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Video: Glenn Greenwald Is Grilled on BBC Newsnight, Spews Insults Like a Firehose

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goddamnedfrank10/03/2013 11:58:52 pm PDT

Off topic rant incoming:

Based on the number of comments my ignore list filters out Fark has become around 18% pure DERP. Maybe more, this is just a spot check.

I have over 400 users on my ignore list (400!), which is the only thing keeping the place (particularly the politics tap) visitable on an even occasional basis.

You can’t find a center through false equivalence, the Fark experiment with a Commie/Fascist axis and link self reporting was a laughable failure from the beginning, and they stuck with it for years.

You can’t create a community by deliberately refusing to moderate all but the most extreme (or more often, critical) content. You can’t foist off the moderation on the user base through ignore lists either, and since it’s impossible to train people not to quote assholes you’re going to see the comments from assholes anyway, only the threads become less redundant.

You have to make a choice, like Charles did here, are you going to sacrifice your personal integrity or are you going to sacrifice the page views generated by professional trolls. Are you going to legitimize the dumbing down of your user base through controversy and ignorance while fostering a bifurcated, angry dystopian blog attracting a user base that is only capable of taking past one another.

I’ve really come to hate what Fark has become, in it’s early days, before the tabs, the ignore lists and the false equivalence worship it was a fun place. One of the few early blogs to see the community building potential in digital imaging, the Photoshop threads were a lot of fun. Now it is mostly shit.