IRC Operators, web-forum administrators, moderators, “admins”, they all suffer from delusions of grandeur and strange fears of being too tolerant these days. If they don’t like what you have to say, they shut you down. I noticed there’s some pathetically weak egos there. Confront them with truths about themselves, and they will mute you. Abusing their power to change reality. In all the years I’ve been busy online, I found out how Forum Administrators are seldom necessary. The good ones know this, and you will not notice their presence. Nobody needs people with god-complexes on the Internet, really.
Look at Usenet; Nobody closes a thread there, nobody needs to play Big Daddy Oversight over other users there, and it runs just fine. In fact, it always ruins the atmosphere as soon as control-freaky behaviour enters the equation. Try to parent your users, and it will change everything, from a free and open, to a scary, limited, rigid, narrow-minded and tensed place. So long live Usenet! The only medium where you can still find true honesty in discussions, where you can write about everything without being banned or suffocated with blinking and animated crap or “ops” that think they need to “mute” you. Oh, good heavens, god forbid if a human should use words that are not allowed, or a user posts two messages in a row! No way, one can’t do *that*. You should all behave the way others tell you to, like you need little administrator-boy to teach you how to think and act. You’re no longer allowed to think for yourselves, to make your own decisions, judge things based on what YOU think. If it were up to them, the world would be a neat and orderly place, while in fact it will always remain chaotic and messy (which makes it much more fun, in my opinion). You can’t control the Internet, you can’t control people’s behavior, you can’t prevent a stupid web based forum from having a dysfunctional database every once in a while. You will, at some point, have written all your messages on such forums for nothing;
“We’re very sorry, but we lost the backup.” Not so for Usenet. Usenet messages are backed up all the time, all over the planet. Write something in Usenet, and your words will change the world as long as there is access to the network. You can pretend to be somebody you’re not, you can write what you want, have freedom of speech and will not be censored. So, if you’re ever looking for the truth about something, usenet groups are the place to start.
Good post, got me to think here.
While I praise the freedom and openness of the Net pretty much the same way you do, I myself am little disappointed in it after the masses started to use it. I want to question something, especially this:
“In all the years I’ve been busy online, I found out how Forum Administrators are seldom necessary. The good ones know this, and you will not notice their existence.”
By my experience about the forums especially, a core group of moderators are critical for the board to be usable. On closed, invitation based societies of web veterans (like 9rules) moderator’s are not needed, granted. But you surely have bumped into some young, open community forums, that are full of off-topic babble (moderators don’t lock topics), users have blinking .gif signatures that are 3 times longer than their original posts itself (admins haven’t thought to set the board signature settings correctly to make the post readable for new users) and lastly as the sum of all this, the search function is useless because of the lousy moderating. It also implies that in the end the site doesn’t really care about their visitors.
I agree that threads/posts should be never deleted (spam posts to be excluded) but setting up locks and moving them is a must for a forum to be taken (at least) more seriously.
No. Just no. I don’t see the argument for your stance anywhere. Why does any content online have to be made temporary? The internet is not supposed to be a koran or bible. It is supposed to be changed, for decades on end. Just like science, it develops, it progresses. There is just not ONE valid argument to ‘close’ a thread down, to put a lock on it, ever.