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by cecida 1223 days ago
Early 2000s message boards were so much fun.

vBulletin, hilariously awful moderation, arguments over signature sizes, cliques, random outages, people who had just got DSL posting images that ruined the experience for posters still on dial-up.

Great times. The internet feels so banal these days.
4 comments
edgyquant 1223 days ago
>hilariously awful moderation

I don’t see how anyone can hold this opinion in the current day. Early 2000s forums made a rule of ensuring things didn’t devolve into flame wars. Modern discussion technology incentivized them and turned our society into a giant flame war

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mostlysimilar 1223 days ago
I'm always surprised by this when these types of threads come up on HN. A lot of people seem to remember these forums being moderated poorly, or being run by egomaniacs. My experience is the opposite. The internet forums I spent any time on were generally run by passionate people who cared about the community and donated their time to help keep them running smoothly.

I'd take small communities run by passionate people over today's mega-sized social media any day.

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reb 1223 days ago
Norms against flame wars and the old "don't feed the trolls" made for some really excellent experiences growing up on forums as a kid (and instructive experiences when I ignored that advice). It's too bad we weren't able to bring that energy to social media, because wow is the alternative depressing to behold.
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tfgg 1223 days ago
Social media owners wanted all the benefits of superscale communities with none of the responsibilities - it isn't surprising that moderation got worse.

Reddit vaguely has a workable approach with subreddits, but it's still high variance, and they have to discourage long-lived comment threads.

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paulpauper 1223 days ago
Twitter has way less moderation than probably any Vbulletin site. The key is not tripping the algos. But otherwise, you can get away with a lot. There is no such thing as a 'twitter admin' or 'dm the mods' like there is with a regular forum.
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ffhhj 1223 days ago
Back in the day wrote some scripts to load view.php on a new post to quickly increase views and have everyone asking what's so interesting about it.
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scrlk 1223 days ago
> hilariously awful moderation

> (USER WAS WARNED FOR THIS POST)

> Thread locked: use the search function next time

followed by...

> (USER WAS WARNED FOR THIS POST)

> Thread locked: don't necropost

:^)

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