What's wrong with internet fora?

Back in the early days of the Internet, cyber-libertarians declared that since people were free to make their own rules online, all online problems would magically resolve themselves as a thousand electronic communities evolved whatever rules worked for them.

As it turns out, Internet debate fora are, with vanishingly few exceptions, run as dictatorships. And within the limits of the medium, those dictators wield something approaching absolute power. In fora where people exist solely as their words, moderators can silence people completely, or retroactively alter their words without any sign of tampering. In theory, they could even ban a user and keep his avatar going as their puppet, turning a critic into a literal mouthpiece of the party line, and no one would be the wiser.

Predictably, the results are less than satisfactory. In general, users have told me that while they think the mods and admins of their messageboard are nastily corrupt, there's no point in leaving because nowhere else would be much better. So, they tough it out in order to stick around with their fellow users, despite the abuses of the mods.

The frustrating thing is that it's so easy to change all that. Mysteriously, popular messageboard engines are programmed to give moderators powers for which there is no legitimate purpose. A few tweaks to the code, and 75% of moderator abuses disappear, and most of the rest will vanish if users stand up for clearly defined standards.

Messageboards are a pink-collar hobby.

Suppose I complain to a waitress about her grumpy behavior. She replies that she's grumpy because she works long hours at a difficult job for low pay in order to put her kids through school.

She has my sympathies. She's clearly doing the best she can with a difficult set of circumstances.

Suppose I complain to a moderator about her grumpy behavior. She replies that she's grumpy because she's working long hours at a difficult job for no pay.

Excuse me? Being a moderator is a hobby. Any quasi-intelligent person will change their hobby if they don't like it. And yet, I can't tell you how many moderators have justified their behavior to me by whining about how hard it is to be a moderator.

The fact of the matter is that messageboards are a service industry. If you become a moderator, your hobby is to serve the users by providing a congenial environment for discussion. Unfortunately, the enormous power given to moderators tinges the whole situation with echoes of the Stanford prison experiment. Moderators get it into their heads that they're the mature adults who have to discipline the users, who are unruly children.

Don't believe me? Just tell a moderator that you consider yourself to be their equal, and want to work with them, adult-to-adult, to make the messageboard a better place. See what happens.

Editing without a trace

There are legitimate reasons why a moderator might need to edit a user's post. But there is never any legitimate reason whatsoever for a moderator to edit a user's post, and not announce that he has done so. Nevertheless, I know of one messageboard where the users had to fight long and hard to get the rules changed so that any edit had to be accompanied by a notice saying "This post edited by such-and-such moderator on such-and-such date."

I know of one creationist messageboard where this kind of editing was taken to ludicrous heights. If the mods saw any message which questioned creationism in the slightest, they would ban the user and silently edit the message into a ringing endorsement of creation science. They even edited messages by young-earth creationists who were asking about creationism simply because they wanted to learn more about it! Ridiculous though that may sound, remember: whoever programmed the messageboard software had a choice, and they chose to let admins do that kind of thing whenever they please.

Secret parking tickets

Only in the most brutally repressive states can you imagine being exiled for revealing that you were charged with a misdemeanor. And yet, messageboards in general have a policy that no user may reveal any official messages or warnings that they receive via private message.

In one case, I asked a moderator for an official rules clarification, which she gave me. Later, I quoted her clarification in public, and was immediately threatened with banning if I ever revealed an official communication again. One might naively think that the moderators have an interest in making sure that everyone plays by the rules, and thus would want official clarifications of the rules to be available to all. (In case you're wondering, I asked her whether moderators could be stripped of their duties if they were caught lying in an online discussion. In reply, she stated outright that moderators could lie freely in debates without fear of punishment.)

At another messageboard, moderators responded to my criticisms by declaring that I had violated the rules, and that I would be banned if I didn't admit my guilt and promise to be good. When I asked them to specify precisely which rules I had broken, they refused to do so, saying only that on a particular date I had received a private message which had specified the rules I had broken. Of course, they were lying, and the message contained no such thing. I could have easily proven it by posting the contents of the message- but that would have given them an immediate pretext to ban me.

The most ridiculous thing about all this secrecy is that moderators consistently justify it by pretending that official communiques contain deeply personal revelations, given in the strictest confidence to people whom they don't even like. The fact is that there is no legitimate reason whatsoever why users can't reveal anything that mods tell them in their official capacity, and it's silly to pretend otherwise. Perhaps we need a rule like the U.N.: no agreement is binding unless it is conducted in public.

The ostrakon

Unfortunately I don't remember what brilliant soul thought of the ostrakon. An ostrakon is a special forum for "banned" users, who are forbidden to post anywhere else.

An ostrakon serves all the legitimate functions of normal banning, but removes most of the abuses. If a troll is creating trouble, just send him to the ostrakon. Then nobody has to deal with him unless they choose to. And if someone wants to criticise the mods, they can't silence him by banning him, since anyone who thought he had a valid point is free to continue the discussion in the ostrakon.

The ostrakon could potentially have beneficial effects even when the moderators aren't corrupt. Decisions to ban are often controversial, but anyone who would miss a banned user is free to do so in the ostrakon.

Remember, too, that much of the force of banning as a punishment comes from the fact that the banned user is immediately cut off from the community. If he's sent to an ostrakon, he can announce that he's moving to a different messageboard, and people are free to meet him there if they wish. For that matter, simply letting people give a single goodbye message upon being banned would serve the same purpose- but the moderators' illusion of authority rests on the idea that everyone they ban is a reprehensible troll, who has no right to speak and whom no one would want to follow.

Extend the ignore list to moderators

One of the perks of being a moderator is that no one can put you on their ignore list. Mods justify this by saying that users need to be able to hear comments made by the mods in their official capacity. That would be more convincing if they didn't spend so much time stressing that there's a difference between comments made when they have their "[Moderator hat ON]" and when they have their "[/Moderator hat OFF]". There's no reason why official comments from a moderator couldn't be made to circumvent the ignore list. For that matter, you could do it without reprogramming vBulletin. A moderator could have two accounts, for example "MrBinky" for when he's speaking as a user, and "MrBinkyMOD" for when he's speaking as a moderator. "MrBinky" can be ignored like everyone else, but "MrBinkyMOD" cannot.

The other argument presented against my proposal is that anyone who wants to put a mod on their ignore list must be some kind of weakling, since they are free to just skip over the mod's posts. Horse hockey- if that's the way you see it, then you shouldn't have an ignore list at all. If it's legitimate to have an ignore list at all, then no one should be exempt from it. (And if you don't believe in ignore lists, then I firmly hope that someone writes a virus that randomly inserts "YOU SUCK! HAHAHAHAHAHA!" into every webpage you ever read. After all, you're free to skip over those parts, if you don't like them.)

The hidden subtext here is that the moderators don't believe that there's any legitimate reason for someone to want to ignore a moderator. Like I said, there's a touch of the prison experiment here. The moderators assume that they're the mature, intelligent people, because after all, they're moderators. Maybe someone would want to ignore a user. But a moderator? Never.

I could provide some examples of moderators who deserve to be ignored, but that would be beside the point. Nobody has to justify their ignore list. There is no God-given right to impose yourself on people who don't want to listen to you, and they don't need to justify themselves to you in order to be left alone. And if you're going to have an ignore list at all, then no one deserves to be exempt from it.

What now?

Internet messageboards have a lot of potential, and there's no reason why we have to empower a bunch of jerks to spoil them for us. Write Jelsoft and demand that the next version of vBulletin incorporate features that make it harder to refuse. And most of all, stand up for your rights and roundly ridicule any mod who pretends that official moderator notices are deeply personal love letters.