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The one thing I'm gonna miss about Ol' FAF

PastryOfApathy

By PastryOfApathy,
in The Watercooler

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PastryOfApathy Newbie

PastryOfApathy

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All those horrible threads made by spergs from the FA mainsite about "coming out" as a furfag or how to convince your parents to stop preventing you from looking at furry fetish porn. I mean some of the most memorable threads were from people acting like retards and us laughing at them (luv u sylox) and I dunno if we're gonna get too much of that anymore. Especially since we're kind of a hidden-ish community now so new blood doesn't seem as likely unless we're like advertising somewhere or some shit.

Oh well, I can type out the phrase "Chase is a dog raping cuntface" without fear of getting permabanned and really that's all that matters.

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ChaosCalix Newbie

ChaosCalix

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Honestly speaking, this is some of the shit that kept me AWAY from the old forum.

If I wanted to hang around a website full of assholes being assholes for the sake of it, I'd hang around /r/cringeanarchy, 4chan, and cesspits like that. But maybe that's just me. (and yes I know how laughably bad the posts you're referring to are, but that doesn't make people less dickish for it)

Edited by ChaosCalix
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PastryOfApathy Newbie

PastryOfApathy

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Honestly speaking, this is some of the shit that kept me AWAY from the old forum.

If I wanted to hang around a website full of assholes being assholes for the sake of it, I'd hang around /r/cringeanarchy, 4chan, and cesspits like that. But maybe that's just me. (and yes I know how laughably bad the posts you're referring to are, but that doesn't make people less dickish for it)

Every forum needs a village idiot and considering the subject matter of this forum, we could really use some boosts to our self-esteem.

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Hewge Newbie

Hewge

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I'm gonna miss being able to dig through old threads and relive some old nostalgia.

Now you can make the new nostalgia and look back on it in another 5 years, then think about all the time you've wasted by spending it on forums!

Making memories is fun ~

Edited by Hewge
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yell0wf0x Newbie

yell0wf0x

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The old faf gaming community. I liked faf cuz of the gaming forum and enternaiment threads. The other forums just doesn't have the same discussions on games, movies and other media like faf does. I'm glad almost everyone from there is here and the gaming threads are being started again. 

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Clove Darkwave Newbie

Clove Darkwave

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The old faf gaming community. I liked faf cuz of the gaming forum and enternaiment threads. The other forums just doesn't have the same discussions on games, movies and other media like faf does. I'm glad almost everyone from there is here and the gaming threads are being started again. 

I stepped out of the gaming community there when I made someone so mad in a pokemon battle they uploaded it to Youtube haha.

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belmonkey Newbie

belmonkey

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Honestly speaking, this is some of the shit that kept me AWAY from the old forum.

If I wanted to hang around a website full of assholes being assholes for the sake of it, I'd hang around /r/cringeanarchy, 4chan, and cesspits like that. But maybe that's just me. (and yes I know how laughably bad the posts you're referring to are, but that doesn't make people less dickish for it)

Woo, a voice of reason. Dunno why people have to needlessly be jerks here; it doesn't have to be a hugbox, but being a dick just because is unnecessary.

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nrr Newbie

nrr

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Honestly speaking, this is some of the shit that kept me AWAY from the old forum.

If I wanted to hang around a website full of assholes being assholes for the sake of it, I'd hang around /r/cringeanarchy, 4chan, and cesspits like that. But maybe that's just me. (and yes I know how laughably bad the posts you're referring to are, but that doesn't make people less dickish for it)

I think the biggest problem that the old FAF had was that there was definitely more of an implied reliance on the institution to maintain some degree of social order. The only problem is that the institution was direly incompetent, and in fact, it often made the situation worse. To add insult to injury, it was an offense to act in the capacity of a moderator to try to maintain social order.

The result was a lot of backlash and very little of having the community's denizens actually call out behavior it saw as unsavory. (And, trust me, a lot of us saw the insults and shitposting and just general chaos as unsavory, but the most we could do was hit the "report" button and hope for the best.)

Also, since I don't have the heart to post any more responses to Pikaduck over on that one giant trainwreck of a journal at FA:

I'll be the crotchety old bastard who was raised on Usenet and old school mailing lists since no one else is stepping up. Plainly put, you're given adequate self-moderation tools to silence individuals whom you find unsavory or otherwise not befitting your perceived ideal social interactions.

At least, you are if you register an account and make use of them.

