Forums, As Seen On TV

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This brief clip from the season 7 finale of the television show 30 Rock skewers stereotypically snarky Internet forum culture. The action starts at 25 seconds in.

This topic is for comments on the original blog entry, at http://blog.discourse.org/2013/03/forums-as-seen-on-tv/

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forums can be scary places. happy to hear discourse is trying to shake things up.

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I heard this quote on Daily Show …

I finally figured out where Sarah Palin came from. Someone cast a spell on a YouTube comment and it came to life.

I think the larger forums get, the worst the culture often becomes, the pinnacle being YouTube. Once you reach the YouTube level of comments, you have found your pot of gold.

I really hope we can change this.

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Reminds me of my favorite Chrome extension, Herp Derp Youtube.

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The chief problem with YouTube comments is just that, they’re comments. When you place emphasis on ephemera instead of lasting conversation, that’s what you get. When you present what should be lasting conversation as ephemera, that’s also what you get - and this is where a lot of forums fail. What do I care what I wrote that I can’t easily even go back and find a month from now? Or maybe I don’t care if my cheap thrill just gets voted down into the ether.

When every reply is presented as important, and valuable - I suspect people tend to behave better. I can’t rightly say one way or another, as I have no real prior experience with discussion software that gets this right.

So I guess we’ll see :slight_smile:

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I love this quote about YouTube comments:

YouTube IS the room with the million monkeys and the million typewriters, but they haven’t even gotten half-way though Hamlet yet because they’re too busy pitching feces at one another.

The chief problem with YouTube comments is that the people who implemented the commenting system simply do not care. If they did, 3 letter comments would be disallowed, there would be a spectacular system for weeding out the crap, trolls would be banned and so on … and so on.

YouTube comments don’t really matter to YouTube cause its all about the videos and nothing else. The conversation is not even a secondary priority.

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There is a WordPress version of that Herp Derp extension too!

http://www.jwz.org/herpderp/