Sociopath Community

by Spy Baby

This forum is very nicely designed, compared to any others I've seen. The content sucks ass though. 

 It's because its been overrun by trolls and alts. Not suprising considering who the targetted audience is. Just a question. Why bother coming if you're just going to complain and cry like a baby?

I think the content would vastly improve if there was moderation. :D

How come?

I was just playing around to cause drama and fun for myself. :D  People can moderate themselves. The only problem with doing that here is the puppetry. It's not lack of moderation that makes SC different. It's the (dumb!) puppet free for all.  

This is true, but there's more to it than just moderation. If tomorrow Luna decided to make this forum heavily moderated, added lots of posting guidelines, etc. the content would still be terrible, because there's no goal for this website.

It goes like this, generally speaking: FIRST you place a goal to the forum (to the content you'd like to see posted in the forum), THEN you moderate the fuck out of it. No one in the internet seems to be aware of this, and the result is that there are barely 5 or 6 properly moderated, worthwhile forums to visit depending of course on your interests and tastes. Everywhere else everyone and their mother are allowed to have an opinion (and VOICE it moreover) no matter how idiotic and retarded it is, and when a high quality post suddenly appears, it is immediately buried by countless boring, contentless and usually even meaningless posts. The purpose of moderation, then (and no one seems to be able to grasp this), is to RAISE the level of a discussion. This of course requires a COMPETENT moderator, and he will only step into a discussion if he is a specialist in it and can add worthwhile comments. When this is not the case, he will NOT POST ANYTHING in the thread and will leave the specialists deal with the issues themselves, all the while making sure any 12 year old kids attempting to shit on the discussion are promptly banned (permanently). 

This is the only way to ensure the content of your forum remains as good as possible: by having only the specialists give their opinions. Everyone else can go fuck themselves: the internet is filled with chatrooms and everyone can happily wank themselves there eternally. It's not like all the chatrooms would magically disappear after a SINGLE website decided to have standards and self-respect anyway, so stupid 12 year olds need not to worry. Intelligent 12 year olds, on the other hand, would be perfectly served, because they could then EASILY  READ what the AWESOME EXPERTS are saying about their favorite subjects. So everyone wins: stupid people can keep being stupid, not-so-stupid people can learn from intelligent people on their fav. subjects and intelligent people will not only learn with other specialists, but also and more importantly, CONTRIBUTE with CUTTING-EDGE ANALYSIS and KNOWLEDGE of whatever the hell is being discussed in their forums. This is what "high-quality content" means: that only THE BEST are allowed have an opinion.

Can you now see, dear reader, why 99% of the existing forums are terribly moderated? Because the moderators don't do their job! They don't even moderate! The most they do is ban offensive words and users! So-called "moderators" are no more than policeman whose job is to make sure discussions run without conflict! But the very act of discussing  presupposes conflict: if everyone thought the same there would be no reason to discuss anything (ultimately no need to communicate anything). That is not to say that a competent moderator shouldn't strive to make the discussions as polite and civil as possible, but THAT IS SUPPOSED TO BE ONLY AN AFTERTHOUGHT -- the important thing is NOT TO HAVE COMPLETE IMBECILES POSTING MINDBOGGLING HORSESHIT ON GOOD THREADS. Also, to DELETE stupid threads. And to also ban whoever was too stupid to read the posting guidelines. And. And. Etc. 

That's the job of the moderator: to raise OR maintain the level of the discussion. 

So, to get back at our little sociopathic forum, what is the goal of this website? Is it to have CUTTING-EDGE discussion on sociopathy and perhaps other mental illnesses and psychology as whole, or is it just to have a bunch of bored people socialize, gossip and joke around? 

And need I answer that question? Isn't it obvious what the purpose of this website so far as been? Why would moderation be needed when  there is no goal? And if making an elaborate chatroom (which functions like a forum and looks like it) IS the goal of this website, then the goal is ALREADY ACCOMPLISHED and moderation is not needed (unless you want to make a chatroom for experts only, in which case you'd have to find a way to test their expertise before they were allowed to join and/or be already aware of their awesomeness, etc.). 

