Someone wrote in [personal profile] rionaleonhart 2023-03-09 06:23 pm (UTC)

This is definitely an interesting conversation.

First of all, for the light-hearted: I'm glad to see you also were a member of a Final Fantasy forum back in the day, it doesn't surprise me at all! The one I spent my time is also a now defunct forum, but I don't think it was the same one: I believe mine may have been Final Fantasy Addiction? Most of the users were in their upper teens (as in about 17) or young adults and I was 12, and they used to laugh at me a bit as I acted more mature than they did and didn't get involved in a lot of joking about. (Not because of any sort of moral highground, but I am quite a serious person, and was really gravely serious when I was 12: I struggled to interact anyway due to ASD!)

Moderation of forums is definitely an interesting topic. There's definitely an element of playing up to an audience, but who is that audience? And a lot of the time we don't necessarily realise we're being unkind or rude; I've had my share of online interactions very early in my internet days that retrospectively I realise were quite rude, but genuinely wouldn't have occurred to me.

Going to be vague here, but I used to be a forum moderator for an extremely large game forum whose messageboards were, at the time, extremely busy. I learned quite a lot about how I wanted to approach people, and from working out what areas I was strong at moderating versus other areas, I developed my own style of moderation that was fairly informal and non-threatening sounding, and warned in very light hearted ways so that when I was dealing with that same community (who could be extremely volatile) when I went "That's enough, drop it" (aka. still fairly unformal but now abrupt and clear) they knew a line had been crossed before I had to go further. To moderate effectively where I did you had to survive a trial by fire and earn the respect of the posters for them to tolerate you moderating them in the first place - it was definitely an experience that taught me a lot although it was extremely draining as I cared so much I couldn't separate well from it sometimes. I also took a fairly hands off approach at times, deliberately leaving some of the technical rule breaking as it suited me for them to think I wasn't aware of it while it tipped me off on what/where/who to keep an eye on and aware of any ongoing incidents.

When I was still a relatively young internet user I developed my own internet philosophy and I still go by it today: "Before you post something, ask yourself would somebody punch you in the face if you said it in real life? If yes, don't post it online." Served me quite well!

I actively avoid Tumblr so can't comment on how that works, but I do have some familiarity with Twitter, and I think that Twitter profiles are more like public performances than an interaction. Same with stuff like Facebook: it's different to something like a messageboard where fans of something may get together; it centres on an individual rather than on, say, a hobby. It's made worse with Twitter with being able to search and so coming across random people, as well as it generally being inconvenient for things like fandom as Twitter lives in the moment, very much - if you look something up a week later it may be buried. Or it may not be, and it may be picked at and shamed. Very different to forums. I consider them completely different beasts and when I talk about social media, I don't mean forums - they're their own category for me.

Stuff like Twitter also often ends up either an echo chamber where everyone only hears people fawning over how right they are or toxic where people mock or dispute those opinions, but never in a "let's have an intelligent discussion" way, always in a case of one-upsmanship as if they're trying to see who gets the most likes while doing it. I honestly think being able to upvote things is half the problem: it becomes competitive.

I feel like the internet is much more toxic than it was when I was growing up. I think it's partially to do with the type of platforms people flock to having changed (and them being more interaction based), the internet now being a part of most people's lives (as opposed to it being taboo and geeky when I was young) and people growing up with internet where the parents haven't and have only come to it later and there's a genuine lack of understanding of what goes on, what repercussions your actions may have (from a young age, even affecting employability etc), and of there needing to be a conversation about how to treat people. Age restrictions often don't help as people don't heed them and since they shouldn't be on those kinds of sites anyway, netiquette simply isn't taught at a young enough age. It should be taught before any interacting with the internet is done. And I can tell you as someone who works in a school, platforms such as Snapchat and Whatsapp cause absolute heaps of trouble and it often spills out offline and parents getting involved or people not realising that what they've sent is readily available to view. This happens from a lot younger than people would think and can cause huge issues and police involvement - we've had to get community police in before in relation to online conduct.

The internet is very important to me and it's sad to see the way people interact on it nowadays. I'm grateful for places like this to come and have a friendly chat.

PS: Unrelatedly, how did you find the latest Zodiac Trial route?

-timydamonkey

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