"Any forum good enough to become popular eventually becomes big enough to be dominated by total jerks."
I came to this realization, actually, by viewing Craigslist's flagging help forum and realizing that about 20% of the people asking for help about why their for-sale item got flagged did not have their ad flagged for being scams or otherwise violating the Terms of Service, they were being told, "you're asking too much money for it, that's why you were flagged." WTF? So now CraigsList's crowdsourced flagging crew is the Pricing Police, imposing their own Stalistic vision of what things should sell for upon the buyers and sellers on the site?
Why... YES! And CL apparently sees nothing wrong with this. So why did it seem wrong to me? Then it struck me: it's wrong because these people are total JERKS. They are taking a system that was originally designed to deal with spammers and scammers (and I know this because I was *there* when Craig introduced his original flagging system, back when CL was a small San Francisco board with a few thousand friendly users) and using it to impose their own agenda of how society should be organized onto the rest of the users of CL. And if you mention this to anybody at CL, they get all hostile and angry and say if you don't like it, go somewhere else because, like, CL is perfect and has no problems and yada yada. CL's support forums have become a very angry, hostile place because of the CL defenders constantly attacking the users who come on and ask why their item got flagged even though their ad is not spam, a scam, or a prohibited (under the ToU) item or type of ad.
But why can the jerks dominate things so much? Well, it's for the same reason that HOA's are dominated by the HOA Nazis, who fine you if your grass is 1.1 inches tall when their HOA rules say the grass must be 1.0 inches tall and otherwise make your life misery. It's because having the power to impose your own vision upon other people attracts jerks the way that gay prostitutes attract Republican politicians. And when you have enough of these jerks in one place, it's like they form a black hole of Peak Assholery. And CL, as a very popular Internet forum, has attracted enough users to pass this threshhold, and gives the assholes enough power (via the Flag button) to impose their own vision upon the site.
Unfortunately this appears to be a core problem with voluntary crowdsourcing: Voluntary crowdsourcing generally attracts people who are fanatics, assholes, jerks, or all of the above. This is why the OWS movement degenerated into small gangs of radicals rather than growing to encompass the rest of the 99% -- it is the fanatics, assholes, and jerks who want power, who have the motivation to grasp for power, who force their vision upon other people who then, because most people are *not* assholes, simply go elsewhere. Furthermore, when I was involved in one of the first community sites back in the 90's, back in the days when CL was Craig's local listing of classified ads in San Francisco, we ran into the *exact same* problem -- once our site got too popular, the assholes took over and abused the "Flag" button to downgrade posts that complied with our ToS but did not comply with the ideology of the assholes. The solution? Have both upflag *AND* downflag, so that jerks downflagging valid posts for ideological reasons could be overruled, and give flagging points only to a randomly chosen group of people (different every day) as a *privilege* rather than give everybody the ability to flag. That worked at first because jerks are generally outnumbered by non-jerks, but eventually enough jerks got attracted to this very popular site that it reached Peak Assholery and I had to leave because it just wasn't fun anymore dealing with assholes who wanted to impose their own will on everything.
Which, of course, is the other side of Peak Assholery: when enough assholes get on a site and start shitting all over the place, it causes non-assholes to say, "meh, I'm not going to deal with that bullshit" and leave. Which leaves the assholes dominating everything. Hmm... say, have you noticed that I haven't logged into DailyKOS in, like, *ages*? Just sayin' :).
And now that I think of it... does this describe why the American political system is so fucked up, too? Funny, the connections you can make just by observing how assholes are ruining a popular community site...
-- Badtux the Observant Penguin