So that's it for sociopath-community. Moderating it without placing a goal of high quality content would only make it worse, because at least this way we can see the true colors of bored pranksters and gossipers. Whoever feels disgusted with the content in here should just turn their backs and move away. Staying here WHILE complaining is just hypocrisy (if not outright stupidity, lol), since there are TONS of other places where you can get high quality commentary on whatever subjects you like (namely in books, and even on the internet if you know how to look for it).

A last question remains, though: what, then, is the FUTURE of this website? But isn't it obvious? Luna herself seems to have been working her way towards this future. To grow "infinitely"; to bring more and more bored pranksters and gossipers; to maximize the "niche" "sociopathy" and package it in a nice, tidy and appealing way to the masses; to make a lot of — money. 

That is the only worthwhile goal of this website: to make money. To maximize the number of sheep under the concept "sociopath" (which I hear is fashion these days!) and use them to make money with the power of the internet. After a certain point, however, the bigger it grows, the worse and worse it will get content-wise, because the masses are not just averse to quality: they are averse to honesty and rudeness, and these are currently the only "selling points" (lol) of this website for me. What I mean, basically, is that as this website grows it will look more and more like psychforums. 

But if the goal is neither quality nor money, why the hell are you wasting your time here Luna? To practise you web design skills of course! And that's totally fine. :)

Really Pretzel? You think anyone wants to read all of this?

by Etzel

So, to get back at our little sociopathic forum, what is the goal of this website? Is it to have CUTTING-EDGE discussion on sociopathy and perhaps other mental illnesses and psychology as whole, or is it just to have a bunch of bored people socialize, gossip and joke around?

Didn't that Sociopath Street forum try to be serious and it sucked?

This should be stickied so we don't need to repeat it.  This might already do some moderating on its own.

Haha, I enjoyed reading your view points Etzel!!

The future of this place is uncertain. Umm, I know there will be huge changes though. Perhaps instead of describing the future, I can just tell you about the changes that I have planned, and you can imagine from that what you like.

One of the first objectives I'd like to accomplish with this community is to establish a sort of reputation system which will allow us to passively filter out noise from trolls, spam accounts, alts, etc. This will be important when we begin to impliment community orienated moderation which will depend on high-rep users policing themselves. I'm sure there are a lot of you who think the cool thing to do would be to game such a system, and I don't blame you, but I believe that if we can develop a system that cannot be gamed, we will have accomplished something pretty cool, and I think it could allow this community to take on a personality of it's own.

Another big thing is that I really admire reddit. The idea of a community of people being able to upvote an idea. It's such an amazing way to guage support, and unite people in a cause. I think I would like to add a sort of system which will allow the community to rate the quality of it's own threads, and even auto hide low quality content, spam, NSFW, etc.

So basicly.. from these two ideas, I'd like to develop an experimental system which will allow this community to moderate itself.

I'd also like to point out that I'm not so interested in content. I'd prefer to focus on the user experience, and improving that. Mostly I'd like to do this by giving the user more opportunities to interact with other users. I've mentioned plenty of times a great candatit would be RISK. A 6 player game based on player diplomacy basicly. Additionally on the topic of user experience, I'd like to remove the requirement of pressing refresh to update the thread list, and the list of online users. I believe the entire page can be alive and update in real time, and I think this will greatly improve the user experience.

I'm not sure how much money this site could possibly make, and I think it's dumb to imply I'm so interested in the money. After all, it's been 10 months now that this forum has been launched, and look.. we've paid over $700 in server costs, and not even a donation button yet. :P

The truth is that... I'm 17 years old. I'm blind and I'm learning as I go by feeling the walls. I watch this place grow, and I make changes, and observe the results. I have the ability to program it's true, but this is my first opportunity to truly work with a community and experiment with group dynamics. Money is on my mind of course, but I focus on clients who can pay thousands... not a small group of basement dwellers who can pay $5