Maybe the real NeoGAF was the friends we made along the way...

[Arbys Roast Beef Sandwich]

gaf has split into
Slaent
Thebore
Geonaf (already dead)
Dozens of discord chats
Giant Bomb Forums
IGN forums
Something awful forums
Reportedly new forum being built by ex mods (soon)


2004-2017
13 years . Most older folks will be good but 25 and younger will be lost

You forgot about OA, papangus

[KarpalaJoe]

I think any black man (or non-white, for that matter) who willingly hugs a self professed Nazi is a traitor to his race. It's not a difficult opinion to arrive at. Nazis choose to embrace and espouse a belief system that is rooted in the extermination of non-whites. In 2017, emboldened by the election of a Nazi sympathizer to the White House, Nazis are marching in the streets and mobilizing over the internet for the express purpose of normalizing their ideology. This isn't a game. They are on the march. The only dialogue I'm interested in having with a Nazi is the one between the barrell of my gun and the back of his head.

Wait, being black is a race now ? Slow down. The only race recognized by science is the human race, being black is being part of an ethnicity group. It says a lot about you.

On the rest, seriousely, stop thinking internet is the real world. You're "internet nazi preparing to take over the world" are 12 years old in the vast majority. You're almost as dumb as people thinking that muslim are a threat to the western world.

[wsippel]

Controversial opinion, beware : The entire europe and USA were much more racist toward black people than Hitler was back in the time.

Surrre... https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005479

The situation was far more complicated than that. For example, while some nationalist dumbfucks vandalized the restaurant of a highly decorated black German veteran officer in Berlin (yes, the German army had black officers in WWI), the Wehrmacht fought alongside black troops in Africa, and they continued to pay pensions to black WWI veterans. So while the propaganda painted them as subhumans and the mob acted as expected, leadership was far more opportunistic. There even was an entire Indian SS division. Obviously, had they been just a bunch of loons blindly following some nonsensical ideology, they wouldn't have been that dangerous and successful.

[Swollen Bowels]

Returning to the discussion about Besada's protection of minority groups: I think this is a good foil to discuss the broader challenge of moderating a large, responsible forum like GAF.

In the broadest abstract, I actually agree with Besada that minorities need to be protected. The tyranny of the majority is a real thing, and at the very least we need to offer some protection to disadvantaged or small groups so that they aren't simply overwhelmed. The idea, out of context, is sound, in my opinion.

But there are a couple specifics I feel most of the other moderators (not just Besada here) were missing, or at least which I think were important:

1) The most important kind of minority is not a racial minority or a religious minority, but an intellectual one. Often these go hand in hand (i.e. different religions have different intellectual bases), but they are not identical, and if I had to pick one type of diversity to defend first and foremost (I'd like to defend them all, of course) it would be intellectual diversity. It often seems that many people focus exclusively on more superficial types of diversity, and that seemed to be the case with several other moderators, to me.

2) What defines a minority is significantly context dependent. For instance, I am a white guy living in America, so at the moment I definitely do not qualify as a minority. But if I were to move to China -- as my sister has -- then I would rather quickly find myself as a minority, and the same tyranny-of-the-majority rules apply, where my sister is often ignored or overlooked because she is not naturally Chinese. As an example. Similarly, on GAF, conservatives were a minority, and I felt deserving of some protection simply because their voices were being drowned out. It didn't even have to be mean spirited drowning out -- if one person advocated a conservative position, he would often get 8 retorts back from liberals, simply because there were so many more liberals than conservatives. Even if none of those people was inherently trying to "pick" on the conservative, the end result must have been exhausting if you happened to hold political views that were not majority GAF opinion.

So I ultimately agree that protecting minority rights is important, just like Besada felt. I just think that means different things at different times. If I were moderating FoxsNews.Com forums, I would probably have found it necessary to reach and give special protections to liberals. If I were moderating MensHealth.com, I would probably feel obliged to make sure women who happened to post on that forum feel comfortable. Being a minority is context dependent, and most importantly can include being an intellectual minority. This, in essence, was a consistent sticking point between me and much of the other moderation staff.

minority here. ethnic and religious. i didnt need to be protected because of those 2 things if dogpiling would have been frowned upon. that was the issue. many users were allowed to dogpile on others regardless of level of differing opinion. if the opinion was literal hate, any forum which wasnt 4chan would ban that but if you werent PURELY within the slipstream of the collective thread opinion, you would be banned for being neutral. being neutral or aloof or not interested in politics of a situation or not interested in picking fights is not, should not be bannable offense. this is what ticked off most of the folks who were not the actual haters but who got run over by friendly fire.

and every one was triggered by everything moving. A word was different and everyone was piled on. it was a snake eating itself.

Yeah, near the end NeoGAF felt like everything was racism. It got ridiculous.

As hard as it may be to grasp for someone under the delusion of a post-racial society, many opinions in this white supremacist culture ARE racist. People like you seem to have difficulty reconciling your warped perception of the world with the reality we actually live in. If anything, Trump's presidency showed just how phony many of the so-called liberals on GAF are when it came to race. When the mirror was turned to our society, those supposed liberal allies became awfully defensive when confronted about their own conditioned views on white privilege.

[etiolate]

From experiences of using forums where that was a rule: It's terrible.

You know how you get a handful of mods playing favorites and following no consistent rules of moderation? You tell the community they can't discuss moderation. Then suddenly your "community" is just peasants.

