ZOMBIE FORUMS

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PostPosted: Mon Feb 27, 2006 11:09 am 
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Personally, I think the "enlightened dictatorship" is one of the best options a forum can have. You have a handful of intelligent, fair, unbiased people*, picked by other intelligent, fair, unbiased people who run things how they see fit, yet are not impervious to the suggestions of us poor commoners. Any other systems just devolves into a popularity contest, and it opens up the flood gates for factionalism. As long as the forum trusts the admins, and the admins don't do anything to lose the trust, everything works out.

And, as Baron said, unlike the real world, it is always easy to get up and leave if you don't like it.


Back to the topic on hand... I tend to avoid posting in this part of the forum because I remember the old debate club, where Mibbers prowled in search of anyone who dared disagree with him, and based all his arguments on quote editing. I haven't seen that level of widespread animosity since he left, but old fears die hard.


* Of course, if the admins AREN'T these things, all hell breaks lose, but a) that doesn't seem to be the situation here and b) As mentioned, you can always just leave.


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PostPosted: Mon Feb 27, 2006 11:53 am 
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Do I smell regime change?

NEVER!



As far as the debate club, our community is growing, and will grow even more with Randy induced influx of people from SP.

As such, our community pages will grow, and DC will as well.


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PostPosted: Mon Feb 27, 2006 12:47 pm 
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Gazing Rabbit wrote:
Your theory makes a lot of sense. Do you have a way 'round the problem?

I'm going to be the typical Enlightened Guru: No, but ask me again in five years.

Actually i do have a couple ideas, but not a real solution.

nick012000 wrote:
Not true, winter. As a counter example, I will point towards this.

Unfortunately, my theory has that odd feature of being completely impossible to disprove. Eventually all relations will break down. I could even prove this quasi-mathematically:

While X is the quantity of posts from intelligent, dedicated, well-meaning debaters (who number M) and Y is the quantity of posts from everyone else (who number N) you can have X > Y in any specific forum, but never M > N for a large enough sample size. Given, therefore, the common reactions of the "everyone else" group discourages posts from the "intelligent" group: as N increases (which it assuredly will as the quality of the forum and, thus, its popularity increase due to X) then X will decrease and subsequently M. Therefore, the more successful a forum is the more likely it is to dissolve.

Now, you might counter, that a forum could resist this by closing off its membership, therefore keeping X > Y for the required margin (or even Y not that much < X for the required margin) would do the trick but then the forum faces stagnation of a different type.

I had some pretty good ideas on how to fix this problem with kuro5hin, but they were never implemented and they wouldn't work here. (Hint: consider conditional membership and the "cost" of becoming a new member of the community.) I suspect they would not ultimately fix the problem, either, but i thought it was a good try.

(Incidentally: i don't know about Baron's self-moderation scheme, but my kuro5hin additions retained the self-moderation of that site while pushing off some of the inevitable problems i have already outlined that kuro5hin had not yet, and has not yet so far as i'm aware, dealt with. It might not have been enough to fix self-moderation, however. I do not feel "elections" will save us. In fact, they might make the problem worse by adding gamesmanship to the system. The advantage of enlightened dictatorship in a forum is that the dictator usually outlives the forum, rather than (as in the real world) the other way around.)

Even barring that theory i have another backup: T-Minus 15.193792102158E+9 years until the universe closes!

I think that if we get something that lasts that long we could consider it a moral victory, though :wink:

People sometimes talk about "The old days of Usenet" and lament the decline of whatever. What changed, as almost everyone will now claim, was AOL's fault.

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PostPosted: Mon Feb 27, 2006 2:48 pm 
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The Baron wrote:
I am in favor of giving something all the trappings of self-moderation when nothing of the sort is actually done (e.g., it's still controlled entirely by one or two people).

Can those people be us?


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PostPosted: Mon Feb 27, 2006 2:54 pm 
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Radio wrote:
The Baron wrote:
I am in favor of giving something all the trappings of self-moderation when nothing of the sort is actually done (e.g., it's still controlled entirely by one or two people).

Can those people be us?

Ah yes, you have clearly illustrated the problem with Baron's proposal :3nod:

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PostPosted: Mon Feb 27, 2006 3:00 pm 
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Hey now. hey

Look at the hat.

Look at it.

It screams respectable.


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