Subject: Politics
Author:
Posted on: 2008-08-11 06:07:00 UTC
Well, having been through at least my share of forum politics, I've formed a few hypotheses about that particular problem. The most important is that the cause of forum politics is not the forum itself, but the innate politics in the organization that populates the forums.
Take Usenet as an example, back in the golden age before the Eternal September. Unmoderated newsgroups were about as much of a free-for-all as has ever existed. Some of them were nightmares of flaming, sniping, infighting, and general asshattery. Others were some of the most civilized discussion groups I've ever seen. Since they all had the same structure, or rather lack thereof, the only significant difference was the population. The same is true of Web forums. For example, at various times, I've been a mod or admin in a number of online game forums. Those whose populations consisted of people who were big on in-game drama brought it to the boards, and there was more than enough forum drama to last a lifetime. Others, whose populations consisted of people who basically liked each other and weren't trying to be jerks (my former WoW guild, for instance) had no forum drama at all; there was a general agreement on how to go about things, so that's how it got done.
The way to reduce politics, I think, is simply to make it useless. What would be the point of politics on a PPC forum anyway? Make those decisions that need to be made -- should we add a new forum section for legendary badfic nominations? -- by consensus. Forum mods could be appointed by the same mechanism as PG's are. Or we could do entirely without mods, for that matter, and just deal with troublemakers the same as we do now. Or something in between, where there's a mod or two to take care of spam, but anything by a real user is left alone. Look around you: is there any problem with politics now? Changing whether we have an EDIT button and organized sections won't change people's attitudes, or make us all into different people.
I was using the term "cabal" jokingly. Whoever would maintain the website and hosting, and being root admin of the forum, wouldn't have any more of a voice than anyone else. I hope we, as a group, would be able to choose people who wouldn't want to expand that role to anything more than keeping things running and implementing any changes, like a new section, that the group consensus called for. Having a member of a group who takes on a job that needs to be done (like keeping a website paid-for) doesn't diminish the anarchy as long as their role is understood to be akin to that of groundskeeper rather than owner: a duty and a service, not a position of authority.
In other words, go along just the same as the PPC has always done, except that a couple of trusted people handle the technical stuff on behalf of the group. A better forum won't cause political drama to spontaneously generate any more than moving some politics-riddled forum to a system like this would cause it to go away. It's the people, not the medium.
Oh, and just so the massive cash flow doesn't cause drama of its own: Anyone who contributes five bucks during the annual fund drive gets listed on the forum, so the bill-payer (who would obviously have to be a Money Plant!) never gets accused of collecting a few extra contributions than are needed and splurging on a double-cheese pizza.