Likewise, you can also, not to put too fine a point on it, very well choose not to respond (and hence not give credence to) to anyone in that same equivalency class. However, it seems you were already doing that by opting not to participate even in possessing an account there.

In other words, if you don't particularly like what you're reading, you can choose to filter it from your view so that it's less distracting. It's truly that simple.

Now, that said, the point being made by the FAF denizens is that they're quite tired of being arbitrarily (and forceably) silenced for myriad reasons that don't quite line up with the community's values. It's neither good nor bad; that's just how it is. The status quo has changed. The FAF denizens have declared that they want to be the ones to set the tone for their tiny universe of discourse, to follow with the responsibility of everyone to pull their neighbors aside and confront them about their behavior. This does allow folks, at least at the outset, to be rude and obnoxious--as anonymity is wont to do--but it has been and will continue to be made clear to offenders and rabble rousers that they will not be accepted unless they can bring something of substance to the conversation.

A lot of the backlash was because of a decree handed down from up high that regular denizens could not act in a way to maintain social order without facing repercussions for it. Given that the moderators were so thinly spread to answer every reported post and dish out justice as required, the quality of the community started to go down.

This is why neighborhood watches are so critical. If you don't give people an incentive (or, worse, disincentivize them from trying) to keep tabs on their homes and communities and error-check mischievous behavior that goes counter to their values, your best homes fall into disrepair as those homeowners move, and the folks who are stuck there become disenfranchized with living there. The same thing happened to the FAF, but the onset was pretty quick to happen from August 2005, when it originally went online, because of the overly controlling nature of the moderation team.

(Unrelated: It's kind of amazing to think that it actually managed to last 10 whole years.)

The best contributors there seldom ever responded or paid attention to the rampant shitposting and would instead continue to produce good posts with informative, insightful, or genuinely funny content. As a result, the unsavory parts rarely affected them. These folks were also likelier to be the ones to call out bad behavior through private messages or otherwise devise ways to keep the offensive content at bay.

Having been around these parts since 2005, I can say that I've actually had a decent amount of critical, thoughtful exchanges on the FAF, the likes of which I will likely never read again. Did I have to wade through a lot of shit in the meanwhile? Yes, but given that I've been on the Internet longer than most of these kids have even been alive, I just consider it par for the course.

Additionally, this is kind of how things in real life work when your universe of discourse includes people who subscribe to anything outside of your core ideology. If you don't like what they have to say, don't talk to them and ignore them if appropriate.

 I'll just leave it at that.

Well I'd hope being there since '09 would give me oldfag status.

Regdate 05 here. My oldfag status is more oldfaggier than thy oldfag status. :B

Woo, a voice of reason. Dunno why people have to needlessly be jerks here; it doesn't have to be a hugbox, but being a dick just because is unnecessary.

Those folks were getting attention (i.e., positive reinforcement) for being jerks, so it begat more jerkitude. You can't successfully combat that kind of thing with any institutional punishment other than hellbanning and short-lived suspensions, and unfortunately, no one ever did that.

Unfortunately, the denizens never really made good use of the self-moderation tools available to them to keep those distractions at bay.

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ChaosCalix Newbie

ChaosCalix

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I think the biggest problem that the old FAF had was that there was definitely more of an implied reliance on the institution to maintain some degree of social order. The only problem is that the institution was direly incompetent, and in fact, it often made the situation worse. To add insult to injury, it was an offense to act in the capacity of a moderator to try to maintain social order.

The result was a lot of backlash and very little of having the community's denizens actually call out behavior it saw as unsavory. (And, trust me, a lot of us saw the insults and shitposting and just general chaos as unsavory, but the most we could do was hit the "report" button and hope for the best.)

....

Those folks were getting attention (i.e., positive reinforcement) for being jerks, so it begat more jerkitude. You can't successfully combat that kind of thing with any institutional punishment other than hellbanning and short-lived suspensions, and unfortunately, no one ever did that.

Unfortunately, the denizens never really made good use of the self-moderation tools available to them to keep those distractions at bay.

Basically, this. No one really wants to be in that position where the entire culture of your website has reached a self-sustaining level of "jerkitude", as you put it, and have to try correct its course. No matter what you do, it's kind of a no-win situation. On the one hand, you can do nothing, but if the goal is to improve it, that's clearly not ideal. On the other... The only way to really send a message is to crack down on it, and then you're going to get hellish levels of backlash.

With a new forum, this may be a chance to make a better start. We aren't so far gone anymore.
With better guidelines, and a new start, we can make this place better.

Edited by ChaosCalix
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