The obsession with OT and spoilers is a sign of whats wrong.
An internet community is like a bar. Be it a forum or a chatroom. A bar can self regulate and a good bar normally self regulates. Gaf is like an old bar that had long standing traditions and members, then suddenly a change in management started changing traditions and discouraging or kicking out long time patrons. Some of this was probably warranted and needed, but then the management put up a LIVE NUDE GIRLS neon sign outside the bar, because it needed patrons to replace the people that are no longer there, and the bar and its identity went to shit.
Of course, when you put up a sign like that, you're going to get some uncouth cretinous masses of the man brotherhood. The new patrons come in, hoot and holler, and get shitfaced, and start retelling the same joke and doing all sorts of nonsense that is irking the workers and whoever is left from before. So management ought to turn off the LIVE NUDE GIRLS sign. Instead, they let the idiots come in and then inform them that its illegal to hoot and holler, and not to pass along jokes, and generally telling the new cretinous patrons to not do the only things they know how to do. So it gets awkward.
And that's GAF, with their change in moderation practice acting like that LIVE NUDE GIRLS sign, but they don't want to stop this self-important news source image of themselves because it brings in people, even if its sycophants and idiots. They just tell them they can't use memes, and how to spoiler, and try to reeducate shitty posters from posting the only way they know how.
If you stop attracting PR spewing sycophants then you don't have to write a law book on OT threads.
If you stop attracting over-reactive hyperbolic children you don't need to have an intricate spoiler policy.
But when your mods act like PR spewing twats and hyperbolic children, you attract their minions.
