Subj : Re: Notice that... To : boraxman From : DustCouncil Date : Wed Feb 16 2022 19:47:48 bo> Hence why politics is eschewed on fsxNet. Anonymous discussion is bo> important given the social climate today. I'm sceptical of pushes to bo> remove anonymity, it seems a push towards more oppression. The WELL is still up and running. They require real names, and a monthly subscription fee, but their interface is really old and bizarre (ahem), and there isn't much activity. I think one of the problems is a lot of forums have had a problem figuring out accountability; I think they swap in the real name thing in hopes it will lead to that. I've always liked Slashdot's meta-moderation process, where you review another (unnamed) user's ratings of comments, and depending on whether people mark the ratings as appropriate or not, that person may be offered more opportunities to moderate. All of these processes have weaknesses or downsides. What seems to work best is something a lot of us are used to, small semi-closed systems. I have never equated technical competence with intelligence but if you look at Usenet in the 80s, for example, people tended to behave. Not that there weren't flame wars, but they were different than now. I think one of the central issues is "bigness," in which it becomes difficult-to-impossible to moderate from the standpoint of weeding out true trolls and abusers. (Unfortunately this term "troll" is often applied to abrasive contrarians, but to me a troll is someone who is only interested in entertaining themselves by spreading discord and chaos, and doesn't really mean anything they say -- I say this to differentiate it from ornery and cantankerous people who may mean what they say and aren't purposely trying to stir the pot just to laugh at the results.) Of late, I have tried to find alternatives to web forums (and BBSes) to host such communities. IRC is one but I don't think many people have the time to sit around in realtime chat anymore -- at least not people my age. Another medium I miss are majordomo/listserv mailing lists. But because of spam blacklists and the general drag of hosting one's own mail server, the other options are to pay someone else to host them for you, and it *feels like* I should be able to have a mailing list for free, given everything else that is free. Mailing lists are low-bandwidth. But all of the free options seem to be gone. There's another dynamic here. I mostly lurk on these BBS networks, but I recognize you, boraxman. I recognize your name, and in time am associating personality characteristics and opinions to you as you post them, and in this sense you are becoming a fully-formed human being in my mental filing cabinet. I find on large communities like reddit, people become faceless. The person disappears even if the post intrigues or enrages. I often wonder whether two people in the middle of a tedious online exchange of abuse had once upvoted each other or had a friendly exchange, and just forgot, because they don't recognize the other's screen name. I wonder if I've done this. I wonder whether sometimes if I want to applaud someone if I thought they were a complete bastard 18 months ago when they posted something else. Here, because of the smaller userbase, we recognize each other, for good or for worse, and this may be more central to the question of health of online communities than anything else (platform, software, the corporation hosting it for profit through advertising, etc.) I don't have it handy but we evolved to simply have a maximum capacity for community, beyond which we cannot keep track of the people beyond that number. And when that happens, maybe a subtle shift occurs whereby the normal courtesy we afford another slips away, because on a subconscious level we're not giving them the "human" form in our heads. They're just noise. I wonder if this is fundamentally what a lot of us miss about BBSes. ANSI graphics are fun. Doors are, too. But maybe "BBSness" has less to do with the form and medium and more to do with the size of the community. Not that this has stopped certain people on the much-derided Fidonet. I don't like posting there at all. I don't understand what the damage is over there, but I notice it like everyone else does -- in particular in how it contrasts to fsxNet. Fidonet isn't the only one. I did some research recently. There are still something approaching 30 existing BBS networks, which, unless I'm wildly miscounting, is about one network fore every active BBS user (message poster, I mean). Has anyone taken an informal count of how many people post on BBS networks -- by which I mean, all of them? Because from what I can see, 30 may be a generous guess. --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64) * Origin: Shipwrecks & Shibboleths [San Francisco, CA - USA] (21:1/227) .