain to PA?
Just remember, I'm slow.
It's a discussable topic, thus it is being discussed?
I think this is pretty much it.
Anonymity leads to no consequences for your actions, which is what causes internet fuckwadary.
It's become slightly moreso as time progresses, but Penny Arcade's forums are hardly authoritarian compared to some of the others I've been to. Honestly, to a large degree, our membership polices itself because we don't really have much in the way of censorship and standards of what can be included in posting. Idiots are called out, ridiculed, and summarily ignored. Moderation only tends to step in when threads pass the point of no return of they're spambots or something. But the long and short is that the established base wouldn't put up with the sort of idiocy that is posted on the Facebook forums cited. The few legitimate ideas would be taken and run with, the stupid threads would turn into threads mocking the idiocy of the OP until it reached a point where a mod felt it necessary to lock, and the OP would likely leave the site thinking of what asses we are. Then we move on with our merry lives.
Feeling guilty or having your feelings hurt are potential consequences notwithstanding anonymity.
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
And, of course, a community's 'feel' or whatever you want to call it is by and large defined by the people who found it.
So why aren't more people attracted to the better communities? Why aren't the PA forums as popular as Facebook's? I'm sure the Facebook forums have their own veterans and founders, too.
'Better' is subjective and PA forums fill a rather specific niche (the intellectual gamer community) which isn't that large to begin with in an overall population sense.
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Thank God I no longer have a Facebook/MySpace what have you. The people I know are aggravating.
It doesn't, really. Just because a name is on the screen that does belong to the person doesn't remove the anonymous aspect of it. If you click the name in those large groups, 99/100 times you won't be able to see their profile. Their picture is usually not them, them and other people etc. The rest of this holds but I don't think it breaks JGIF theory.
Yeah, but their not much of a consequence, and alot of people just shrug it off. Plus, it's harder to feel guilty about offending or hurting a bunch of people you don't know and almost certainly will never meet.
I agree that the consequences are different. It is possible that a smaller forum of more like minded people creates more transactions between individual recognizable avatars and hits on some deep instinctual stuff about belonging to a community etc. (which has already been pointed out in the thread). On these smaller forums there tends to be a good deal of importance placed on the legitimacy of avatars. Alts etc. tend to be frowned upon. Once you've got people identifying with their avatars they start acting less fuckwadishly. This is notwithstanding anonymity in the sense that I could be nothing like my avatar but still cry myself to sleep or plot imaginary revenge on those anonymous people who were mean to me on teh intarwebs.
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
Think back to your first forum experiences. That first realization that there was all these "crazy" people who didn't agree with you and spreading a bunch of nonsense you had to stop and tell everyone how it really is. The temptation to wade in and pick a fight when there's no sign of any apparent consequences can be enticing.
Once you become a forum vet your brain usually opens a bit more and you become a little less sensitve to every post out there. From what I have seen PA forums seem to attract the more experienced interneteers out there. And tend to chase off or ignore those who haven't wised up yet.