Apparently the Steam Workshop can be pretty based.
(media.communities.win)
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Centralization is a bad thing as it turns out. We need to go back to fan forums and just a multitude of venues for discussion that aren't controlled by hostile forces. It's the same issue I have with reddit, it centralized all discussion and then the antagonistic interests moved in to make sure actual discussion couldn't happen.
I think back to some of the most enjoyable online forums and while the venues themselves were fragmented you had many of the same personalities participating across many of them. Ye olde FFXI forums were a community unto themselves. I remember when Square Enix finally opened up official forums decades after the game launched and immediately we were running into authority figures squashing discussions either for getting too heated or because they reflected poorly on the company. Many people simply fell back to the old fan forums to continue the conversation.
Now everything just gets funneled into a reddit or a space curated by moneyed interests, or worse ideological interests and it all goes to shit.
Centralization isn't the cause it's just correlated with it. Multitudes of venues will be overrun as well, and you'll be constantly moving around looking for the new one that's still undiscovered by raving lunatics.
The problem is they merge together everybody's votes. So the extremists get a loud voice because they vote more, and especially those cheaters willing to create AI bots. Scored will fall to this, just like reddit, but not 4chan because they don't have scores and karmas.
The solution is obvious when you consider that every scored/sorted forum will create a biased information bubble. Then the least bad is to have a personalized you-sized bubble. For example, a system where you vote to see more content like that, not to make others see more content like that. When you pick a forum to read you're doing just that; you're saying you want more content like that and less like in other forums.
Of course the downside is that Imps will see other Imps - it'll magnify the good and the bad. But it'll do it fairly and give people the content they deserve. New people show up and downvote Imps because he's too far out and then the forum gets better for them. The core group will never have their forum overrun, worst case they'll have another forum superimposed that they never see.
This can be done with a centralized forum or a distributed one, but the distributed one lets you verify the you-bubble algorithm.
I think the fix is to just go back to PHP bulletin board forums. No more upvotes and downvotes, just bully people into reading through the entire thread if they want to actually participate in the conversation. There was a lot more actual engagement between people who disagreed back in that format.
Even in the USENET glory days people had their own blacklist in their newsreader client.
You can't prevent people from using client-side scripting and there's too much ability to spam these days.
So you'll be looking at a huge linear thread but they'll be clicking a button to hide every reply by a person and making it a collapsible tree.