Subj : Re: Notice that... To : DustCouncil From : boraxman Date : Thu Feb 17 2022 22:53:16 Du> The WELL is still up and running. They require real names, and a monthly Du> subscription fee, but their interface is really old and bizarre (ahem), Du> and there isn't much activity. Du> Is that a BBS or an other-net? Never heard of it. Du> I think one of the problems is a lot of forums have had a problem Du> figuring out accountability; I think they swap in the real name thing in Du> hopes it will lead to that. Du> Du> I've always liked Slashdot's meta-moderation process, where you review Du> another (unnamed) user's ratings of comments, and depending on whether Du> people mark the ratings as appropriate or not, that person may be Du> offered more opportunities to moderate. Du> Du> All of these processes have weaknesses or downsides. What seems to work Du> best is something a lot of us are used to, small semi-closed systems. I Du> have never equated technical competence with intelligence but if you Du> look at Usenet in the 80s, for example, people tended to behave. Not Du> that there weren't flame wars, but they were different than now. Du> The slashdot method can lead to groupthink, if you have more of one political persuasion than another, then it can become more dominant. Du> I think one of the central issues is "bigness," in which it becomes Du> difficult-to-impossible to moderate from the standpoint of weeding out Du> true trolls and abusers. (Unfortunately this term "troll" is often Du> applied to abrasive contrarians, but to me a troll is someone who is Du> only interested in entertaining themselves by spreading discord and Du> chaos, and doesn't really mean anything they say -- I say this to Du> differentiate it from ornery and cantankerous people who may mean what Du> they say and aren't purposely trying to stir the pot just to laugh at Du> the results.) Du> I know of one forum, which has civil-(ish) discussion, but it has a small community. People get to know each other, and being low traffic, it is easier to moderate. Large scale forums don't work that well, that is the problem with mediums like Twitter, it has millions of people who can weigh on and hijack the conversation. How do you keep things on track? Its almost impossible without some automation, and that is a problem in itself. Du> There's another dynamic here. I mostly lurk on these BBS networks, but I Du> recognize you, boraxman. I recognize your name, and in time am Du> associating personality characteristics and opinions to you as you post Du> them, and in this sense you are becoming a fully-formed human being in Du> my mental filing cabinet. Du> Du> I find on large communities like reddit, people become faceless. The Du> person disappears even if the post intrigues or enrages..... This is an important point. With a smaller userbase, you can become familiar with people. They become people, not just comments. This in part leads to people acting with a little more civility, because you understand more that there is a person behind that. Du> Here, because of the smaller userbase, we recognize each other, for good Du> or for worse, and this may be more central to the question of health of Du> online communities than anything else (platform, software, the Du> corporation hosting it for profit through advertising, etc.) Du> Du> I don't have it handy but we evolved to simply have a maximum capacity Du> for community, beyond which we cannot keep track of the people beyond Du> that number. And when that happens, maybe a subtle shift occurs whereby Du> the normal courtesy we afford another slips away, because on a Du> subconscious level we're not giving them the "human" form in our heads. Du> They're just noise. You may be referring to the Dunbar limit, which is the number of people that we can keep track of, maintain a social relationship with. It is about 150 people. The BBS doesn't really count, but the same principle applies. One of scale. When you can reasonably get to know who you are communicating with, when future comments come from people you know, even if just a username you know, the dynamic is very different to one where there are 500 comments on a thread from 400 different people. There is a lot of focus on Social Media with regards to censorship, etc, but the sheer scale is also a problem. Facebook you can limit to friends, but join a group, join several groups and the number of people you are casually contacting with goes up exponentially. The Internet has given us social connections of a scale much large than we can, and should be able to, handle. A friend of mine maintains a Twitter account, to gripe at the world, but it is like taking a leak in the wind. As the scale of the audience increases, the effectiveness of the message decreases. Sure, you have the 0.01% who have millions of followers, but for 99.9% they are engaging in a broken form of social relationship for no benefit. Du> I wonder if this is fundamentally what a lot of us miss about BBSes. Du> ANSI graphics are fun. Doors are, too. But maybe "BBSness" has less to Du> do with the form and medium and more to do with the size of the Du> community. Du> Du> Not that this has stopped certain people on the much-derided Fidonet. I Du> don't like posting there at all. I don't understand what the damage is Du> over there, but I notice it like everyone else does -- in particular in Du> how it contrasts to fsxNet. Fidonet isn't the only one. Du> Du> I did some research recently. There are still something approaching 30 Du> existing BBS networks, which, unless I'm wildly miscounting, is about one Du> network fore every active BBS user (message poster, I mean). Du> Du> Has anyone taken an informal count of how many people post on BBS Du> networks -- by which I mean, all of them? Because from what I can see, Du> 30 may be a generous guess. Du> That is what I miss about them too. I came back for the nostalgia, out of interest, to see ANSI graphics again, but I realised that the BBS was at a *human* scale. Each BBS is a real community, with its own "home" It feels like meeting people in a place. Some small web-forums can feel this way, but they are limited to a specific interest. The other advantage is that the "home" can, and usually is, hosted by someone of that community, on their own hardware, probably in one of thier houses, using their own rules, without a third party spying, tracking, monitoring, threatening, as would be the case if you set your community up on Facebook or Parler. Part of my work here is to search for some modern equivalent. Matrix is good for messaging, but it just isn't the same. The closest I've found is Citadel, but it just doesn't have the same sense of going to a destination. Groupware isn't quite the same. In a way, I think we need to take this step back, back away from digital globalism more towards a digital localism. Moving away from global networks where everyone yells into the same maelstrom towards finding our own niches. We don't need to talk to the whole world all the time, only to the small audience of people we can engage with. --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64) * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101) .