thread: 2005-06-16 : The Forge and Me
On 2005-06-20, Vincent wrote:
Ethan: "Yet it wasn't always so. What changed at the Forge? Is it simply that there are so many voices that it's become cacophonous, or is it something else?"Hoo boy.
Here's my most generous and understanding possible take:
As the Forge has grown, its uninformed membership has grown faster than its informed membership, of course. This means that the number of people with questions on the forums has increased faster than the number of people qualified to answer them. Sooner or later, the questions were bound to outstrip the answers - and indeed they have.
Furthermore, everybody's allowed to answer every question, even people who aren't qualified to. The longer a question thread goes without a good answer, the more likely somebody's going to jump into it with a bad answer. As the number of questions has outstripped the number of answers, the number of bad answers has grown, accordingly. For a while it didn't matter much, because someone qualified would get to the thread eventually and correct the bad answers. Sooner or later, though, the bad answers were bound to outstrip the qualified answerers' ability to correct them - and indeed they have.
That's where we are now, according to my most generous reading of the poor Forge. I could spend all day every day there telling people they're wrong. I read threads and I'm like, if I were a good Forge citizen I'd be GNS cop and club some heads, but shit man, it'll just be more heads tomorrow, and still more the day after that...
Then, ask me what I really think and I'll throw in some badly entrenched identity-politics-based and grudge-based bullshit that wouldn't go away even if we were all theory-heads. As the number of members has grown, the number of pairs of members has grown way, way faster, and every pair is a potential crisis. It's to Ron's extreme credit that the forums haven't exploded in interpersonal flames.
I'm totally open to better analysis, by the way. I'm just winging it.
