This is more or less what it boils down to. What you have with #nes is an IRC channel where effectively 80-85% of all of the people who post and participate regularly in NESes are online at some point or another every week. Many are on everyday. For something comparable to happen in OT you'd have to have a good 30-40 people being regularly logged into #fiftychat rather than what you do have which is 10-15, with about half of those being former OTers who long since quit posting. The results are stark. In OT I may see a poster say something everyday, and I may form an opinion about them based on what I see. There are people I like, whose opinions I tend to agree with, and people I dislike whose opinions tend to irritate me. But at the end of the day I don't know these people. They are faces in the crowd to me. With #nes are people whom I talk to everyday. We share stories, we talk about our days, we open up, talk about our personal lives. We revel in each other's ups and we commiserate in each other's downs. I've known some of these people for 5 years now, and I would consider them to be among my closest friends, in real life or online. So yeah, I would say that it's something different than what you get in OT.
The other side of it is the profile of a typical NESer. I know the joke is to describe OTers as intellectuals, and it's a joke precisely because it's inaccurate. OT is a wide assortment of characters ranging wildly in age and level of education. From 13 year olds who are just starting high school, to high school smartasses, to collegiate freedom fighters to hardworking professionals to parents to cynical retirees. The NESer profile is much more focused. Male, mostly aged 20-27. Highly educated with many in or seeking postgraduate education, most with a strong background in humanities disciplines. They like to think of themselves as emotionally matured and with a strong sense of morality and ethics. They've worked hard to get where they are, whether that be in terms of their profession, their education, or their hobby. They want to be approached and treated by staff as adults, not as petulant children who need their toys taken away, as OT is treated. This is the reason BJ was considered a popular and well-liked mod. He was a member of the community who understood the thought process and internal dynamics of the NESing community. His reaction to bad behavior was not to burn everything to the ground immediately, but to approach the wrongdoer person-to-person and come to an understanding. NESers largely see themselves as being above infraction. Not in a haughty, anti-establishment sense, but rather in the same way as a parent wouldn't ground their 25-year old child. They've matured beyond that stage. This is a community; close friends who have known and worked with each other for years, a decade in some cases, not a loose collective of mostly-strangers. They know where the line is drawn and are loathe to cross it unless they feel it necessary to do so, and so honestly the best way for a mod to behave in NES is to understand this. Attacks or infractible offenses largely aren't the random line-pushing "for the lulz" that you get in OT, but rather a measured action with a logic performed to achieve a specific end. A NESing mod should recognize this and try to come to a more complete understanding of what is going on, rather than barging in and throwing down infractions left right and center, as might happen in OT.
Thanks for that reply - it certainly helps me to understand the mindset of the NES community and how it differs from OT. It more or less confirms my broader impressions about how they differ but adds a lot of detail I wouldn’t have known about.
I can easily understand some of the problems that I’ve seen voiced about the rules. Leaving aside PDMA for now, they are geared to deal with immature “lulz” behavior like trolling and spam, and I see how enforcing them against the NES community in the same way as they are on the rest of the site comes across as condescending. I’ll take a bit of a detour and talk about rules I’ve seen complained about in both OT and NES.
Probably the most obvious example is the site-wide prohibition of profanity. Although I’m all in favor of forcing people to behave civilly and avoid insults towards each other, banning people from using certain common words seems over the top to me. I don’t know of many people of any age demographic who are offended by swear words, although some parents dislike the idea of their kids hearing them. In an attempt to keep the site “family friendly”, we have a rule against swearing that would seem childish to most teenagers, let alone anyone older.
At the same time it’s a very “objective” rule to enforce: if someone says a word on the autocensor list, it’s a minor infraction or warning and the word is snipped as if to protect sensitive eyes. On the other hand, it’s a lot harder to get infracted for a racist post if the poster puts in a minimum amount of effort to avoid actually naming the target race through dog-whistle terms. I infract racism and other bigotry whenever it’s obvious enough to make the infraction stick, but it’s frustrating as a moderator to have to let thinly-disguised bigotry go while infracting impolite and/or profane replies.
Regarding NES, I see very little evidence for moderator interference in any of the game threads other than to enforce inclusivity. Obviously I am an outsider and there could be quite a bit I don’t know about, but as it is I can’t see much basis for complaint about moderation in any of the threads having to do with the games themselves. As for the old WWW thread, it was functioning like a mini-OT with the same sorts of flamewars. The demographics may have been somewhat different, but the behavior was the same, and it’s hard to see that it should have been moderated any differently than OT when it got out of hand in August. BSmith did try to stay away from moderating that thread as much as he could, but was eventually forced to intervene.
This is around the time a PDMA thread would have been most helpful. People could have asked questions and lodged complaints during the initial disturbance in August and the staff could have replied before the pressure built to the point that people were resigning and leaving the site, and constructive dialogue may have been possible. It also might not have been - for instance, Amon’s opinions would still have been allowed because, in the opinion of most of the staff members, he was not advocating terrorist violence but rather saying that defensive violence against government actions can be legitimate. This is allowable - otherwise, we’d have to disallow a range of other opinions (e.g. revolutionary communism) for also containing theoretical support for violence under some circumstances, and OT would be a less interesting place. If this was an issue worth leaving the site over, people may still have left. Still, any explosion would likely have been less severe.
I do need to say that although I personally support some sort of relatively strictly-moderated PDMA thread, a staff consensus has not been reached yet and might not be. Changing the rules is very difficult around here, as I’m sure you’re all aware. People who find the CFC ruleset completely intolerable and have somewhere they would rather go (be it The Frontier or anywhere else) might prefer to leave, and I for one would certainly respect that even though we would obviously all prefer that everyone stay.
