board77

Yeah, right.

Well, I'm getting offline for the night darlings - thanks for playing with me

Lucky!!

TP, my apologies. I over-reacted a bit.

But it is something that I feel strongly about.

*ignores the bizarreness around him*

Uh motion to delete some of these posts

Denied

Voronwë_the_Faithful wrote:

*ignores the bizarreness around him*

Please teach me this trick, I beg you.

Lidless wrote:

Voronwë_the_Faithful wrote:

*ignores the bizarreness around him*

Please teach me this trick, I beg you.

* Maintains her reputation as a prim and proper lady by not replying to that comment *

Motion for Voronwe Expletive Preservation. I always miss all the good stuff. * pouts *

Frelga, my dear, believe me, you did not miss anything good.

For what it's worth, I think a lot of people here over-reacted to hal's over-reaction.

Well, I think you under-reacted to hal's over-reaction.

So there.

yovargas wrote:

For what it's worth, I think a lot of people here over-reacted to hal's over-reaction.

I'm pretty sure it's got something to do with the Newton's Third Law of Hyperbolic Motion.

I have come back to start a post to finish out this discussion twice now, and I can't seem to do it. I'm just going to write, stream-of-consciousness, and see what comes out.

(1) Voronwe, we simply have very different outlooks. As I implied in a recent PM to you, I believe the best system for any messageboard is a "benevolent dictatorship" system, in which someone responsible and mature makes the final decision and lays down the law to the members about how things are going to be. I suspect that your disagreement with such a stance could not be strongly enough expressed.

I simply do not believe the stakes are high enough on a messageboard for due process to be necessary. Perhaps your expletive was not misplaced. It's just that, despite my youth, I've been on the Internet for approximately 12-13 years. In that time, I've moderated messageboards and communities ranging in size from 400 to 5000. I've been responsible for banning people and for making decisions that have left a good many people unhappy. On the flip side, I have had my fair share of bannings; I know what it feels like to be kicked out of an Internet venue that I was enjoying. I've seen moderators make decisions I disagree with, and decisions with which I strongly agree. However, I strongly agree with the concept of having a central authority figure there, and I know what it's like to be on every side of such a process - to be the authority figure, to be disciplined or even expelled by the authority figure, etc.

I don't think that everyone's opinion needs to be considered for every little thing. We had this discussion way back when, with the vote on whether admins should be called Rangers - do you remember how I said that it's something on which a decision should just have been made and announced, not voted on? To me, the best example is Wikipedia - they have a full system of rules and regulations in place, but at the end of the day, the founder, Jimbo Wales, steps in and makes the decisions he believes are in the best interest of the site. (He spoke to one of my classes last semester, and the "benevolent dictator" terminology that I use is taken from his talk.) Don't get me wrong, in real life (and I do think it is important to emphasize the distinction between real life and the Internet here), I value my status as an adult citizen in a democracy highly. I just see a huge difference between that situation and this.

I wouldn't say that it's not important to me if somebody is banned or disciplined arbitrarily. I certainly wouldn't want such a thing to happened. I guess it's just...at the core...I don't really agree with messageboard democracy. I think it's inefficient, and I think that it lends too great a degree of seriousness to something that's just supposed to be fun. I mean...let's talk about everything from the death penalty to Grand Hippos, not worry about cumulative voting vs. instant runoff voting, or what formula to use to determine a quorum, or how many days a committee needs to leave between drafting an amendment to a Charter and voting on it. I am half-cringing to write this, because I'm sure this is a heretical view for this board. How can I put this? I go to school to worry about how our real-life democracy should function. I come here to get away from that.

Now, if there was a way to run a very simple democracy - one with a one-page Charter and with a simple poll setup for Amendments, etc., then I'd be fine with it. Yet, the problem is as you say - the moment you have a democracy, you have to start thinking about 50 million competing considerations and worry about what every single person wants. Then, so much time goes into satisfying everyone's procedural concerns that the REAL purpose of the messageboard - in this case, what goes on in Turf and Symp and Halls of Fire and every other substantive board - gets submerged under the procedural stuff. I'll be honest with you. I hate that. It's not a matter of just ignoring it, either. I tried that for a while, but what was really getting to me is that people like Jn and you - people who can write incredible posts that blow you away - were forced to give up a good deal of your posting in the other forums to focus on the procedural stuff. It didn't even end after the Charter was passed - it feels that we've had one issue requiring a vote after another, and this "democracy" is detracting from some of our best posters' ability to be a part of the board in my humble but very firm opinion.

In my PM to you, I wrote that it would have been, in my view, much better if we had a "benevolent dictator" to resolve the ToE issue one way or another. Either said dictator would have told us, Snowdog's here, live with it or don't, and people would have acted accordingly - or the dictator would have told us that Snowdog was out and we could go along our merry way. Either way, this would have been resolved the FIRST day I made the post - July 18, 2005 - rather than us still dealing with the issue today, October 18, 2005. I'm saying that that price of democracy is, in my personal opinion, just too high. Too high in terms of time, energy, bad feeling between posters, etc.

So, I guess I'm saying - the process to which you refer - of "balanc[ing]...diverse interests and views" - is one that seems to me to have come at a very significant price.

