• joethebob (edited 8 years ago)
    +3

    It took me quite a while to realize that most of the attention focused on trolls and sjws appears to come from a newer generation of internet users. I'm old enough to remember pre-internet days, bbs, and all that stuff that probably resembles the flintstones car to younger players. Just about everything that seems newsworthy now happened a thousand times over in complete anonymity before. Perhaps in slightly different mediums like irc, usenet, bbs, and a hundred different niche forums but it was all there. Many of those old bbs operated on a very simple principle of 'dont piss off the admin', which was fine because that person had all the keys and did the work to keep that playground open. Now you have the creation and maintenance of that playground in the hands of random people each one having some power while the users are left to figure it all for themselves.

    The same general purpose rule still applies now as then,if you want to have users on your side. Pick a set of rules you can enforce and enforce them. Anything hinting of inequality in application and you've just cracked the dam holding the flood. In reddit there are more cracks than dam at this point. Clear lack of stated rules, enforced rules, constantly changing rules, interpretations of rules, revisionist history by the people at the top, hidden agendas, hotseat management, etc...

    Sidenote: while I really didn't get into the Ellen Pao witchhunt, I did find the characterization as 'Chairman Pao' (complete with stylized art) damn funny.