My god what a disappointment image boards have become. I've seen a lot. From telling Tom Green to do a barrel roll to Hal Turner raids to Scientology to all the cross-board wars to /b/-day to 7chan and a zillion other failed alternatives, and eventually to gamergate and finally 8ch. I really thought 8ch would be different this time. Finally, a large enough community picked up its collective spine to form a sustainable alternative to 4chan. And then what happened? A flock of newfags seized administrative control of most of the major topical boards, and slowly transformed themselves into the exact corrupt, narcissistic, censorious pieces of shit that everyone left 4chan to escape in the first place. Did their communities have the courage to move once again to other boards when this became apparent? Almost never enough to make lasting alternatives.
I spend most of my time talking about video games, and it is absolutely astounding to me how 8/v/'s owner became the spitting image of moot, and then administration on the next biggest alternative /vg/ morphed into the same damn thing. Some alternative? If you looked at their attitudes and posting styles without any context you would hardly be able to tell them apart. I've always been hostile to the idea of a "lefty" themed video game board, but at the moment I really fucking want another alternative. Zig Forums, /animu/, and this board here are practically the only boards on this fucking shithole community where I don't feel like making a new thread is hopeless or pointless because the mods are actively hostile.
Sorry if this thread is pretty meta and not entirely related to leftism, but I frankly feel like this is one of the few places on this entire website with a decent population of sympathetic oldfags. The community across most of this site has become utterly servile and docile when it comes to cretinous, self-serving mod corruption, and most of those who actually cared have long since left.
Anonymous discussion forums have a prophecy to fulfill. We were told we had found the holy grail of debating venues: a format where people can truly express themselves freely and arguments would be considered on their own merits. A venue where collective mental abilities can come together and get closer to the truth, where the apprehensions of taboo and identity do not stifle progress, where everyone is free to speak their minds. When is this damn prophecy going to come true?
Pic related, that's fucking me. 33 years old with gray hair, I've been using image boards for something like 14 years, I've been struggling to find, support, and foster image board communities that address the corruption and problems of other communities for most of that time. And I am fucking tired.
The worst feel is having abandoned many of those alternative image boards like 7chan and 99chan and having left their communities to die because I was so convinced that we had a chance at something great on 8ch.
Nolan Ross
Mods here take a no-fucks-given approach to this board, but it also works against us. We get flooded by tankies, nazbols and Zig Forums retards constantly.
Jeremiah Gomez
Good post. Replies to all of op's questions correctly in a few short sentences.
Noah Thomas
I've posted it before, I'll post it again: Develop an alternative system of moderating websites that is egalitarian and transparent, and you'll solve half the problem right there. To date no one has come up with a better alternative to generic mod/admin accounts and the alienation and incompetence that comes with them.
David Reed
Rotational moderation, with 5+ mods at a time. If one abuses power he can be voted out by majority rule but is allowed back in eventually.
Benjamin Moore
That's impossible, humans are too stupid.
Jaxon Edwards
But what if the majority is wrong tho? What's reddit's upboats?
Jeremiah Cruz
Alternatively just do what I've been saying for the past two years and start up a chan with no actual rules that allows cp and more so no discussion at all can be censored and staff only exist to ensure the imageboard stays up. Cp Imageboards already exist but none dedicated to being like 4 or 8 chan etc and being anything beyond circlejerking and even then they just went down now so keeping up with them is a problem.
Lincoln Jenkins
You do realize that that's illegal everywhere on the planet, right? If you allow it you go to jail.
Jeremiah Walker
Thanks Captain Obvious but what else are you going to do? 900% of the time a site goes downhill it starts with banning the pedos. It's either no power. (Illegal.) Power for everyone. Or power for a fee. Pick one or come up with a better idea.
Charles Evans
Xennials really are Boomers 2.0
Chase Barnes
Bring back the only online discussion venue that never had any of these problems, at least until spam killed it: USENET
I think we have the technology, using crypto and CAPTCHA, we can build a spam-proof USENET without introducing centralized moderation.
Full decentralization, there wouldn't be anyone specific to arrest.
What the fuck, why bring pedophiles into the discussion? is there really a connection between banning them and the entire community going down hill? any examples? are you just pedos that wish to say you want to fuck children and post child porn? no offense, i'm not a clean minded person myself when it comes to my own sexuality.
