Forum etiquette - double-posting vs separating ideas?

[KisaiTenshi]

But, you're not looking to debate or discuss ideas rationally, you're just looking for being told that you're right.

Nope. Take a closer look at what I actually said.

Most "western" forums don't have these limits, because western people have an inflated ego, and see "dem's fightin' words" everywhere if everyone isn't praising them.

And if you start moderating them, they cry censorship! Free Speech! Blah blah blah.

But that wasn't enough, because YOU took it as a personal insult first.

.....I think that's a bit rude to make a generalized assumption that everyone who lives on the western side of the hemisphere have inflated egos, especially after you just talked about flamewars and trolls. I mean, it doesn't matter what side of the world you live on, everyone has an ego, just some people make their own more apparent than others.

To which I responded to why that is the case:

I manage/manged 4 or so "big" boards, and there are entire forums dedicated to "forum games" that do nothing but inflate the post count. Trust me, people post, just to be seen.

At least two of these boards date back to 1999. I've seen things. I've also seen how Reddit and 4chan have turned "forums" participants into rage warriors. Twitter and Tumblr have done nothing but drive a wedge between people who would get along if it wasn't for this incessant need for people to "call out" people they disagree with. A not-recent thing is "receipting" which is when people take screenshots of other peoples social media posts, often without their knowledge in a vendetta to try and shut the person up. This is all old drama that I've had front row seats to before.

The fact is, in point form:

1. The people who participate on large forums, feel the need to be seen.

Larger post counts in the case of is seen as a competitive ego challenge. There are entire forums, where there's sub-forums set aside for people to do nothing but ****-post in to keep it out of the General discussion where moderators don't want to keep removing their posts. This 100% true, and I have not seen any exception to this except when a forum is either very small, or has aggressive moderation. The SE forum for all that matters is unmoderated, and only limited by the post count.

If you read something else from that point that isn't "the post count limit is designed to prevent people from ****-posting endlessly" you're reading the wrong thing from it. If the post count didn't exist, the tech forum would be more useful, because as it stands right now, the tech forum allows you to post without the limit, but counts against the global limit, so if you respond 25 times on the tech forum, you will be unable to post anywhere else for two days.

2. When you try to moderate an English Language forum, you will get accused of censorship, hence many forums try to have a light touch as possible to avoid notorious trolls from crying censorship and dividing the community as to if their ban was worth the forum cleanup. In Customer Service situations, everyone can see what you're saying, and some people are intentionally "receipting" behaviors to show they were being mistreated, when in context, they were the instigators.

3. If you really care about what you have to say, start a blog. Nothing says forum participation is more worthless more than carefully researching a post that takes an hour, only to have the usual band of ****-posters latch onto the most generalized part of the post and go "Not everyone..."

Which is what happened here. You've found insult, where none was implied. You took a deliberate gross exaggeration and made it personal. Then others decided to dogpile on that without the context. If only there was a standard for sarcasm on the internet s/ .

So you're expecting a few more folks? Oh, do tell. *grabs notebook* I'm verrrry curious.

*kitten smile*

My Self-fullfilling Prophecy bingo card is almost filled out. What about yours? :P

But you did this very thing but a page ago. So... are you not rude as well. After all, by your own rules, snipping posts is rude.

Deleting everything but what you respond to is not "snipping". Deleting everything from the quoted post and replacing it with "snip" or something like "blahblahblah" is rude. If I remove a part of quoted post, it's because I'm not responding to the rest of it for reasons of either "context" or "focus". As the forum actively prevents double-quoting, the only way to get the complete context for a post is to quote the pieces necessary, and forum software often has a limit to this as well.

Use Google Scholar and look up "Social desirability, anonymity, and internet-based questionnaires", or "Can You See the Real Me? Activation and Expression of the True Self on the Internet"

People, simply put, are uninhibited on the internet when they are anonymous. People who post a lot, want to be seen, or want to be popular. People who are raging trolls on the interent, are bullies, and likely to ignore rules as long as they get what they want.