The Shrine

This is something that's gone on for at least 25 years. I can tell you this for certain, because I was a pioneer in this dickheaded toxic behaviour dating all the way back to 1995/96.

Basically arguing and encouraging the argument to continue with questions, accusations of cowardice, and pivoting to other angles in the argument, until you "win" in a war of attrition against your opponent.

No doubt, one of the earliest uses of a meme photo occurred in this very forum, when someone posted this in a thread I was arguing in. At the very least, it was one of the earliest uses of this meme.


Despite this behaviour becoming well known, it seems in 2021 society still hasn't figured out any easier ways of shutting it down - really time-out temporary bans were the best methods, but social media is more wild-west than it used to be.

I've noticed that this sort of behaviour now heavily infects nearly every single platform (not heavily moderated ones or relics of the Internet's ancient past like The Shrine), especially political channels. It's usually people responding to each other for (sometimes) 200-300 back-and-forths sometimes in less than 1 week. The pages and pages of wasted time for something that won't even matter unless you're monetizing it. Which many youtubers now do. But the shere volume of time wasting in social media...

Anyway, our Shrine is now empty of this behaviour, and I think, despite having like 100-300 posts a year for the past decade or so, it almost seems we're more productive and have more meaningful posts here than many other communities with 10,000+ posts per month because we don't engage in this activity any longer, and flush all our positions down the tube.

I think message board format isn't very conducive for meaningful discussion in a high volume area, because if you're in an actual busy place by the time you replied something there might be 2 pages of stuff already, and who's going to continue following up on that? On something like reddit, even if you somehow had a good conversation going with someone else on the 50th post, it's very unlikely anyone else will be joining in because it's buried way deep and you need to hit a button just to see what is even going on in the conversation. Even if a few guys miraculously all have meaningful things to say, chances are someone's going to get tired of looking up for stuff from a page ago to reply something at some point.

An even more ancient relic of the past, the mailing list, would probably be better if the point is to actually get meaningful conversation done while having a high volume of participants. In this case you can just skip the email that doesn't look like it has anything to do with you but reply to either the subthread or the guys you care about and other people can still jump in if they see something interesting. Reddit, in particular, is a very bad form to communicate on. It seems like it's a medium better designed to farm karma points than getting anything done. Sometimes things magically have useful response because people all accidentally upvoted the useful answer, but that's more of an accident than any inherent property of the medium.

Also I think another issue is that maybe because of twitter but people seem to post with roughly the same length as the limit of twitter is, and it's pretty hard to have a discussion in two sentences. Yes, part of being good at writing is being able to communicate in concise terms, but that's more like using several pages instead of tens or hundreds of pages when we're dealing with things that are actually reasonably difficult to explain. Even if you're asking a relatively simple question like 'who is the strongest guy in Street Fighter 5?', a response like "Ryu" is generally not very useful unless the answer is so self-evident that you don't need to elaborate on that.

Do you have much experience with mailing lists?

I'm actually looking into creating some mailing lists for certain discussion topics. I'm just not really sure how to start one up. They're kind of fun. I'm also at that stage in my life where I want to have some kind of commercial incentive to doing most of what I do - or at least the potential for it; but I am not really sure if mailing lists are very good for that unless marketing some kind of product.

I've run them before on a very large scale (tens of thousands of people, if not 100,000+), but its scope was probably more limited when expanding to the global population. It had filters and such based on user location and whether they had paid their membership fees and such. Sending out newsletters and targeted invites to various social events and such; but I was taking over a position on an established platform. I acted as a bit of a content creator and director of the content (I forced someone into being my producer, even though they literally gave me absolute power over the mailing list, allowing me to send out whatever I wanted - which scared me senseless, because I'm so used to working in a corporate system where absolutely every piece of content has at least 2 layers of approval); and didn't really know much about the tech involved (aside from using it). But I saw the potential of the mailing list as a viable platform for discussion, and even marketing.

I've been some mailing list way early on but they all sort of died out since message boards become the preferred medium and even that kind of faded away. Seems like the effort to gather up a good community for a mailing list (or anything else) would be too extensive to do in the first place. Ultimately I think the people you have is the most important part and people these days seem to be way too fragmented.