A forum is not actually a community, it's not serious enough to consider anyone peasents.

Not allowing moderation discussion is not about supresing anyone or making anyone feel like a peasent;  same with bans for that matter.  I'm all for clearly communicating ban reasons, but beyond that, it's generally not a constructive conversation to get into arguments about why someone was banned in the open forum.   

Keep it simple, respect that the posters are the reason the forum exists, etc.  But I've never seen or experienced any good coming from spending loads of time arguing about bans.

Trigger Word Inc: KiA subreddit has open discussion on its policies and moderating with 83k subs. So it's fairly large and leaves a thread open about rules and allows discussion. It's been productive.

I think you just ran shitty forums, because a good forum is a community.

[jacob.armitage]

It begins.

(Image removed from quote.)

The type of thing i was hoping not to see.

[agrajag]

2) NOT allowing discussion of moderation on the forums.

Why in god's name do you think that was a good thing? As soon as you see that as a rule for a forum, then you know that forum is shit.

It has some merit from the standpoint that online forums are not a democracy. For example, at my job, I am not going to invite my staff for a round table discussion of my managerial decisions.

I do think a dedicated sticky thread for discussion of moderation would be constructive on a site as large as GAF. But shitting up every thread with meta discussion of why so and so got or didn't get banned isn't good.

The problem with gaf is they completely got what their product was wrong. After 2010ish they started thinking their product was their moderation team and the personalities of the mods and admins. They drank their own  kool-aid. When really it was the content being created by the users. Since they started banning anyone that was the least bit creative, well, all they had left was moderation and admin personalities. So it's no surprise at all that two blows against said personalities (ami and evil) would bring the whole thing down.

As evidenced by Opiate thinking GAF was popular because of the mod team and not the community. How self important can you be?

[Interficium]

The problem with gaf is they completely got what their product was wrong. After 2010ish they started thinking their product was their moderation team and the personalities of the mods and admins. They drank their own  kool-aid. When really it was the content being created by the users. Since they started banning anyone that was the least bit creative, well, all they had left was moderation and admin personalities. So it's no surprise at all that two blows against said personalities (ami and evil) would bring the whole thing down.

The sell was this is where the devs and insiders are posting.

Guess what happened when they let the armchair "lazy devs" smarks push those people out.

But no the secret sauce was the rockstar mod team!

[Occam]

I think any black man (or non-white, for that matter) who willingly hugs a self professed Nazi is a traitor to his race. It's not a difficult opinion to arrive at. Nazis choose to embrace and espouse a belief system that is rooted in the extermination of non-whites. In 2017, emboldened by the election of a Nazi sympathizer to the White House, Nazis are marching in the streets and mobilizing over the internet for the express purpose of normalizing their ideology. This isn't a game. They are on the march. The only dialogue I'm interested in having with a Nazi is the one between the barrell of my gun and the back of his head.

Wait, being black is a race now ? Slow down. The only race recognized by science is the human race, being black is being part of an ethnicity group. It says a lot about you.

On the rest, seriousely, stop thinking internet is the real world. You're "internet nazi preparing to take over the world" are 12 years old in the vast majority. You're almost as dumb as people thinking that muslim are a threat to the western world.

Thank you for this post. It's sad that 72 years after the fall of the Third Reich some people still believe in racial theory. Which is bunk.

[Nabbis]

Don't know about this shitty moderation talk but i joined Gaf cause of industry rumors and devs posted there. Whatever the fuck it was a few days ago, it certainly was not what i joined.

[KarpalaJoe]

He was also one of the most annoying and insufferable Nintendo fanboys on NeoGAF.  Looks like he is still sucking up to Tyler and the GAF mods.

Shit, you made me remember about Nintendo defense force there. It was insufferable for real, I'm not violent, but I wanted to slap their faces so hard.

"The Switch made me want to live again".

I remember a couragous little guy saying that Iwata was responsible for the Wii and the DS during his death ceremonial on gaf. Insta banned but the meltdown was GLORIOUS.

[VomKriege]

I think you are largely right in your argument, but the way the moderation by and large manifested itself on the site over the last few years was not protecting minorities per se(as we just talked about the whole NBA-gaf fiasco that led to Slaent) but by protecting opinion holders. Often majority opinion holders. Doubly so if they came from perceived minority groups. Which is much different than just protecting minorities or giving them a bit more leeway as Besada would frame it(I think disingenuously).

I think it's an important point. Saying the moderation protected minorities (or had protected groups) make it sound both much nobler and sinister than it really was.

Also there's really no excuse for a forum as large as GAF to not have any built in appeal mechanism if even just for the form. GFaqs had that shit back in 1997-1998 for fuck's sake.

[border]

Evilore whining that he couldn't get an E3 Media Badge was so sad.  He posted that so petulantly, and I think expected everyone on the forum to treat it as a huge slap in the face to their community.

Of course since it was him crying, everybody had to walk on eggshells and find a gentle way to tell him "Yeah man, you aren't a member of the media."

[Boredfrom]

What bubble do you live in ?

Gaf was popular because it was the place to get the news the quickest and famous guy posted there on the gaming side (Durante), that's all. It has strictly nothing to do with your croisade against everyone who did not share your weird vision of the world.

If you think it has to do with shitty moderation practice, you are completely delusional.

