Maybe I’m too young or just had bad luck, but ALL the interactions I’ve ever had with Internet forums have been unbelievably awful. Whenever I asked a question, I was asked why I wanted to know that and was lectured that my reasons were stupid, bad, or wrong (how is that even possible?). People hijacked my post and talked about anything else, and I received NO answer whatsoever! This kind of thing happened way too often, regardless of the type of forum. This occurred in Skyrim forums, Coh2 forums, PC forums, aquarium forums, … I hate forums. It’s good that they are dying, and I, for one, will not miss them at all.
I advocate for two things, oddly things I never would have in earlier internet:
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Paid forums. A one time payment for registration.
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Strict rules and quick bans. But allow offenders to buy back in. Permaban for serious offenses. .
Why? Because if it costs you $10 or 15 to re-activate after screwing around, you’re much more likely to read the room and not fuck around too much with others. It encourages users to point out bad behavior, and mods to act decisively. If the mods or management totally suck, then it can go sour, but that’s true of any community.
In this case though it can at least partially help to offset costs from shitty users, and keep bots at bay by making them cost a registration fee.
I don’t love it as a “solution”, but when Facebook was small, people behaved better. But now people post the most unhinged shit ever under their full legal name, so no amount of daylight is going to put the proverbial trolls back in their cages. Just gotta lock them out of civil spaces.
You wanna talk about Honda engine tuning here with us? Don’t be a fucking asshole, or get banned.
You wanna chat with fans of 50s cinema and the rise of modern camera film technique? Do it without brining up woke/trump/biden/Covid or get out.
I like that we have free stuff like lemmy and reddit for now, but bots are getting far, far worse.
Honestly to avoid the immense botspam coming for small orgs, you need either a literal army of volunteers, or some kind of “realID” type check to verify they’re human, and I hate that concept immensely as well.
Giant if, but if you could do a one way cryptographic check against an ID to verify its legitimate, without sending anything off the server elsewhere, then a forum could bind your current username to a state issued ID, at least until it’s reissued. And then you could at least reasonably think these users are human.
But who wants to give that info to a stranger online. Even if the hash is unique to the site based on their own seed, the average person doesn’t understand that, and it feels like handing over your actual privacy.
Setting aside that PCs don’t have NFC readers as a standard feature as well.
Everything I think would be effectivd boils down though to needing to know that something exists in meatspace on the other end, and being able to use that to manage your bans. At least 10bux is just money, and not your ID.
This is the thing, the balance of anonymity and preventing people using that anonymity to be a tit.
In my opinion, one of the answers is keeping the signal-to-noise high: Make sure that there are enough sensible people in a community that if someone starts acting up, they’re alone. And then they can either correct their course, or get banned, ideally before the next moron shows up.
And part of the way of achieving that is raising the barrier to sign-up, if only a little, and rate limiting.
If there is payment, better support crypto too, because this way you wouldn’t force people to KYC themselves, as well as wouldn’t exclude people from sanctioned regions.
Nope. Imo the point is to avoid cryptobro bots and the like, not invite them.
Plus crypto is volatile and you’d have to manage it a lot more to keep it pegged at “expensive enough”
And even then, you won’t discourage a troll who just happens to have an absurd stash of coins without pricing out legitimate users. A bot farmer with 50k in bitcoin would drop a few hundredths of a coin just to make your day worse.
“Cryptobros” =/= “people using crypto”, because this is a legitimate usecase. You can see it discussed on Lemmy too. This is how I can pay for my VPS while my card doesn’t work. This is how I would pay for a service even if my card did work, but I didn’t want to attach pretty much my real name to it. But yea, I agree that it might be complicated logistically. Have seen services where you can buy prepaid cards for crypto - at least that should work.
Plus crypto is volatile and you’d have to manage it a lot more to keep it pegged at “expensive enough”
this is a solved problem. Just change the crypto cost according to its exchange value. I pay for my vpn and my vps with crypto.
Well you have just described Metafilter. I’m a liberal a lefty as can be, and eventually even I got tired of the drama and obvious virtue signaling. And at the end of the day, drama and less-than-appropriate virtue signaling were what the mods wanted.
Communities can eventually become insular and crappy, that isn’t anything new. I haven’t ever used/heard of metafilter , but I believe you.
Not a problem unique to lefties or hardcore MAGA folks. It’s just community management for free by volunteers eventually means you have some echo chambering. The site/community manager can steer the mod policies, but without leadership you get fiefdoms. Look at some subreddits that speed run this process.
We already tried this with something awful and it was still in fact kinda awful
One downside to this is that $10 is worth more to one person than it is to another, and I can’t see how that can be fixed.
Hate that aspect of social networks as well. Someone has to moderate manually in the end, once a community is not finely curated. Since that is not pleasant experience.
Thats why I Love the idea that users have to show some merit before allowed to join a community. But that kind of system does not scale well. And social networks usefulness is all about scale. There are contradicting forces at play here.
Discord is not a forum lol
Discord has evolved from more or less being a series of chatrooms (like IRC) to having “threads” that work a lot like how a forum would typically be used.
In the repair community, a lot of conversation about component level repair has moved to Discord channels. Sites like badcaps.net or the Rossmann group forums have comparatively low usage. Nested away in Discord, this information doesn’t show up in search engine results and can’t be archived by web crawlers. When a Discord server is deleted or made private, that information is forever lost.
Every now and then I get a forum as a search result and they’re just so clunky. Replies are spaced out too much, no chains, everyone has a long winded signature phrase. I’m glad it went to this kind of format.
Forums existed when everyone had a 1024x800 computer monitor on his desk, before mobile Webbrowsers where a thing. The layout did make sense at the time.
Don’t worry, the US government is hard at work banning social media. Wouldn’t want people to expressing ideas.
Don’t worry, the US government is all governments are hard at work banning social media. Wouldn’t want people to expressing ideas.
FTFY.
