What do you think about superunmoderated forums?

PF has got everything just right. The only thing I find odd about it is that I've never been a member of a messageboard where there are only two banned words, when both of them are in common usage in everyday language by every adult in the country. But hey, who's complaining? (Cerb hastens to add!!)

 

Liberals pushing PC speech. Notice the words which are banned.

****
Piss
****
****
*********ker
********er
Tits

 

No thanks. Don't have time to sift through mountains of trash looking for the one nugget worth reading.

 

As someone who has been a supermoderator, I can only say that it's really hard to find qualified, competent, unbiased, people to moderate larger forums. It's often just a friends network to be perfectly honest. You have to kind of know a little bit about a lot of things that drive discussion in order to really see what's going on and to be able to make the right judgment in a given situation. One simply cannot moderate functionally and honestly absent the means. And I say that as respectfully as I can. It's just true. The facts often get reported gang style as a personal attack because some people simply get offended with the facts and it ends up 1 - shutting down by a mod who might agree with the reporters' personal views and wants or 2 - shutting down functional debate just because the mod simply lacks a grasp on the material being discussed and it ultimately shuts down any kind of functional debate before it can even happen. I can't begin to count how many temp bans, closed threads and strikes I've had to overturn because of that practice. And it happens on both sides, left and right. Not only that, but I've known fellow mods who were really a bunch of know-nothings who really shouldn't have ever been a mod in the first place and who liked to use their mod powers to kind of snoop on posters without them knowing. That's cringe worthy. That's never good and it's hard to catch and stop because the controls themselves actually allow that kind of stealth.

End of the day, without any kind of firm mission statement toward a specific goal, it's dysfunction and the circus that generates clicks. So that's generally the only real function. It just is what it is, I guess.

 

They could theoretically do that here if PMs aren't snooped on.

 

Then find one. I, personally, hated them. They basically deteriorated to immature people calling each other names. I never went on an unmoderated forum that had anything like debates or arguments, just juvenile name-calling.

 

I guess you have a point.

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You know what else is superunmoderated? FAN FICTION!!! Why the hell you would want to emulate what happens on fan fiction sites is beyond me unless you want to be able to post child porn here or something.

 

The problem with having a too anarchic forum is that it invites spambots. Firthermore, threads will - most likely - sail way off topic way too often and personal attacks will be too prevalent. Some moderation is therefore always needed.