You're welcome to think that, and there is certainly an argument for the position that GAF just got lucky. I do not agree, however. I can go in to detail if necessary, but I fear many are already rather bored with my verbosity, which has clearly not been assuaged by the passing of time.

The moderation team helped until it become tribialist and protectionist, but the mod team was not main drive. It was the community.  The mod team helped to foster a decent community for a while, big enough to attract a lot off people without being a shitshow like other forums.

I definitely agree with this. Of course ultimately the community is the central component of what makes a good forum, since any forum is really just a bunch of people talking to each other.

But shaping that community in the first place is a challenging task. I'm sure you've all been on forums with very limited moderation, and you can see what happens when anyone with anonymity and no danger of being banned (since they can just rejoin with another account with virtually no effort) can post on a forum. The buck definitely stops with the community , but the moderators and policies of GAF were what helped shape the community in to one of the best on the internet.

Until recently, at least.

Moderation helps, but it genuinely depends more of the kind of persons end in a community and their policies. I used to be in a small comic forum that was pretty nice and only have one moderator (the owner) before it got a little bigger, more mods were choosen but policies were not applicable to everyone. Ended badly.

Why allow keeping people like Besada? Why keep the favoritism with BCT posters when it was clear they baited people to get banned?  This is the kind of stuff that kill online communities.

[Interficium]

https://gaf.is/

A NEW CHALLENGER APPROACHES

[TypicalVoatShitlord]

Don't know about this shitty moderation talk but i joined Gaf cause of industry rumors and devs posted there. Whatever the fuck it was a few days ago, it certainly was not what i joined.

Losing NPD hardware and software was the beginning of the end

[FStop7]

(Image removed from quote.)

NeoGAF is now Spectrum. Everything's fine now.

GAF was always on the spectrum.

[etiolate]

Opiate:

I can't find the post, but some pages back you said something in response to the mod team only responding now to Evilore? I swear you said that its hard to tell what is rumor from real, but I find that to not compute.

Are you expecting me to believe that you will make careful thoughtful arguments on pedophilia and intellectual oppression, but that you nor any of the mods can tell the difference between "Evilore is a cigarillo" and "Evilore grabbed a woman's ass in Spain and acted entitlted to it and it was posted by him on your forum."

[injurai]

Why do these plant communities want to cling to the old brand...

[treythemovie]

None of these splitter boards are going anywhere. The only one with any potential to survive would be one by former mods, but even that one necessitates that they all work together and not splitter up into multiple former mod run boards.

This weird attempt in the discord is especially doomed because no one knows who this guy is who has proclaimed himself king lol

[Himu]

It begins.

(Image removed from quote.)

You can take the gaffot out of gaf not the gaf out of a gaffot. I knew they wouldn't learn and would go back to their safe space censorship authoritarian bullshit in a matter of days.

[agrajag]

It amuses me that apparently none of these ex-gaffers find the rampant opportunism gross.

[clothedmacuser]

Eh, I kinda liked Opiate.

This is how the crisis started. Resist.

I vote we make Opiate a mod here!

[HaughtyFrank]

https://gaf.is/

A NEW CHALLENGER APPROACHES

Good start

[Opiate]

No. Like I said earlier, in a perfect world, the presence of a moderator on a forum is minimal.

I disagree with this pretty strongly, and present as evidence that The Bore (Which you hold up as exemplary) has an order of magnitude fewer daily viewers than GAF does (or did, I suppose), and essentially no industry pull that GAF had.

I think that latter part of the equation is particularly important: people point out that GAF happened to have several members who were important members of the Gaming Industry who helped bring in other users, but those people did not choose GAF by accident. Try to find out how most industry professionals like the sound of communicating with an almost entirely unmoderated forum, and see how far that goes.

However, I definitely agree with you that the community is ultimately the bottom-line ingredient that makes a forum successful (or not). It's just important to note that moderators and forum leaders help shape that community in the first place.

[Nabbis]

Eh, I kinda liked Opiate.

This is how the crisis started. Resist.

I vote we make Opiate a mod here!

Would be hilarious just to see how Dennis reacts.

[Nola]

I think you are largely right in your argument, but the way the moderation by and large manifested itself on the site over the last few years was not protecting minorities per se(as we just talked about the whole NBA-gaf fiasco that led to Slaent) but by protecting opinion holders. Often majority opinion holders. Doubly so if they came from perceived minority groups. Which is much different than just protecting minorities or giving them a bit more leeway as Besada would frame it(I think disingenuously).

I think it's an important point. Saying the moderation protected minorities (or had protected groups) make it sound both much nobler and sinister than it really was.

Also there's really no excuse for a forum as large as GAF to not have any built in appeal mechanism if even just for the form. GFaqs had that shit back in 1997-1998 for fuck's sake.

I have no evidence to its efficacy, but it seems like if you are going to run a heavily moderated forum, you need some sort of system where there is a bit more transparency, an appeals process, and oversight of the overseers. Like a review process for bans.

Of course if you have almost everyone participating in that structure subject to the biases I mentioned, I am not sure it would of done any good either?

I definitely think there is also something to the cult of personality trap others mentioned. Which if you are drinking your own kool aid there is probably a good chance you aren't seeking to refine and improve your decision-making processes.

[I'm a Puppy!]

No. Like I said earlier, in a perfect world, the presence of a moderator on a forum is minimal.

I disagree with this pretty strongly, and present as evidence that The Bore (Which you hold up as exemplary) has an order of magnitude fewer daily viewers than GAF does (or did, I suppose), and essentially no industry pull that GAF had.

