On the sickness of our community

> Mind if I ask for specifics on what sorts of online communities you're
> thinking of when you say this?

I too wonder a bit about what people are using as a basis of comparison.

I think many of the old timers around here, when making comparisons, are possibly going the whole way back to USENET and BBSes.

Back then the idea of finding another place, where you could discuss technical things with like minded people in a semi-anonymous way, was a great thing. It is true you had to put up with trolls, flame wars, and the endless Amiga/OS2 fanatics, but that was what killfiles were for.

When endless September arrived and the real world started leaking in things just never quite recovered.

It is true that with the corporate takeover of Linux and the ensuing attitude enforcement things will be much nicer for outsiders.

It's just once we get a world where Linus is always cheerful, Al Viro doesn't flame, and David Miller removes all strong language comments from the Sparc-Linux sources, I feel something will be lost. Maybe it is the destiny of everything to leave its wild-west roots. I always used Linux because it was fun; I feel like the push for universal blandness is just making things boring and I've found myself losing interest in Linux development, something I hadn't really thought was possible.

I'm mostly thinking of gaming communities - the ones I interact with (like Civilization) are somewhat skewed more in favour of adult participants versus the more console-oriented areas that have to deal with things like this gamergate nonsense.

Also, other hobbyist communities, principally related to electronics, such as Arduino/wearables/assorted open hardware initiatives, plus recently some more traditional analogue electronics.

One thing most of these have in common is *some* degree of moderation, which is commonly hated by the ultra-libertarian elements of the FOSS community (where this ideology is unusually prevalent), but which appears to be a practical necessity in growing a community past a certain size when none of the participants can ever see each other's faces (seeing each other's faces acts like a natural form of moderation IRL, especially in combination with the impermanence of the spoken word).

There doesn't usually need to be *much* moderation though: the maker community seems to be generally very good, even with very little visible moderation. The gaming communities I suspect could devolve more easily, but in practice even very little light moderation is generally enough so long as it is consistent and has well-defined rules.

Moderation is a lot easier to get right if it's baked in to the system from the start, because then you're not trying to get people to *change*, but to behave in a certain way in the first place. It also only works when it is transparent (eg there is an explicit 'post removed/edited by ...') and the moderators are actually good at it - don't act emotionally, are specific about why they are taking some action, and are polite. The latter is extremely important, and I'm not just talking about using polite *words*, which many people seem to feel is enough, but being *genuinely* polite: just because you insulted somebody without using the word 'fucking', it is no less of an insult. Somebody whose post is being moderated should never be made to feel like they are being victimised because it's counter-productive.