pull down to refresh
Interesting observation. Why do you think that is?
Easy answer is that forums are all dying, besieged by spammers for years and lately slop and feeling that the only way to survive is ruthless defense of their own.
A more complicated answer might involve the human reaction to discomfort. Foreign ideas sometimes feel like they will destroy the comfort we have if we even deign to listen to them.
Hmm. Spammers and clankers make things less personal too. So there's less feeling of community that way. I saw most communities move to discords. Which sucks because the nature of that - invites, privileged rooms, moderation and real time chat - makes it even more of an echo chamber.
I suspect that echo chambers are what most people want -- probably even most of us here on SN. It feels great to be surrounded by people who agree with you and think like you do.
One of the cool things about the SN model is that it is designed to allow open participation. This seems really hard for outsiders to understand though.
Pretty sure it wasn't VPN related. It was because I signed up and made a post describing a generic forum moderated by money (no names, no links, no mention of Bitcoin) and for some reason they find this problematic.
I did a bit of research first and tried to match the tone and attitude on the forum. They do seem to like discussing the idea of how to moderate communities, but the idea of using money is perhaps a bridge too far.
One of the things that people generally distrust in their echo chambers is outsiders. This is a bit different here on SN, but I catch myself also being more skeptical of newcomers, and if there is even a remote sense of slop, I ignore the first post.
Note that sufficiently downzapped content reduces its public visibility (downzapped posts do not enumerate outside of top downsats / new, downzapped comments render hidden in SSR) and removes anchors on links, so the effect is similar-ish on SN in terms of public discovery (and I think search engine discoverability too)
Sure, but the decision to limit visibility is open to everyone, not just the mods.
And if someone was savvy, they could figure put how to boost themselves back into visibility (I acknowledge at that point you are pretty much an insider).
Your observation that outsiders are risky (or perceived as such makes a lot of sense). However, that was not the only forum I checked out and the trend I see is that people assume I'm attacking them or their way of (internet) life.
what triggered that thought?
Some people here in SNs are pretty fragile too whenever confronted with ideas from outside their own Libertarian US exceptionalist circle jerking echo chamber bubble...
A demonstrable inability to engage in a good faith reasoned contest of ideas instead of stooping to crude trolling attacks on the messenger...
Here's something I've noticed: other forums on the internet are very insecure -- not in the tech sense, in the emotional sense.