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
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.