Free speech, take 2
A little over a year ago I wrote this post about F169 BBS, a forum dedicated to near-absolute free speech. Four months later, despite an abundance of interesting stuff on the site, I had to judge the experiment a failure. It turns out that when a forum allows absolutely anything, it gets taken over by lunatic-fringe elements like neo-Nazis and conspiracy-theory cranks, and stays taken over, because most people who don't fit into those categories get run off by the constant heckling and general idiocy.
Well, forum founder "Hans" has decided to try a new experiment -- a new forum called FastChatters which has a similar philosophy except that it's heavily moderated to exclude "hate speech", including racism, as the intro post explains. Hopefully this should allow for a broader range of weird and wacky content without the place degenerating into a toxic waste dump for the worst sorts of bigots.
I think it's important to encourage experiments like this. We can't talk about serious stuff all the time, and I have a soft spot for things offbeat, colorful, trivial, and a tad daring, as this blog occasionally shows (though not often enough). So I'm glad that "Hans" (reincarnated as "Spud" on the new BBS) is giving it another try. I'm looking forward to finding more of that weird and wacky stuff there, without having to slog through page after page of repetitious rants about imaginary Jewish conspiracies to get to it.
Well, forum founder "Hans" has decided to try a new experiment -- a new forum called FastChatters which has a similar philosophy except that it's heavily moderated to exclude "hate speech", including racism, as the intro post explains. Hopefully this should allow for a broader range of weird and wacky content without the place degenerating into a toxic waste dump for the worst sorts of bigots.
I think it's important to encourage experiments like this. We can't talk about serious stuff all the time, and I have a soft spot for things offbeat, colorful, trivial, and a tad daring, as this blog occasionally shows (though not often enough). So I'm glad that "Hans" (reincarnated as "Spud" on the new BBS) is giving it another try. I'm looking forward to finding more of that weird and wacky stuff there, without having to slog through page after page of repetitious rants about imaginary Jewish conspiracies to get to it.
posted by Infidel753 at 4:56 PM
2 Comments:
"when a forum allows absolutely anything, it gets taken over by lunatic-fringe elements like neo-Nazis and conspiracy-theory cranks, and stays taken over..."
This was the experience of both my wife and me on USENET. It first drove us to alt.usenet.kooks, where we mocked and recognized the insanity, then off USENET entirely, when the kooks went beyond mean and crazy to a bunch of vicious doxxers, at least some of whom were willing to file nuisance suits. I wasn't willing to be sued for a hobby.
Doxxing is still a problem here and there. I think the knuckle-draggers who dominate the red-board scene are mostly too dumb and lazy for that, though. Their tactic is just to run people off by flooding threads with anti-Semitic nonsense until discussion becomes impossible.
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