I think that latter part of the equation is particularly important: people point out that GAF happened to have several members who were important members of the Gaming Industry who helped bring in other users, but those people did not choose GAF by accident. Try to find out how most industry professionals like the sound of communicating with an almost entirely unmoderated forum, and see how far that goes.

However, I definitely agree with you that the community is ultimately the bottom-line ingredient that makes a forum successful (or not). It's just important to note that moderators and forum leaders help shape that community in the first place.

And this is why you fail

[maninthemirror]

Don't know about this shitty moderation talk but i joined Gaf cause of industry rumors and devs posted there. Whatever the fuck it was a few days ago, it certainly was not what i joined.

That was 2006-2011

Then the website collectively made a decision to inject politics in both OT and gaming on literally every topic. Some moderation like that was obvious. Literal Nazis racists and misogynists were rightfully kicked out . But then the remaining folks who said hey let me discuss this game. No you cannot discuss this game because it does not align with our world view except that you did discuss these kind of games in a civil manner from 2006 to 2011. That’s when the forum lost its soul . The only good sections left were the communities section at that point

[Boredfrom]

No. Like I said earlier, in a perfect world, the presence of a moderator on a forum is minimal.

I disagree with this pretty strongly, and present as evidence that The Bore (Which you hold up as exemplary) has an order of magnitude fewer daily viewers than GAF does (or did, I suppose), and essentially no industry pull that GAF had.

I think that latter part of the equation is particularly important: people point out that GAF happened to have several members who were important members of the Gaming Industry who helped bring in other users, but those people did not choose GAF by accident. Try to find out how most industry professionals like the sound of communicating with an almost entirely unmoderated forum, and see how far that goes.

However, I definitely agree with you that the community is ultimately the bottom-line ingredient that makes a forum successful (or not). It's just important to note that moderators and forum leaders help shape that community in the first place.

But Demi has outright said that he doesn't want to be big or having GAF numbers.

[thehunter116]

What bubble do you live in ?

Gaf was popular because it was the place to get the news the quickest and famous guy posted there on the gaming side (Durante), that's all. It has strictly nothing to do with your croisade against everyone who did not share your weird vision of the world.

If you think it has to do with shitty moderation practice, you are completely delusional.

You're welcome to think that, and there is certainly an argument for the position that GAF just got lucky. I do not agree, however. I can go in to detail if necessary, but I fear many are already rather bored with my verbosity, which has clearly not been assuaged by the passing of time.

The moderation team helped until it become tribialist and protectionist, but the mod team was not main drive. It was the community.  The mod team helped to foster a decent community for a while, big enough to attract a lot off people without being a shitshow like other forums.

I definitely agree with this. Of course ultimately the community is the central component of what makes a good forum, since any forum is really just a bunch of people talking to each other.

But shaping that community in the first place is a challenging task. I'm sure you've all been on forums with very limited moderation, and you can see what happens when anyone with anonymity and no danger of being banned (since they can just rejoin with another account with virtually no effort) can post on a forum. The buck definitely stops with the community , but the moderators and policies of GAF were what helped shape the community in to one of the best on the internet.

Until recently, at least.

I haven't seen a single person get banned here since I started posting.

Lazy Devs Mods.

No. Like I said earlier, in a perfect world, the presence of a moderator on a forum is minimal. Now if they want to be active participants in discussions, like mods and admins here are, that's fine too. They just can't get into heated discussions and abuse their powers to act in retribution against people they disagree with. Which the mods here do an exemplary job of. Now, on the other hand, you have people like Amir0x, who did abuse his mod privileges to stifle discussion for his own petty reasons. But that is a question of judgement and what happens when you appoint your blowhard pedo buddy to a position of power and responsibility he has no business having in the first place.

I agree.

I was being a sarcastic little shit. Needs more 

[Nabbis]

Oh yeah, why was Tabris banned?

I loved how he drived Gaf crazy.

[BlueTsunami]

Looking up the Neogaf hash on Twitter and its GamerGater for days. This is still a thing?

[tuna_love]

opiate is a gigantic cunt. doesnt fiction post here as well?

[agrajag]

No. Like I said earlier, in a perfect world, the presence of a moderator on a forum is minimal.

I disagree with this pretty strongly, and present as evidence that The Bore (Which you hold up as exemplary) has an order of magnitude fewer daily viewers than GAF does (or did, I suppose), and essentially no industry pull that GAF had.

If you thought that any of those things were ever goals set by the Bore, you played yourself son.

I think that latter part of the equation is particularly important: people point out that GAF happened to have several members who were important members of the Gaming Industry who helped bring in other users, but those people did not choose GAF by accident. Try to find out how most industry professionals like the sound of communicating with an almost entirely unmoderated forum, and see how far that goes.

However, I definitely agree with you that the community is ultimately the bottom-line ingredient that makes a forum successful (or not). It's just important to note that moderators and forum leaders help shape that community in the first place.

Those same moderators that you espouse as so beneficial to industry insiders are the same people that chased away the industry insiders.

[Swollen Bowels]

Talk about reaping what you sow, the irony of how gaf was taken down is incredible. The site really was getting insane with how users could dogpile and insult others like crazy until they got the "victim" banned and go on witch hunts.(even if i didn't feel much sympathy for many of the targets it was just getting to be too fucking much)

I'm fucking liberal as all holy hell but i rarely ever posted in social/political threads, all it took was one thing taken out of context or misconstrued and its over, wasn't worth all the eggshells I felt like I was under, just stay in the OT threads.

