I’ve been playing alot of Street Fighter the last month or so and I’ll go to the Gamefaqs message boards or Shoryuken to read some tips and try to engage in general chatter about the game. I’m shocked at how abrasive and rude the people on those boards are. These people will look for any angle to bash, criticize, antagonize or demean each other. It’s so bad that most threads don’t get more than 3-5 replies before people just walk away from them due to the harsh treatment. For instance, any criticism about the difficulty of a game, or difficulty of using a character or something like that will result in post after post about how “the OP must just suck at the game because everything is so easy and you should just quit playing and kill yourself because you don’t count frames etc…”
Over the years I’ve noticed that ALL game boards are like this. Every single one of them. There is no where to go to have a mature conversation about a game without someone “being the bad guy”. I realize that there are probably alot of teens on these boards but I’m sure there are a ton of 18-50 year olds too but you can’t pick them out of the crowd because they all act like douches.
So overall I would say that videogame messageboards attract the worst personalities and social misfits.
I frequent allakhazam.com, which has boards for various MMO games. The conversations there are generally mature and flaming is almost nonexistant. It has a karma system that allows users to rate each other’s posts and that keeps things in line. I also used to moderate the forums of a browser-based game and discussions were mature with zero flaming.
The absolute worst that I have seen are Youtube, failblog, icanhascheezburger, and wordpress comment threads, but I’m not sure if you can really call those message boards in the traditional sense.
Parenting message boards frighten me, because of the things taken as gospel (antivaxers in particular), the philosophies, and the general idiocy. These people either have reproduced or they are trying as hard as they can to pump out sprogs. And it’s generally the stupidest of them who want to home school.:eek::smack::eek:
As a general rule, game message boards are, as the OP says, horrid. I, too, have found the various Civ boards to be polite and helpful, though. The posters on Civ boards generally don’t seem interested in penis displays. They want to genuinely encourage everyone to enjoy the wonder of the various Civs. Other game message boards, though, are all about who can flame the hottest, have the coolest sig, and general posturing. I used to moderate some video game boards on AOL, and I’d say that most of the posters on those boards were under 18. Some of them were actually pretty good kids, but others…one guy loved to post spoilers for game stories. Many of them bragged about their own games, while sneering at everyone else. Free AOL wasn’t worth the hassle.
I used to play Gemstone III and then GS IV, and there were several message boards that groups of players would set up, and then leave alone. These boards quickly became Spam Central, unfortunately, when they could have been a valuable resource for players.
Where I usually see a lot of stupid is in reader comments on those newspaper sites that have a comment facility for news stories. (The comments to New York Times articles are a nice exception to that - a lot of opinions that I really disagree with, but usually not the sort of aggressive ignorance found on other newspaper sites).
I’ll say that the City of Heroes/Villains boards are an exception; they are generally pretty civilized. On the other hand, they appear to be the exception to the rule ( in the opinion of more people than myself ).
I agree that the Civ forums are really good. Medieval forums are decent also. About bad ones, I don’t know. I just stay away from those. If I have a question about a game or such, I’ll pretty much just ask it here.
You have to remember, GameFAQs is essentially a giant meta-board, the closer it gets to the release of a popular game the worse it gets. Zelda boards usually aren’t that bad a few months before and after release but become hell within that timeframe. After the “release-scrubs” (or other 5 billion terms) leave, or before they come, it’s a lot of speculation and helpful advice and general fan-nerd stuff. And some boards are good because of the moderation, I’ve only been there a few times, but Smash Boards (for super smash bros) isn’t that bad (actually, official forums in general are pretty good because the moderators try to keep the “image” good so it doesn’t turn people off of buying the product because of the community). I used to regular the Lionhead boards (I can’t log on for some reason now :(, I was doing a cool Sims 2 thing too) and they were pretty cool (well, until MS took over and “upgraded” the board software while removing the rep system).
Anyway, I find the worst boards are the highly visible ones with little moderation, this encompasses GameFAQs, Yahoo Answers, etc. Anything that has a lot of people but not much governance.
For the most concentrated idiocy you can’t beat Yahoo Answers. And they’re sincerely trying to answer the question. Hint: if you want to find the right answer, look for the one with all the thumbs down.
Gemstone! GSIV Players is a player-run game forum that is also full of penis-displaying assholes. This was surprising to me, because everyone acts pretty civilized and mature in game. Yet get them together on a message board and all they can do is whine about how much they hate the game and tear each other down in a manner similar to what is described in the OP.
This is what I came in to post, and I see someone beat me to it in only 3 posts, lol.
I have to agree with YouTube comments as well. 90% of which revolve around how “gay” the video is, how “gay” the people in it are, how “gay” the poster is, and how “gay” the other commenters are. :rolleyes: The other 10% are links to CAMMING HOT GIRRRLZ!!! or something.
[Moderator Note]To avoid possible board wars(started by either us or vistors from the boards named), I must insist that posters stay on topic and not name specific boards, just genres.[/Moderator Note]
The first thing that came to mind was our local newspaper which isn’t a traditional message board but the flailing and flaming is ridiculous. I try and just read the news but they always put up the “featured comment” near the top of the article. Any story that is about Coleman/Frankin I don’t even open any more.
Try reading some sports related newspaper articles online that allow followup comments by readers. Every thread I’ve visited has been past stupid. I no longer even glance at the threads, I just read the story and move on.
I was going to mention this one. The IMDB boards seem filled with 12-year-olds who post lists of favorite movies, none of which is older than 1990. There are some exceptions, but the quality of the post in most categories is abysmal.
4chan’s /b/ “Random” board or any Furry message board. End of discussion. The posters on either would make your typical troglodyte look like a Harvard sophisticate in comparison.