How can a website cultivate a good userbase?

[ABE LINN COHN]

There have been many attempts to create moderation systems to prevent a website from turning to shit due to a bad userbase. Some are more restrictive than others. Compare Reddit to 4chan.
Reddit's mods are very restrictive and the community this creates is a big circlejerk where the users rush to spout the approved opinions. Mods are able to do this because they have unchecked power and a restrictive ruleset that they can interpret any way they see fit. As a result, the mod communities become very cliquey and any attempt to change the system ends up with the opposition being banned.
On the other hand on a site like 4chan you can achieve a similar result despite the more laid back moderation simply by shouting down the opposition. Shitposters run rampant, and while I think a little shitposting now and then can be funny, you can't deny it's not conducive to serious discussion. This is without getting into how easy it is for bots and shills to take over the site.
How should a website moderate itself so as to fairly allow for free discussion without being so lax as to throttle discussion with constant low effort posts?

 

[Zoobles]

Julay

 

[ZazietheBeast]

Content, media, tone of the place and moderation form the culture. The Chans is a shithole and because there's no standard to uphold, people to do as they please. Leaving you to parse through all that shit.

Whereas Reddit, its all curated elevator pitch bullshit.

Shit culture = shit site. Simple.

 

[Chocolate Wombat]

First thing, ban all the troons. Second thing, ban anyone who objects to banning all troons. Repeat this every pride month by scouring the site to find any troons you may have missed.

Other than that, I guess just encourage posting good content. Give people the tools to freely discuss things they find interesting or are passionate about (as long as they aren't troons).

You could say that "well, as long as they aren't shoving troon shit down everyone's throat all the time they're fine" and that's actually correct. But if they were capable of that kind of restraint they wouldn't be troons and thus wouldn't need to be banned.

 

[Arctic]

Have a clear set of rules and clear guidelines for posting that leave as little as possible room for interpretation to the moderators. Regularly promote moderators from the userbase and regularly sack mods who powertrip or don't do their job. Have clear discussion subjects and ban anyone who tries to hijack them (e.g. troons). Ban anyone begging for money. Ban anyone who posts nudes onsite, even in DMs. Create features that allow users to associate with one another in a public way so clique formation happens in public rather than in private DMs. Do not allow moderators to read DMs and keep this functionality restricted to as few people as possible.

 

[Dona Morte]

Hmm. Good question.
My hypothetical was would we still have been targeted if there were no doxes here?
My answer is yes.
Not sure that would satiate the mob.

 

[urr13 account]

Mandatory weekly estrogen injections for all users

 

[Whatevermancer]

You can't.
/thread

 

[ロボ﹏§¤r﹏h¶rœ]

Good quality posts attract good quality posters.

 

[Tree]

Gatekeeping, gatekeeping, gatekeeping.

Ever since eternal September, open forums will always be different levels of bad. Even real life public squares had gates, and you'd be thrown out if you were a troublemaker.

After gatekeeping, the problem becomes having a reason for worthwhile people to want to join the club in the first place.

 

[byuu]

Gatekeeping, gatekeeping, gatekeeping.

View attachment 3695759

Ever since eternal September, open forums will always be different levels of bad. Even real life public squares had gates, and you'd be thrown out if you were a troublemaker.

After gatekeeping, the problem becomes having a reason for worthwhile people to want to join the club in the first place.

That's how you end up with a circle-jerk of all the same people saying all the same shit.
"Oh no, these normies that don't even have piss jars invade our community to call us losers"

 

[Tree]

Let me briefly describe how a cult, in the neutral sense of social group, works. A cult puts forth a set of virtues the members are supposed to exhibit and rules to follow. Upstanding members receive benefits of being in the group which prospers due to the organizational effects of their edicts. One very important benefit in a social group is an informal "insurance" that works to offset any persecution, by society or otherwise, for being faithful to the cult. A group who wishes to grow must be capable of the relative prosperity of its members and to be able to garner that prosperity towards offsetting the risks incurred by people for being faithful.

What does this have to do with cultivating a user base on the internet? Not a lot directly. The very fact that there is little buy in necessary to be a part of online communities ensures that they will not be a significant force in the same way as a proper brotherhood. That isn't to say they don't serve their purpose, but to use them as a replacement for what "community" actually is, or to try to make one become something of the sort will forever be folly so long as people maintain these delusions of inclusion, so long as they pretend being an "open space" has any sort of inherent virtue to it. Open spaces are for wayward souls. But please excuse your waywardness with a bad faith example of what sounds like little more than some degenerate discord server.

There are times and places for open spaces, but never will it be the case that people thrive under such universalism. Such an idea is generally only appealing to pariahs and parasites.

 

[Baseton Repillé]

4chan is extremely heterogeneous, as far as discussion quality goes. Obviously the big boards are godawful, but the more niche/inaccessible the board's subject matter, the better the community, generally speaking. Moderation doesn't really determine the quality of a community. It's like that quote from No Country for Old Men: "It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it."

 

[Ser Prize]

Frequent racism.

 

[Haramburger]

I joined because the Zoe Quinn thread was the best repository for that fat whore's exploits online. I'd like to think I've contributed and improved it somewhat, and hopefully that attracted people in turn.

 

[Tree]

Let me briefly describe how a cult, in the neutral sense of social group, works. A cult puts forth a set of virtues the members are supposed to exhibit and rules to follow. Upstanding members receive benefits of being in the group which prospers due to the organizational effects of their edicts. One very important benefit in a social group is an informal "insurance" that works to offset any persecution, by society or otherwise, for being faithful to the cult. A group who wishes to grow must be capable of the relative prosperity of its members and to be able to garner that prosperity towards offsetting the risks incurred by people for being faithful.

What does this have to do with cultivating a user base on the internet? Not a lot directly. The very fact that there is little buy in necessary to be a part of online communities ensures that they will not be a significant force in the same way as a proper brotherhood. That isn't to say they don't serve their purpose, but to use them as a replacement for what "community" actually is, or to try to make one become something of the sort will forever be folly so long as people maintain these delusions of inclusion, so long as they pretend being an "open space" has any sort of inherent virtue to it. Open spaces are for wayward souls. But please excuse your waywardness with a bad faith example of what sounds like little more than some degenerate discord server.

There are times and places for open spaces, but never will it be the case that people thrive under such universalism. Such an idea is generally only appealing to pariahs and parasites.

Strange, I can't edit this post but I can edit my post prior to it.

Anyway, I wanted to add that the early internet was what it was because of the demographics of those who found themselves on it. Being able to get on the internet, both having a computer and the patience to use them, was natural gatekeeping. This should be obvious, but still some pretend the internet was great when it was "open and free like the good old days". It never was open or free. It was good because of who it was open to. As with other things, what is almost entirely an outgrowth of who, not some post rationalization or reduction to so called ideas, principles, or propositions.

That is to say, civilization is incommunicable, even if you can adopt totalitarian means to accommodate those of different temperaments.