Like I felt like I couldn't even post my opinion about that guy who hugged that nazi, even if it didn't work, I just thought it was a nice heartfelt moment for that guy. I couldn't be bothered to take the chance of being accused of being a nazi moderate(and I'm fucking black)

You're  black and think hugging a Nazi is a productive means of combating people who want you and your entire race wiped off the face of the earth? Have some self-respect, man.

Do you actually think about your opinions or are you basing them on the fact that nazi punch gifs make your dick move a little?

I think any black man (or non-white, for that matter) who willingly hugs a self professed Nazi is a traitor to his race. It's not a difficult opinion to arrive at. Nazis choose to embrace and espouse a belief system that is rooted in the extermination of non-whites. In 2017, emboldened by the election of a Nazi sympathizer to the White House, Nazis are marching in the streets and mobilizing over the internet for the express purpose of normalizing their ideology. This isn't a game. They are on the march. The only dialogue I'm interested in having with a Nazi is the one between the barrell of my gun and the back of his head.

Nazis killed Jews. If some black man wants to try to appeal to the human side of a Nazi-lite then that's on him. It might work, it might not, but it's compassion and that man is bigger than the movement that wants to irrationally hate him. People like you that make the world terrible for him by claiming he's a traitor are utter trash. Fuck all two of your dimensions.

He is a traitor. He's extending a kind gesture to someone who gladly subscribes to the belief that he's an inferior subhuman. I'm sorry if I'm not exactly moved by the sentiment.

[Opiate]

Opiate:

I can't find the post, but some pages back you said something in response to the mod team only responding now to Evilore? I swear you said that its hard to tell what is rumor from real, but I find that to not compute.

Are you expecting me to believe that you will make careful thoughtful arguments on pedophilia and intellectual oppression, but that you nor any of the mods can tell the difference between "Evilore is a cigarillo" and "Evilore grabbed a woman's ass in Spain and acted entitlted to it and it was posted by him on your forum."

That certainly was not true during my tenure. Most of us would self regulate, with occasional communal intervention if we felt one of us was stepping notably out of line or had made a wrong move (it happened: usually not sinister). I did say that Evilore would only intervene directly very occasionally, but when he did so it was often "heavy handed." And if you want me to elaborate on what "heavy handed" means, I mean that we might discuss a topic or a poster for some time, then he would drop in to IRC, make a few comments, declare his position final, and that was the end of the discussion. That was of course his right as the site owner, and not always entirely an unreasonable path (in a business, sometimes managers just need to put their foot down and make a final decision), but it was more frequent than I think would have been optimal and he very rarely took a careful, considered approach.

[agrajag]

What bubble do you live in ?

Gaf was popular because it was the place to get the news the quickest and famous guy posted there on the gaming side (Durante), that's all. It has strictly nothing to do with your croisade against everyone who did not share your weird vision of the world.

If you think it has to do with shitty moderation practice, you are completely delusional.

You're welcome to think that, and there is certainly an argument for the position that GAF just got lucky. I do not agree, however. I can go in to detail if necessary, but I fear many are already rather bored with my verbosity, which has clearly not been assuaged by the passing of time.

The moderation team helped until it become tribialist and protectionist, but the mod team was not main drive. It was the community.  The mod team helped to foster a decent community for a while, big enough to attract a lot off people without being a shitshow like other forums.

I definitely agree with this. Of course ultimately the community is the central component of what makes a good forum, since any forum is really just a bunch of people talking to each other.

But shaping that community in the first place is a challenging task. I'm sure you've all been on forums with very limited moderation, and you can see what happens when anyone with anonymity and no danger of being banned (since they can just rejoin with another account with virtually no effort) can post on a forum. The buck definitely stops with the community , but the moderators and policies of GAF were what helped shape the community in to one of the best on the internet.

Until recently, at least.

I haven't seen a single person get banned here since I started posting.

Lazy Devs Mods.

No. Like I said earlier, in a perfect world, the presence of a moderator on a forum is minimal. Now if they want to be active participants in discussions, like mods and admins here are, that's fine too. They just can't get into heated discussions and abuse their powers to act in retribution against people they disagree with. Which the mods here do an exemplary job of. Now, on the other hand, you have people like Amir0x, who did abuse his mod privileges to stifle discussion for his own petty reasons. But that is a question of judgement and what happens when you appoint your blowhard pedo buddy to a position of power and responsibility he has no business having in the first place.

I agree.

I was being a sarcastic little shit. Needs more 

I thought you were, but I wanted to get on my soapbox anyway

[AlteredBeast]

I know I am incredibly late to all these shenanigans, but is there a nice summarized timeline of the past 48 hours? GAF had turned to shit a few years ago, but it was still my #1 reason to be online most of the time. I don't want it back in some Zombie form, and Malka is a dick if the allegations are true, but I need another reason to waste my life online.

Even though the place went down the shitter, I couldn't let 17 years go to waste, now could I?

