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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3314 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 3, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I’m reading about something awful. Namely, SomethingAwful.

They left an indelible mark on internet culture with afaik <50,000 register users. I actually can’t find the number of register users in 2008 so I’m estimating from a bad graph. Compare this to just how many registered users are on Reddit or Tumblr, but how little culture is actually created there (versus shared there).

The forum had a $10 cost of membership and strict standards of posting:

See, since its inception Something Awful was built around strict moderation. Even its $10 entry fee was originally implemented not as a way to make money but as a way to keep problem posters from endlessly re-registering or creating throwaway gimmick accounts.

How strict? Well: Not capitalizing the beginning of a sentence? Probation. No punctuation? Probation. Post a YouTube link without including a description of the video's content? Probation. Not properly rehosting and resizing images? Oh you better believe that's a Probation

Whatever happened to paid forums? They are actually not a bad idea.

SA, though even before it and at the same time some other forums as well, basically taught me that a key to a good and lively forum is moderation (moreso than it being paid). Specifically, having intelligent, active mods committed to forums culture and who moderate less based on formal rules and more by just "playing by the ear"; offering warnings when some poster seems to be actively behaving badly and contrary to the purpose of the forum, offering probations/bans easily and basically instinctively reacting when something isn't right. Particularly in cases where someone seems to be purposefully obeying the letter of the law instead of its purpose.

Of course, all of that is easily lost if you get bad mods trying to do that, then you just have petty tyrants and everything ends up badly.

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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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