modified

I do not think this forum should be so dictatorial. It seems like a very few people decide what goes around here. Also, I am not happy that threads are able to be deleted at the whim of moderators and friends of moderators.

Thank you for this new section though.

Sam

I don't think Modified is at all dictatorial.

If anything, I think the Mods wait too long to get involved, are too inattentive, and that things are too bureaucratic here. All the various threads about rule changes and proposing rule changes... sigh... we're making this more difficult than it really is. The Mods should be attentive to what is posted & use their best judgement to remove egregious statements, posts, or threads. If they need a rule book to figure out what those are, then they probably shouldn't be Mods.

If a poster repeatedly or flagrantly posts egregious material, ban em. Even if they play footbag, but maybe especially if they don't play footbag.

This isn't an attack on anybody, just sayin... it really shouldn't be that hard to take out the garbage.

It'd also be great if some of us hot heads (like me) could restrain ourselves a little more frequently, and stop creating problems only to demand the Mods fix them.

An idea I had a while ago, which is more based on political theory than anything else, is to make basically everybody who is still active on the forums and joined more than say 3 years ago a mod - obviously excluding people who either don't want to be or have demonstrated that they probably don't have the maturity.

Essentially the theory is that if you make people responsible for their own community than they're going to treat it a lot better. At the moment the way this forum, and most forums are run is by arbitrarily nominating a small number of people to take the entire responsibility of the forum, which essentially disempowers the rest of the community and apathises people towards the running of their forum. You can see this in the way that barely anybody comments on any forum issues unless they were personally involved to begin with, except to make ad hominem attacks rather than attempt to look for solutions to the issue being discussed.

If we talk for a minute about ownership. The forum is really owned by everybody who posts on it. The forum is really just made up of each post. As such we're all owners on the forum, and so a better "form of government" would be to give all the owners control over the thing that they've built.

People who are given responsibility of something are much more likely to take it seriously and to show more concern about how it is governed. It forces them to make time and effort investments into the process which forces them to be more engaged and to show more care for the forum.

I don't think it matters too much where the "cut off" point is. I said 3 years, but even 6 months would be fine. I decided time joined was better than post count just because it might encourage people to needlessly post.

There are plenty of examples of this working in the real world, and I've never heard of social engagement policies like this failing. My favourite example is Antanas Mockus from Bogata, Colombia, who was the mayor there twice I think. He managed to reduce homicides in Bogata by 75%, and a whole range of other things by attempting to build collective leadership.

link; http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/200 ... ockus.html

Of course if such a radical policy was accepted, people would need to ensure that there are no mavericks, and that decisions are made with prior discussion. Of course if it doesn't work, it wouldn't be that hard to return to the old system either. I would be curious to see it put into action however, although I should confess I'm more interested in seeing how the policy plays out as a social experiment than the issue of how modified is run.