When Good Forums Lose their Appeal

I’ve been participating in BlogCatalog, a blogging community with individual user pages as well as a forum, for a little over a year now. I enjoy many of the people I have met there, and I have learned quite a bit about blogging in the process. Along the way I have also encountered a variety of bad behaviors, including overt religious and political proselytizing, spamming, general mean spiritedness, and much worse. Hence, I was very happy when BlogCatalog finally instituted a clear set of behavioral norms for the forum.

On the down side, BlogCatalog continued to rely on user reports of bad behavior instead of having its staff take an active role in moderating the forums. The idea, it seems, was to make a virtue out of necessity and preach community involvement. If we wanted to keep things clean, we had to clean them up ourselves. To that end, BlogCatalog provides a report button on each thread and user comment. If someone thinks a comment is inappropriate, she can report it. BlogCatalog staff can then review the post and decide what to do.

Lately this self-policing seems to have become insufficient and even counter-productive. Threads about what the rules actually mean are experiencing a resurgence. They include questions about what is actually inflammatory. Some would ban politics altogether. I wanted to do the same for religion once. But more interesting and problematic are the comments emerging about the use of the report button. Some imply any use of it is like tattling in school. Others obsess about who reported what. And some of these same people seem to think that a report ends in automatic deletion. I once attributed such remarks to the anti-social, an answer that still works for me sometimes. Really, though, the system is helping to foster an us-versus-them mentality.

I myself have been very active in trying to police the forums, because I thought they were worth maintaining. Lately, though, I have become tempted to just ignore their slide into an online version of the “Jerry Springer Show” combined with an imaginary organization I’ll call “Ignorance and Conspiracy Central.” I’m tired of putting up with harassment from folks who feel that my and others’ efforts to help self-police are just wrong. More to the point, I do not see any sense in it, if BlogCatalog’s own staff is unable or unwilling to make enough of an effort to communicate its policies to those who don’t understand them. I am beginning to agree with another blogger, who last week decided she would no longer use the report button, saying it was not her job. After all, this is a privately owned company, not a community in the sense that any of its members has any real stake in the process, outside of whatever fun and opportunities for blog promotion are to be had.

Now I’m thinking the only logical consequence is to cut my involvement on the forums way down, unless there is a specific blogging or internet issue that interests me or I have a post that I would like to promote. If there were more active involvement on the forums by BlogCatalog staff, I might feel differently; however, economic and manpower limitations appear to preclude such a change.