Michael Bennett
I don't like pedos either, but they are a necessary evil. Simply put, any online discussion venue technically capable of reliably excluding pedos, will also be capable of other, and wholly unjustified, varieties of censorship and legal harassment. Similarly, the very first form of suppression against any censorship-proof and/or privacy-respecting venue will be (false-flag or not) to accuse it of harboring pedos.
As such, any serious attempt to build and use a censorship-proof online system must come with the conscious resignation that you will have to share that system with pedos circulating CP.
Brandon Flores
A P2P shitposting network would only make everybody liable once a pig decides to dump the CP archive that's stored on their police station servers.
Jaxon Russell
Nobody is going to prosecute ten thousand shitposters with CP trafficking for using a P2P forum.
Xavier Richardson
Yep, first they come for the pedos. Then they come for the turrrrists. Then they come for the 1337 haxors. Then they come for the file sharers. Then you get Google captcha and 4chan Gold.
Kayden Gray
Don't forget money launderers and the War on Some Drugs.
Isaiah Gonzalez
t. lawcuck
Henry Sanders
This. The quality of this board has suffered so much from this.
Evan Martin
Deal with it. While it is very important that a board stays topical, and other forms of quality control are an invitation for selective interpretation of rules, mod abuse, and a good way to just generally kill fun and thus traffic.
Luke Hughes
t. modcuck
Liam Gutierrez
The problem isn't shitposting, I don't mind that, it's spamming. Outright spam sits in the catalog or fills other threads for days on end before it gets anchored or deleted.
In addition to spam, there's also a lot of stuff that's simply too repetitive to deserve its own thread or be posted in other threads, and should instead be shunted into generals/containments.
I haven't seen spam here in ages. I agree that maybe those shitposting threads should have been shunned to generals/containments but I think they are still just a small trade-off we pay for having a board free of rulecuckery and I like this hands off approach from the mods because I've noticed that whenever mods start to interfere they always lose control and end up in a state where they will delete and ban anything they don't like killing what might have been genuine discussion, fun and the likes effectively killing the board with it.
Adam Ross
As it is? Never. The question of quality on imageboards is heavily tied to the quality of moderation, and that actually can be neither too strict or arbitrary nor too lax and leaving the board to self-moderation. Saying that strict rulefag mods are shit does not really require further elaboration, but "lax moderation" is not a good solution either. Self-moderation only works in case of community with a small share of newcomers, where the peer pressure is indeed enough to rein in the newfriends, but if the numbers start significantly rising, the entire board goes to shit with blessing of retarded and apathetic mods, as seen on countless 4chan boards roughly a decade ago. The only effective solution would be mods attempting to maintain the greatest possible link with the anons(for example through tl;dr meta discussions) and enforcing the "unofficial" unwritten rules in order to maintain the continuity in board quality and culture, as well as to limit the spread of cancer.
What a bunch of bullshit. "Cancer" is subjective and usually boils down to "whatever I don't like".
Liam Adams
So would be saying that eg. "[board] is shit now because of awful moderation", and yet we're capable of developing consensus on such issues and even explain what went wrong.
Owen Diaz
Awful moderation ain't subjective. Ain't nobody gonna feel happy on the receiving end of the whip.
Jack Allen
The userbase won't be happy if the hotpockets aren't around to clean up shitposts and troll threads on page 0 either.
Ayden Collins
it's time to move the fuck on you mongoloid, there are a million better things you could be doing, get an anarchist girlfriend with dreadlocks to teach you how to use powertools absolute fucking wimp omg
Zachary Jones
I want an anarchist gf with dreadlocks who will stomp my balls while I'm wearing diapers.>>138520
Robert Evans
You wish lmao.
With a bit of luck it'll have a few hundred before it starts attracting attention from authorities, and intimidating / prosecuting 50% of them is child's play.
Adrian Moore
One of the worst fucking forum rules of all time. I have never once witnessed this vague conception of undesirable behavior not eventually be used to bludgeon opinions that mod personally doesn't agree with.
Ian Lee
I wish I had anarchist friends
Asher Stewart
There is a sort of an odd compromise I've contemplated for years, which in the case of Zig Forums might have the added benefit of making the masses more inclined to migrate boards like Hotwheels intended instead of limply whining about moderation quality: Give OPs the option of having mod powers within their threads.
Jason Clark
This is both comical and very sad at the same time tbqhwy.