Regarding the multiple hearing procedures - I was referring to the procedure for hearings on a ban, the procedure for hearings to remove a ranger, and the procedure for removing an elected official. I didn't mean that there was more than one procedure for any one of these things.

(2) And that brings me to my response to Eru and Jn. I think that Jn highlights the reason that things are the way they are - that in creating a Charter, people were trying to move past TORC. People felt so badly burned by TORC that the thought of a "benevolent dictatorship" was unthinkable - Ted proved to be the antithesis of benevolent. So, people set out to create the opposite: a democracy. Systematically, everything that TORC was, was shut out. Where TORC was opaque (e.g. the mod forum), b77 became open. Where TORC prohibited certain forms of language, b77 embraced it. Etc. That makes perfect sense.

Eru, your post provided some valuable context for how things were before - in essence, a democracy without rules. I definitely agree that a democracy with rules (the current system) is preferable to one without rules. Thank you for providing that context. It certainly cleared some things up for me.

Back to Voronwe in particular: I don't know if you realize how hard it is to disagree with you on anything, not because of anything you've done, but because you are just someone who commands respect. At first, I wasn't going to write any of this at all, but then, I felt that I should come back and post because I said that I would. Then, once I'd decided to post again, I decided to try to explain that the reason that I'd said everything that I did before is just that I have a fundamental difference in perspective. In trying to put what I said before in perspective, however, I realize that I've presented an outlook that you will find even more troublesome. I am concerned that this might cause me to lose some respect in your eyes, but ultimately, I can still only say what I feel. Ultimately, you and I both very much like and enjoy this board, and I've really enjoyed meeting you twice in person. I hope that the fact that we have different answers to the question of how Internet messageboards are best run does not have to change any of that. It certainly does not change the respect I feel for you.

Jeez, how did I get to talking about this. Understand that I'm not saying that right here, right now, we should have the system I feel is most efficient ("benevolent dictatorship"). In fact, it wouldn't work right now because people would get upset and leave. That was just a general statement about what I felt was best on the Internet as a whole. Why did I bring it up? To explain why the complexities of this democracy frustrated me. And why did I bring that up? Because of my original point - that it was reasonable to complain that some process was frustrating without actually initiating the procedure necessary to change that process, since said procedure is currently too long and unwieldly for most people with commitments outside of b77 to manage it. I hadn't expected to end up making this post.

Although I am fine with responding to anything I've said within this thread itself, I wanted to make clear that I am willing to discuss via email, PM, etc. as well, if someone wants to respond and would find that to be a more comfortable format. Thanks.

TP, first and foremost, you should never have any worry about losing my respect. That's not going to happen under any circumstance, and certainly not because you honestly expressed your feelings about something. I appreciate it when people share different perspectives then the one that I hold, particularly when they carefully explain why they have that perspective, as you always do. I am not so arrogant as to believe that my perspective is the invariably correct one, even if I come across that way sometimes.

Certainly you are more then entitled to have a different perspective on the question of the best way for an internet messageboard should be run. I may be older then you and more experienced in real life issues, but you are certainly much more experienced when it comes to internet messageboards. I have been involved with exactly two, TORC and here. And if anyone had asked me a year ago I would have agreed that the model at TORC was the more reasonable model. It was the shock of what happened at TORC as much as anything else that has colored my viewpoint.

I am looking at board77 as something that will be a vehicle for us to continue our friendships for the foreseeable future. I see it as very much a continuing work in progress. I think the structure that we have is not perfect (I don't believe that perfection exists), but I do believe that it is better suited to last for the long run then the benevolent dictatorship model. I do believe that absolute power corrupts, regardless of whether you are talking about a nation or a messageboard. But I completely acknowledge that I may be wrong about that. It may bell be that there is nothing that can be done to make a messageboard community last over the long term. Humans do have a hard time getting along. But only time will tell.

Now, on to the more troublesome part of your post.

Quote:

Back to Voronwe in particular: I don't know if you realize how hard it is to disagree with you on anything, not because of anything you've done, but because you are just someone who commands respect.

TP, you are not the first person to say this to me, though I think you are the first one to say so publicly (other then Farawen, who did not quite put it exactly like this, but who I believe meant something similar to this). This is a terrible dilemna for me. While I am certainly flattered that people feel that I command respect, it makes me extremely sad and uncomfortable to know that people feel discouraged from expressing their views simply by virtue of the fact that I disagree with them. One of our guiding principles is that of free expression. It seems that I interfere with that guiding principle simply by my presence here.

And though you kindly stated that you did not believe that this was because of anything that I have done, I can't help feeling that I am in fact responsible for cultivating this problem (and as some of you know, I have felt that way more or less since Farawen's "The Problem with board77" thread). In the Silmarillion thread Wilma asked me why I thought Fingolfin had a massive ego. I rather glibly replied "because he reminds me of me." I hardly know why I said that, but I think I am going to have to do some soul-searching and try to figure out what I can do to break the horns of this dilemna.

I have no such dilemma Voronwë.

...

For the record I was fully in favor of a benevolent dictator over this type of structure.
The problem is we couldn't find one.
They were all corrupted.
Absolute power does corrupt absolutely.