Poisoning the well of discourse

[womzilla]

Someone on rec.arts.comics.marvel.universe recently posted an article entitled "Why do so many people have a problem with Marvel?" In the first paragraph, in part, he says:

In the last month I've spent over $100 easily getting new issues and catching up on a few stories from the preceding months. . . . But in reading some of the posts here, it seems that many people are greatly disliking the Marvel stories currently being told. Why? I have my problems here and there but for the most part, I have been greatly entertained.

Not completely coincidentally, novelist and game designer Bruce Baugh addressed this subject on his weblog recently, in the context of a new product he was the lead designer on.

The game was a new version of the 1980 "classic" Gamma World. After a post about some positive feedback, he talks about the other side:

There are a handful of ranters right now, like Sidhain on Pyramid Online, Kevin Mowery there and on RPG Net, and Buzz on RPG Net and the Sword & Sorcery forum, who post and post and POST and POST. Let anyone express satisfaction, and they're in there to explain why that's all wrong; given the absence of new targets, they go into bonus rounds of congratulating each other, maligning me and/or White Wolf and/or Wizards of the Coast, and otherwise beating the conceptual meat. So the hostility is always there, and usually renewed at that, while any expression of pleasure is generally a one-shot sort of thing. There are some exceptions to this latter, but not enough.

Focus goes along with this. The happy customers aren't primarily interested in the net discussion: they're primarily interested in the game, reading and if possible playing it. For the folks who hate the game, on the other hand, the forum is what they've got.

<http://homepage.mac.com/bbaugh/iblog/c720713518/e1363837581/index.html>

Bruce is a very smart cookie.

My immediate reaction was a censor's reaction: "This is what you get when you don't moderate forums." Then I realized that, while Usenet is unmoderated (for the most part; r.a.c.m.u is unmoderated), there are a lot of people volunteering to line up to kick, say, Windbag100's ass whenever he spews false nonsense about "the NuMarvel". I wonder why there aren't such people on the more moderated forums like Pyramid, RPG Net, and Sword & Sorcery. I suspect part of it is what Bruce correctly identifies as focus--most of the goblins (they're like trolls, but less dangerous) on r.a.c.m.u are attacking Marvel as a whole, which there are a lot of people willing to defend. If someone were to follow up every post about, say, Alias (one of Marvel's best titles) with a long screed about how god-awful it is, there'd be fewer people willing and able to defend it, and in the long run the goblins would be more likely to "win", which is to say, succeed in making reasonable discourse on the subject impossible.

There are other problems. It often takes more time and effort to counter the posts of a goblin or a troll than it takes the goblin or troll to write them. I know that I've been in Usenet arguments in which several rounds of untangling unstated assumptions, clarifications of positions, and other teeth-pulling are required to get the goblin properly situated for clear refutation. In a moderated forum, the moderators might not put up with the several rounds of back-and-forth which are vital to the complete unravelling of a spewer's spew. One would hope, though, that in a moderated forum. the moderator would take steps to curtail the goblinations. But maybe not.

All of this is just some chewing on the problems we all face as global reach completely reinvents the ideas of conversation. Talk amongst yourselves.

Comments

[avram]

I don’t know exactly what that $100 was spent on, but anyone who could spend anywhere near $100 on a month’s current Marvel pamphlets has much broader standards for quality than I do.

On the other hand, if I hadn’t bought any Marvel comics for the past, say, five years, I could easily blow $100 on really good Marvel collections in one trip. The two New X-Men hardcovers would account for half; toss in all the TPBs of Ultimate X-Men, Black Panther, and Marvel Boy, and you’re well over $100.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

The original poster did say and "catching up on a few stories from the preceding months", which I assumed meant tpbs.

I have much broader standards than you do and am buying more Marvels than I did at any point in the last decade, or possibly decade-and-a-half, and I'm not spending $100/month on them.

[del-c.livejournal.com]

When the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written was going through a bad patch of goblins posting and posting and POSTING, I proposed a moderation scheme I thought was simplicity itself: you count the posts made by everyone, and tell them to stop when they've posted enough for the week. IMO It has the virtue of being purely mechanical and in no way requiring a judgement on the *content* of the poster's articles, thus forestalling any cries of moderator bias.

Face-to-face conversations often suffer from something similar, where a few individuals shout everybody down. A solution that's often adopted is the "speaking object", a fluffy toy or other object that allows the holder to speak, and no-one else. If you want to say something, you have to get the speaking object off the current holder, and a chairman can order the holder to throw it across the room to the supplicant.

I saw the articles-per-week cap as the equivalent for an asynchronous text forum. I even seem to recall such a thing being an informal point of netiquette in some early newsgroups, but I can't find proof of that.

My idea never caught on, and the goblins subsided on rasfw by-and-by, but I still think its an idea with potential for other fora.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Given my own posting style--a lot of relatively short posts--I'd prefer to see a total word-count cap rather than a total-posts cap, but that would more strongly encourage the type of superficiality which favors goblins and trolls.

One reason that a "talking stick" is not necessarily as good an approach in online fora as in face-to-face fora is that in most online venues, everyone can speak at any time, so it's not possible to literally stop others from talking by talking over them. However, your point that a flood of posts from The Beasts that Will Not Shut Up can stifle discussion is a valid one, and I'll chew on that.

Of course, one of the reasons I like newsgroups more than web fora is that every newsreader I've ever used has killfiles, while only some web fora do.

[kent-allard-jr.livejournal.com]

Not sure this is relevant to the issue, but...

I remember Bruce Baugh from his A&E days, and liked him. But based on the response to Adventure!, on the pulp-RPG mailing list, I have to say he doesn't take criticism very well. And I've read the posts on RPGnet; they were responses to a negative review of Baugh's Gamma World. While the product had its defenders, most posters (and not just "a few ranters") assumed that the review was accurate and the game wasn't very good. (Personally, I haven't read the game -- I've already got 4 versions of Gamma World on my shelf, and don't want another -- so I don't have an opinion.)

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

I haven't read the game, either, and I'm capable of believing that Bruce could produce a bad game, or could produce a game that he likes and almost no one else on Earth will. But a friend of mine posted this on his LJ a few days ago:

I've been doing a lot of thinking about the steaming pile of controversy over the new Gamma World. To me, it boils down to the exact same arguments I saw when Hunter:The Reckoning came out. "It's not [Hunters Hunted Revised][the Gamma World I played as a kid][exactly what I wanted] so it's totally broken and anyone who says different is a suck-weasel." Well, it's not totally broken. I could totally run a rockem-sockem Gamma World campaign. But the raw meanness I've seen on various fora make me more than a little concerned about seeing how they will take some future work of mine.

Rick isn't completely disinterested, but he's also bothered by the venom of the discourse.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I've underestimated the degree to which Rick is "not disinterested", since he actually worked on the project.