With not much to do on a cold Friday night, after doing some reading I settled down to do some surfing. I hang at a couple of music related discussion boards, and one pretty frequently over the last four years. Tonight, completely by accident, one of the moderators deleted the whole thing. The whole damn thing... thousands of threads just disappeared.
Thousands.
Some people are upset. Others are gleefully trying to put their stamp on the first several dozen spanking new threads. There are a lot of web-based versions of the open-mouthed stare.
I had a page up in an open window, and then left it to go clean spam and check out Neatorama. When I tried to refresh... gonesville. One of the other posters managed to take a screen cap of that brief moment in time.
Lately there had been calls to civility, calls against organized trolling by regulars with aliases, threads about, well, anyone who frequents message boards knows how random stuff is. And stupid. And fun. And informative. And really hilarious. And annoying. And. And. And.
No doubt it won't take long for idiocy to reign again, for threads making puns about penises, and late night discussions about synching albums with movies.
Kind of like politics. The disgust with the sullied, the desire to reform, and the inevitable return to form. THe cycle repeating endlessly.
With oldtimers chastising newbs for degrading the discourse, trolls bleating about anything to get attention, cliques, elites... the free-for-all regenerates community again.
The phoenix rises from the ashes.
The non-lips flame on.
Posted by binky at February 10, 2007 12:35 AM | TrackBack | Posted to Music | Random ThoughtsThat happened once to a car board I read, but they restored it from backup -- all the threads just went five or six days back in time, which was jarring but fun. To have it just GONE would have been... disturbing.
Posted by: jacflash at February 10, 2007 08:00 AM | PERMALINKNot to make too many assumptions about the nature of what gets discussed on the car boards versus the non-lippers, but there was a lot of personal stuff on there. There have even been two marriages between board members, and their entire courtship period is gone. I think I might feel some sadness were that me.
Posted by: binky at February 10, 2007 10:20 AM | PERMALINK