Meta McMeta

[prog]

Great scott, that was the most horrible thing I've seen in davis_square in a long time. It's like coming home to discover a steaming turd in the middle of your kitchen floor. (And you don't have any pets.)

This is a compliment to the mods that the turds stand out so much, rather than being part of the background noise like-certain-communities-I-could-name, but I still feel like it shouldn't have gotten as far as it did. Wrote a mod about it.

(Started to mention TNH-style moderation tactics in my email, for I am a fan of them, but then had second thoughts. I'm not convinced that they apply in the case of every active internet community. It's an interesting question.)

Comments

[radtea.livejournal.com]

I'm of two minds about this. I'm an ex-poster to BB who got disemvowelled once too often. In fairness to TNH, I was out of line. But literally two posts up from the one I was commenting on the BB crowd were actively inciting exactly the kind of anti-religious rants I got disemvowelled for.

At that point I recognized BB for what it is: like /., it thrives on carefully cultivated controversy, and as such actively tries to "outrage" its readership on a regular basis for the purpose of inciting a kind of freelance two-minutes-hate. It is at least as much a "directory of annoying things" as what it claims to be, and as such a waste of time. I can get plenty annoyed without help.

The technique of disemvowelling is useful, however, because everyone can see what gets cut. Unlike most moderated fora, the hand of moderation is clearly visible. This is a very good thing. There is a Firefox plugin that will (approximately) re-emvowel stuff, too.