Tetsuo
6th August 2006, 22:29
(Fairly sure this is the right forum, if not sorry)
I've been told that this site tries to be as democratic as possible (elected mods, the commie club, all that jazz), I find this quite interesting because of my own experience with an attempt to make a democratic, politically focussed bulletin board.
The tolling gang (TTG) was a bulletin board set up by a group of posters who were pissed off with the way that another bulletin board (urban75, if that means anything to anyone) was run and the degeneration of the politics forum on there into a few well informed people arguing back and forth with liberals. The idea was to have a bulletin board which was run by it's membership and focussed strongly on "robust political debate".
Initially the site was run by the people who set it up (the Junta), who elected the mods, set board policy, could undo mod decisions with a majority vote, etc., after a while, these powers were expanded to all members who had at least 500 posts and six months membership (with a few exceptions who were "blackballed" by a majority vote). These people comprised the "Citizen's Council" (CC, funny coincidence, eh?).
After a while, a few "anarcho-stalinists" (I swear to God, this is what they insisted on calling themselves) who had been consistantly disruptive (and kicked off both the admin team and then the CC for doing so) began to spam the boards with threads about policy in innapropriate forums and derailing interesting political threads into threads about board policy. With the site increasingly disappearing up its own arse, the site owner and the admin team agreed to scrap the website and set up a new one, this time without any of the democracy stuff.
As melodramatic as the above account sounds, what I'm really interested in is how this compares to people's experience of this site. Are the ways of running things here similar and why do you think what happened to TTG has never occurred here?
I've been told that this site tries to be as democratic as possible (elected mods, the commie club, all that jazz), I find this quite interesting because of my own experience with an attempt to make a democratic, politically focussed bulletin board.
The tolling gang (TTG) was a bulletin board set up by a group of posters who were pissed off with the way that another bulletin board (urban75, if that means anything to anyone) was run and the degeneration of the politics forum on there into a few well informed people arguing back and forth with liberals. The idea was to have a bulletin board which was run by it's membership and focussed strongly on "robust political debate".
Initially the site was run by the people who set it up (the Junta), who elected the mods, set board policy, could undo mod decisions with a majority vote, etc., after a while, these powers were expanded to all members who had at least 500 posts and six months membership (with a few exceptions who were "blackballed" by a majority vote). These people comprised the "Citizen's Council" (CC, funny coincidence, eh?).
After a while, a few "anarcho-stalinists" (I swear to God, this is what they insisted on calling themselves) who had been consistantly disruptive (and kicked off both the admin team and then the CC for doing so) began to spam the boards with threads about policy in innapropriate forums and derailing interesting political threads into threads about board policy. With the site increasingly disappearing up its own arse, the site owner and the admin team agreed to scrap the website and set up a new one, this time without any of the democracy stuff.
As melodramatic as the above account sounds, what I'm really interested in is how this compares to people's experience of this site. Are the ways of running things here similar and why do you think what happened to TTG has never occurred here?