For me, it was that the Internet never forgets and that you should never enter your real name. In my opinion, both of these rules are now completely ignored.
For me, it was that the Internet never forgets and that you should never enter your real name. In my opinion, both of these rules are now completely ignored.
If it’s done within a reasonable time period, it’s understandable. Hours or a day or two later depending on the forum.
It’s different when someone saunters in years later with the “I’ve got the same problem!” quip to a post that may or may not actually be the same, and actually expects a response. That, to me, is necroposting.
This is the attitude that leads us to search results polluted with forum threads with bad, unchallengeable ideas (because they’re locked). Almost all web1 forum are becoming digital flotsam because of these bad moderator opinions.
I thing you replied to the wrong comment, buddy. Nothing in your comment makes any sense in the context of my comment that you replied to. Nowhere did I say anything about locking threads or moderation.
The very idea of necroposting is the basis for these moderator opinions. It is not a neutral term, the idea of necroposting is a negative attitude toward all late posts, it is a permission that all moderators give themselves to delete late posts, lock threads or even, auto lock after a determined period of inactivity. It makes these ideas, prominent on search result into literally unassailable answers. Which is the secret desire of all moderators, to decide the final word.
I think you are ascribing to an entire community that which only a few descend to.
I’ve been a mod on forums before, and my only concern was keeping the signal::noise ratio high. In that regard, new “I’ve got the same problem” posts made many months or years after the current thread had gotten wrapped up only increases the noise; a new thread is far more appropriate for the latecomer and anyone who replies to them than continuing to use the old thread.
The difference is temporal, and dependent on the activity level of the forum in question: highly active forums should see new threads spawned after only a few days or weeks, slow forums could see follow-up comments in the original thread still being appropriate many months or even years later.
Being a good mod isn’t about power or control, it is ensuring the forum operates as effectively as possible for it’s users. Sometimes that means spawning new threads, locking old ones, or even banning bad-faith or misbehaving users. Once you moderate, you discover very quickly that moderation is a highly grey zone, with surprisingly little black or white.
(message to rekabis, please don’t take the following personnally, this is the grudge I have been carrying in my heart for a long time toward all moderators, I’m sorry my experience gives me an uncompromising AMAB “all moderators are bad” unshakeable conviction )
(Also this is a raw text as written, but you can find a somewhat shorter TL;DR here)
(I know my text sounds extreme, but I actually failed to fully express how I feel about this, it is MUCH worse than this and my solution for it is much more complicated than the little idealized version. I think all datacenters should die, basically. )
I want to explain, just how much I disagree with the very idea of moderation itself.
I come from web0 and I find the concept of moderation offensive.
To me a moderator is first of all, someone that suppressed me as a person and manipulates my perception of cyber reality. To me a moderator is a private tyrant that owns the public square and rules it like a cop. They are like that kid who would take his ball and go home. Except he owns the whole street as well.
I have no need for moderation, there is no content on Earth, including the most vicious computer viruses that can hurt me. I understand there was a small period in time when there was spam and it was annoying. But the cure has been much worse than the disease.
And that was before we have locally running, offline LLMs who could do the job of moderation to our own exact specification.
And it’s not just the deleting I have an issue with, it is the manipulation of the content discovery algorithm.
I do not like the knob twiddlers, who fine tune our perceptions to their own desires and biases from the shadows.
The faceless, unaccountable and unknown moderators who mediate who cyber reality.
The supposed humble janitors of the internet who have become its ruling cultural elite. Who adjudicate on all aspect of social and private life. Who have apparently embarked on a project to reshape all of society to their own neurotic image.
My generation has really messed up when we dreamed of Web2 and handed over our agencies to the unaccountable untrustworthy cyber elites and that is a wrong that I hope to see righted before the Musks and the Zucks finish devouring the nerve fibers that connect us.
I know you have good intentions and you probably worked at it really hard but I, simply cannot ever trust the people in your position ever again.
I have seen the mod logs, the trivial things that warranted ban hammers. The moderators drunk with their petty power who lick their lips with their toothy grin at the opportunity to use it.
This is when the dream of Web 2.0 died for me and I saw that we went terribly wrong. Even places with some open standards of moderation like wikipedia, looking at how the sausage is made is quite awful but I respect their high commitment to openness.
The phenomenom of believing in “necroposting” is just one tiny protrusion of the disease that has metastasized throughout our entire communication systems.
The only acceptable future of moderation, is as a subscription service. If you think you’re good enough to moderate what I see, I will subscribe, I will pay you for it.
But I MUST have access to the absolute raw feed, warts and all. I must be able to see every single decision you have done for me as a delegate. I MUST have the power of recall on any of your actions at all time.
The problem with moderators deleting stuff is that while I can easily ignore unwanted content, I can perform my own searches and I can run my own content discovery algorithm. But one thing I cannot do is undelete data that you have destroyed.
There is no space for compromise, it is clear that the outsourcing of moderation to shadowy unknowns has been a grave mistake done out of our collective laziness and ignorance and that the fight to seize back control of our communication is hopelessly skewed against us, it is not a power that will be relinquished without a fight.
The only way forward I see, is the abandonement of centralized private servers that “own” speech. This has been the bedrock on which the power of moderators has grown, “taking my ball home” power and all the people who disrespect freedom of speech “because it’s private”. Public speech has no place on private platforms, you get to talk until the police comes murder you in your sleep ala Fred Hampton.
Ok now to address you points specifically
The signal to noise ratio is a side effect of the forum software antiquated view. You know the chronological ordering of “last posts”. This technical error has create a group of people who sit on the forum and focus on posts by new and compulsively sort, censor, applies rules to them. They forget that this is not how 99.99% of user interact with their space, but these people get all the power to decide what stays on the server that they own. This is an archaic leftover from the BBS area and doesn’t have a place in the future.
As for necroposting, you should know by now that time does not exist on the internet, there is no space and no time. Text written in 2005 and 2024 coexist seamlessly. The concept that there is an end to a thread is anachronistic. It is an aesthetic judgement. This is like saying “nobody will ever speak again of topic” and then the subject is closed forever. If you want to see the end of a thread, print it out on paper, the internet version of any thread will receive comments in the year 2525 if humans and their computers still exist
Do not ever lock a thread, for any reason, I don’t care about your aesthethic choice, you have damaged the fabric of the internet with your idea of necro posting.
NOOOO, creating a new thread is a bad idea. The thread that is found and weighted in the search engine IS the pinned thread, it is the ONLY thread that matter. It is hopeless and pointless to create a new thread on an existing topic.