Forum Overview :: Site Comments :: A Brief Conversation About Caltrops Power Dynamics

[quote name="Zsenitan"][quote name="lurker"]The Cables are killing the site. All day long, it's just those two idiots posting. I can easily predict their inane replies to this thread. If banning them isn't an option, then some of you guys need to have a conversation with them, to get them to tone it down. They're not funny, they haven't been funny for a while, and now they're dominating every thread. I mean, do what you like, but I'm certain they're driving people away.[/quote] QT3 and Caltrops have a lot in common: they're both primarily gaming sites with wide-ranging forums, they're both skewed to an older and more thoughtful audience, they both have administrators who are elderly white men who made their money during the 1974-1982 British technology boom. So far so good. QT3 is unfiltered and censored, Caltrops is filtered and uncensored. That's the big difference between them. By "filtered" and "unfiltered", I'm referring to the tendency of either popular to self-censor. At QT3 people will just post any old stuff that comes into their heads. The incessant communication is softly social, allowing people to make "friends" and forge "alliances" and generate "drama" as posters gravitate into cliques with mutual interests and positions. The tendency of Tom Chick to censor and involve himself in threads leads to Tom-Pleasing Discourse - everything is shaped back to his tastes and lead by his biases, almost none of which ought to be indulged. At Caltrops, posters tend to control their posting more closely, sticking to subjects, opinions, and commentary that are inherently interesting, or funny, or clever. The soft-social side of things is carried out on IM, and even that is ruthlessly pillage-edited and posted on the forum. The upshot of this is that the average Caltrops post is assumed to be worth reading free of excessive context or the imposition of popularity. The lack of censorship allows the individual poster is allowed to post about anything he pleases, so conversations are wide-ranging and do not take the administrator's interests as a compass. tl;dr QT3 has many posts and posters, few of which are worth reading; Caltrops has few posts and posters, many of which are worth reading. In this system, the Cables operate like sparx in Qix: they descend on stagnant posters like wolves, and constantly drop traps for the dopey and naive. At the very least, they will drive you into the blackness where the Qix (all the other incredibly hostile posters) moves darkly. I'm sorry, but learning to deal with the Cables is an important part of finding one's place in the ecosystem here. To remove them would not only damage the basic structure of Caltrops ("Liberace, egalite, fraternite") but also denude us of a precious front-line defense. Can't be done![/quote]