[Klelk]

"See, the problem is that I can't just randomly talk about all the crazy shit. I can't just bring up that I did a 30 mile illegal mountain race in pouring rain at an average speed of 120 miles per hour, water shooting up so many feet in the air. I can't randomly say that I've illegally hiked through the side of the Grand Canyon and had to freestyle mountain climb back to safety, as every other handhold broke away with my back to certain death, then uncontrollably slide down to the ranger checkpoint and get impaled by a desert plant on my way down, luckily deciding earlier to have brought a quikclot pack with me. I can't say that I swam in a ridiculously strong riptide in Hawaii and had to barely make it to a coral reef and drag myself inch by inch along the reef back to shore, being gashed by the reef in a hundred different places, then smear sand in the wounds until they stopped bleeding, the ground soaked with blood, then walk miles back to my car, barefoot.

Not even that I train Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and that I'll look anyone in the eyes, calm and resolved from a thousand fights"

[etiolate]

I think you just ran shitty forums, because a good forum is a community.

I meant that more literally;   it's not the real world, it's not a government, it's not a place anyone does or doesn't have "rights."  There are no peasents, that's taking it way too seriously.

Gotcha.

I mean community as in a social sphere and function. Peasants as their existence is at the behest of the moderation, when it's really the other way around in a good community. The mods are there at the choice of the community and respond to the community. I've never seen a forum with the no moderation discuss policy end up anything other than trash. It attracts the worst personalities to moderation.

[Boredfrom]

No. Like I said earlier, in a perfect world, the presence of a moderator on a forum is minimal.

I disagree with this pretty strongly, and present as evidence that The Bore (Which you hold up as exemplary) has an order of magnitude fewer daily viewers than GAF does (or did, I suppose), and essentially no industry pull that GAF had.

If you thought that any of those things were ever goals set by the Bore, you played yourself son.

I think that latter part of the equation is particularly important: people point out that GAF happened to have several members who were important members of the Gaming Industry who helped bring in other users, but those people did not choose GAF by accident. Try to find out how most industry professionals like the sound of communicating with an almost entirely unmoderated forum, and see how far that goes.

However, I definitely agree with you that the community is ultimately the bottom-line ingredient that makes a forum successful (or not). It's just important to note that moderators and forum leaders help shape that community in the first place.

Those same moderators that you espouse as so beneficial to industry insiders are the same people that chased away the industry insiders.

I remember Aeana chasing off Tom from Xseed (he had a mini meltdown on his own, thought, years later) and I always wondered how much involved she was in culling gaming discussion in the forum.

[Swollen Bowels]

I think any black man (or non-white, for that matter) who willingly hugs a self professed Nazi is a traitor to his race. It's not a difficult opinion to arrive at. Nazis choose to embrace and espouse a belief system that is rooted in the extermination of non-whites. In 2017, emboldened by the election of a Nazi sympathizer to the White House, Nazis are marching in the streets and mobilizing over the internet for the express purpose of normalizing their ideology. This isn't a game. They are on the march. The only dialogue I'm interested in having with a Nazi is the one between the barrell of my gun and the back of his head.

Wait, being black is a race now ? Slow down. The only race recognized by science is the human race, being black is being part of an ethnicity group. It says a lot about you.

On the rest, seriousely, stop thinking internet is the real world. You're "internet nazi preparing to take over the world" are 12 years old in the vast majority. You're almost as dumb as people thinking that muslim are a threat to the western world.

Artificial it may be, blackness is a very real and accepted racial construct that defines and impacts the lives of millions (over a billion, if you include every black outside of the diaspora). And there weren't any 12 year olds at that rally in Charlottesville. No 12 year olds telling black NFL players to stop kneeling in defiance of racism. And certainly no 12 year olds who put Trump into office. But you keep clinging to your post racial delusions.

[Opiate]

If you thought that any of those things were ever goals set by the Bore, you played yourself son.

And that's fine, as there is no reason you can't enjoy something that may be less populated or popular. There are certainly plenty of good but smaller forums. But if popularity and industry connections are not a sign of a good forum, then what is? Your personal preference?What about my personal preferences? There's nothing wrong with having a preference, and I respect that you may have different preferences than I might have. But the reason why personal preferences don't typically lead to good conversation/argument is that they are unenforceable -- they have no external validity. I like orange, you like blue; nothing wrong with those preferences, but good luck to either of us convincing the other that he's totally wrong. It's a nonsense argument.

[etiolate]

Opiate:

I can't find the post, but some pages back you said something in response to the mod team only responding now to Evilore? I swear you said that its hard to tell what is rumor from real, but I find that to not compute.

Are you expecting me to believe that you will make careful thoughtful arguments on pedophilia and intellectual oppression, but that you nor any of the mods can tell the difference between "Evilore is a cigarillo" and "Evilore grabbed a woman's ass in Spain and acted entitlted to it and it was posted by him on your forum."

That certainly was not true during my tenure. Most of us would self regulate, with occasional communal intervention if we felt one of us was stepping notably out of line or had made a wrong move (it happened: usually not sinister). I did say that Evilore would only intervene directly very occasionally, but when he did so it was often "heavy handed." And if you want me to elaborate on what "heavy handed" means, I mean that we might discuss a topic or a poster for some time, then he would drop in to IRC, make a few comments, declare his position final, and that was the end of the discussion. That was of course his right as the site owner, and not always entirely an unreasonable path (in a business, sometimes managers just need to put their foot down and make a final decision), but it was more frequent than I think would have been optimal and he very rarely took a careful, considered approach.

No, I am not referring to that post. I am referring to why moderators kept sticking around or not standing up until now when awful behaviors were apparent within Tyler and the moderation crew. You said something about it being hard to separate rumor from real. Maybe I can find the post.



