re: #175 goddamnedfrank

I think the reason that a lot of the people who are here now came here is because it was fucking amazing to actually see an online community in flux. I’ve never seen anything remotely like it. It took a very unique combination of blog owner and the right kind and number of reasonable commenters to execute the kind of change that took place here. It’s easy to imagine this place dying completely as a result of the lines in the sand Charles drew.

The fights against Creationism, Christian Supremacy and the European neo-fascist right alienated a huge chunk of a community that had come to view the place as theirs. It’s no coincidence that Blogmocracy originally had named itself LGF 2.0, they felt that their home had been stolen by one random dude, ignoring the fact that it never belonged to them. It’s easy to imagine that without a solid number of moderates and liberals already in place and contributing to those debates that this place could easily have ended up another deserted blog on internet. Instead, while the old numbers haven’t come back the discussion here is actually thriving, and the community is more diverse and interesting than ever.

I used to be on Fark, which just got fucking trolled to death. Even back when the real weirdos like Bagua and Walter and the like were here, you didn’t just get page after page of low-effort trolling. As wrong as they were, and as nutty as some of them were, they could actually articulate their arguments enough for a debate to happen. They were presenting arguments honestly.

Something about the stripped-down format, too, lends itself well to drawing attention to people’s fuckups. With one main thread at a time, with others easily eye-able, it’s hard for someone to slip by classic cockups without getting noticed for them. On a place like Fark, with hundreds of things going on at once, it was a lot more effort to remember who made the good, and who made the horrible arguments, so much that people made plugins to color-code people.

Even back when I was being downdinged for stating that most US Jews were leftist, there was something worthwhile engaging here.