| I never ran an popular board. I had ran some small ones, mostly folks I knew in real life. I've also ran several in-person clubs over the years, which obviously don't scale to the same degree. But I do have some inkling of the issues you're talking about. The newess of the whole thing is a great point. I keep hoping that Internet culture as a whole will invent a new sense of manners. (At the risk of being accused of being an Eternal Septemberist, which was actually before my time) 'Member when people talked about being a "good 'netizen"? We had trolls, but they knew what they were doing was against good manners (indeed, that's why they did it). Somewhere along the line, people stopped getting on-ramped onto the Internet. They got dumped on instead and the only role models they had were other folks who couldn't see the humanity behind the handle. A lot of the issues you talked about still exist in general-purpose social media. Indeed, the platform reinforces it, as it gets to know your political proclivities better and pushes you into their engagement bubbles. I think the decentralization is a bulkheading against those issues. When they happen--and they will happen--the limited scope of the topic board limits the damage to that subculture. It doesn't impact the Whole Damn Nation. Can you imagine someone like Donald Trump winning the presidency without a one-stop-shop of advertising and propaganda dissemination that Facebook provides? You don't even have to spend that much money, you can get the people to organically self-sustain it with the right meme seeding. We had competing boards, too. I was active on two different game development boards. There were more that I just didn't bother with. If one started to feel like shit, I could dump over to another one. There was some continuity, but it wasn't absolute. IDK. I know I'm probably rose-colored-glasses on the issue. And you're right, there's no putting the cat back in the bag. Maybe the bigger problem is that most people really are shit and smartphones gave them access to the internet. "Garbage in, garbage out". But it seems like they'd all be fighting it out on the ESPN boards, away from my eyes, if it weren't for general-purpose social media. |