As for intellectual minority: I'm that minority here and the only protection I require is being able to make my point. I get dogpiled all the time. You kind of have to let people learn to defend themselves by allowing them that ability to defend themselves. If demi started banning the people who gang up on me, then it would naturally lead to people copying my posting style for that same protection, and soon enough I'd be the dangerous majority.

[seagrams hotsauce]

No. Like I said earlier, in a perfect world, the presence of a moderator on a forum is minimal.

I disagree with this pretty strongly, and present as evidence that The Bore (Which you hold up as exemplary) has an order of magnitude fewer daily viewers than GAF does (or did, I suppose), and essentially no industry pull that GAF had.

If you thought that any of those things were ever goals set by the Bore, you played yourself son.

I think that latter part of the equation is particularly important: people point out that GAF happened to have several members who were important members of the Gaming Industry who helped bring in other users, but those people did not choose GAF by accident. Try to find out how most industry professionals like the sound of communicating with an almost entirely unmoderated forum, and see how far that goes.

However, I definitely agree with you that the community is ultimately the bottom-line ingredient that makes a forum successful (or not). It's just important to note that moderators and forum leaders help shape that community in the first place.

Those same moderators that you espouse as so beneficial to industry insiders are the same people that chased away the industry insiders.

I remember Aeana chasing off Tom from Xseed (he had a mini meltdown on his own, thought, years later) and I always wondered how much involved she was in culling gaming discussion in the forum.

Tom from xseed was a gem. Some classic posts from dude. Whata fuckin weirdo

[Boredfrom]

Hey Opiate, dunno if you already answered this but:

Did Evilore impose being less tolerant with insiders because the Xbone debacle/ not getting a E3 pass the following year?

[Nintex]

Yeah, I don't buy this "GAF was popular because it was a socially engineered perfectly curated user experience" nonsense. It was a fun forum that had a few industry insiders and a fun off topic forum where people could just shoot the shit. Even in its hey day, heavy handed moderation was prevalent, like when dragona went on her mass purges and a lot of good posters were lost. Or when they started banning benign memes like caturday.

NeoGAF was like Sonic the Hedgehog

You had this thing that was really cool in the past but its owners kept abusing it. Literally.

[seagrams hotsauce]

Opiate:

I can't find the post, but some pages back you said something in response to the mod team only responding now to Evilore? I swear you said that its hard to tell what is rumor from real, but I find that to not compute.

Are you expecting me to believe that you will make careful thoughtful arguments on pedophilia and intellectual oppression, but that you nor any of the mods can tell the difference between "Evilore is a cigarillo" and "Evilore grabbed a woman's ass in Spain and acted entitlted to it and it was posted by him on your forum."

That certainly was not true during my tenure. Most of us would self regulate, with occasional communal intervention if we felt one of us was stepping notably out of line or had made a wrong move (it happened: usually not sinister). I did say that Evilore would only intervene directly very occasionally, but when he did so it was often "heavy handed." And if you want me to elaborate on what "heavy handed" means, I mean that we might discuss a topic or a poster for some time, then he would drop in to IRC, make a few comments, declare his position final, and that was the end of the discussion. That was of course his right as the site owner, and not always entirely an unreasonable path (in a business, sometimes managers just need to put their foot down and make a final decision), but it was more frequent than I think would have been optimal and he very rarely took a careful, considered approach.

No, I am not referring to that post. I am referring to why moderators kept sticking around or not standing up until now when awful behaviors were apparent within Tyler and the moderation crew. You said something about it being hard to separate rumor from real. Maybe I can find the post.



As for intellectual minority: I'm that minority here and the only protection I require is being able to make my point. I get dogpiled all the time. You kind of have to let people learn to defend themselves by allowing them that ability to defend themselves. If demi started banning the people who gang up on me, then it would naturally lead to people copying my posting style for that same protection, and soon enough I'd be the dangerous majority.

you, a filthy commoner; "etoilet is dumb lol"
me, an intellectual; "I get dogpiled all the time, also hillary murdered seth rich and pizzagate is real"

[Boredfrom]

No. Like I said earlier, in a perfect world, the presence of a moderator on a forum is minimal.

I disagree with this pretty strongly, and present as evidence that The Bore (Which you hold up as exemplary) has an order of magnitude fewer daily viewers than GAF does (or did, I suppose), and essentially no industry pull that GAF had.

If you thought that any of those things were ever goals set by the Bore, you played yourself son.

I think that latter part of the equation is particularly important: people point out that GAF happened to have several members who were important members of the Gaming Industry who helped bring in other users, but those people did not choose GAF by accident. Try to find out how most industry professionals like the sound of communicating with an almost entirely unmoderated forum, and see how far that goes.

However, I definitely agree with you that the community is ultimately the bottom-line ingredient that makes a forum successful (or not). It's just important to note that moderators and forum leaders help shape that community in the first place.

Those same moderators that you espouse as so beneficial to industry insiders are the same people that chased away the industry insiders.

I remember Aeana chasing off Tom from Xseed (he had a mini meltdown on his own, thought, years later) and I always wondered how much involved she was in culling gaming discussion in the forum.

Tom from xseed was a gem. Some classic posts from dude. Whata fuckin weirdo

He semeed pretty normal before the Ban. When I think weirdo i imagine Huelen or Birdie.

[agrajag]

If you thought that any of those things were ever goals set by the Bore, you played yourself son.

And that's fine, as there is no reason you can't enjoy something that may be less populated or popular. There are certainly plenty of good but smaller forums. But if popularity and industry connections are not a sign of a good forum, then what is? Your personal preference?What about my personal preferences? There's nothing wrong with having a preference, and I respect that you may have different preferences than I might have. But the reason why personal preferences don't typically lead to good conversation/argument is that they are unenforceable -- they have no external validity. I like orange, you like blue; nothing wrong with those preferences, but good luck to either of us convincing the other that he's totally wrong. It's a nonsense argument.

Sure. But you yourself acknowledged systemic problems particular to GAF moderation, which are not present here. I think what makes a forum bad is a toxic environment, which has been fostered by site management over the years over there.

[etiolate]

I love the response that is basically: The discovery of yet another witch in our group of witchfinders does not reflect on the moral character of all us witchfinders!

[wsippel]

The situation was far more complicated than that. For example, while some nationalist dumbfucks vandalized the restaurant of a highly decorated black German veteran officer in Berlin (yes, the German army had black officers in WWI), the Wehrmacht fought alongside black troops in Africa, and they continued to pay pensions to black WWI veterans. So while the propaganda painted them as subhumans and the mob acted as expected, leadership was far more opportunistic. There even was an entire Indian SS division. Obviously, had they been just a bunch of loons blindly following some nonsensical ideology, they wouldn't have been that dangerous and successful.

I never said it wasn't complicated, never said it was a bunch of loons blindly following some nonsensical ideology...  but claiming they were less racist than Europe/US under Hitler seems ridiculous to me.   They seem at the very least equal.

Under Hitler? Almost certainly not, because of the propaganda. In the years leading up to the NSDAP taking over? I sure think so. Less racist than the US, at the very least. All of that was thrown away by the NSDAP, while they happily worked with "subhumans" under the surface. I mean, "I decide who is or isn't a jew" was an actual statement brought up when people questioned why Hitler wouldn't get rid of a Jewish Wehrmacht general.

[agrajag]

Yeah, I don't buy this "GAF was popular because it was a socially engineered perfectly curated user experience" nonsense. It was a fun forum that had a few industry insiders and a fun off topic forum where people could just shoot the shit. Even in its hey day, heavy handed moderation was prevalent, like when dragona went on her mass purges and a lot of good posters were lost. Or when they started banning benign memes like caturday.

NeoGAF was like Sonic the Hedgehog

You had this thing that was really cool in the past but its owners kept abusing it. Literally.

And abusing the consumer.

Wait a minute. The mod team is Sonic's Shitty Friends

[Goldboy]

It's hard to believe NeoGAF is gone just like that. I'll miss the getting high thread and a couple certain posters, but I mostly just lurked anyways so eh. And yeah, fuck Evilore. My first time learning who he was was seeing him get into a petty argument with some random poster, which ended with him permanently changing the poster's username to "Piece of Shit," lol.

[Occam]

The situation was far more complicated than that. For example, while some nationalist dumbfucks vandalized the restaurant of a highly decorated black German veteran officer in Berlin (yes, the German army had black officers in WWI), the Wehrmacht fought alongside black troops in Africa, and they continued to pay pensions to black WWI veterans. So while the propaganda painted them as subhumans and the mob acted as expected, leadership was far more opportunistic. There even was an entire Indian SS division. Obviously, had they been just a bunch of loons blindly following some nonsensical ideology, they wouldn't have been that dangerous and successful.

I never said it wasn't complicated, never said it was a bunch of loons blindly following some nonsensical ideology...  but claiming they were less racist than Europe/US under Hitler seems ridiculous to me.   They seem at the very least equal.

Under Hitler? Almost certainly not, because of the propaganda. In the years leading up to the NSDAP taking over? I sure think so. Less racist than the US, at the very least. All of that was thrown away by the NSDAP, while they happily worked with "subhumans" under the surface. I mean, "I decide who is or isn't a jew" was an actual statement brought up when people questioned why Hitler wouldn't get rid of a Jewish Wehrmacht general.

That's actually a quote by Goering.

[Frankie_baby]

How do you get on to the discord thing?

[demi]

But Demi has outright said that he doesn't want to be big or having GAF numbers.

I'm not against being a big forum, but I said I'm not trying to be the "new NeoGAF" - you feel?

[Marhunchy]

"See, the problem is that I can't just randomly talk about all the crazy shit. I can't just bring up that I did a 30 mile illegal mountain race in pouring rain at an average speed of 120 miles per hour, water shooting up so many feet in the air. I can't randomly say that I've illegally hiked through the side of the Grand Canyon and had to freestyle mountain climb back to safety, as every other handhold broke away with my back to certain death, then uncontrollably slide down to the ranger checkpoint and get impaled by a desert plant on my way down, luckily deciding earlier to have brought a quikclot pack with me. I can't say that I swam in a ridiculously strong riptide in Hawaii and had to barely make it to a coral reef and drag myself inch by inch along the reef back to shore, being gashed by the reef in a hundred different places, then smear sand in the wounds until they stopped bleeding, the ground soaked with blood, then walk miles back to my car, barefoot.

Not even that I train Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and that I'll look anyone in the eyes, calm and resolved from a thousand fights"

(Image removed from quote.)

white people dancing

[agrajag]

There are no GAF lulz buddy, there's no more GAF