When I was in college I used to frequent the **Pro Wrestling **Usenet group. Hard to imagine a higher moron to non-moron ratio than there. For a group of guys who like watching other big sweaty men in tights grappling with each other, they sure have a high percentage of homophobes. shrug I have to hand it them though, they have had an amazing run of getting their own lingo accepted into the American lexicon.
Amen to that, jabroni.
Pretty much everything related to pro wrestling has a higher idiot factor than everything that isn’t- and I say that as a fan.
Imageboards in the Japanese “chan” genre typically have something like the Pit, only it’s set aside as the “anything goes area”. The larger the population that participates in the imageboard, the larger the sub-population that lives in that marginalized noise duct.
On at least one board I can think of, the noise outweighs the signal by so many orders of magnitude it’s like hiding a tiny glass pony figurine inside a supertanker of radioactive horse feces doped with heavy metals and Amazonian lizard toxins. There might be a pony in there somewhere, but damned if you’re getting it out unscathed.
There are entire threads that where the topic is, essentially, I bet I can say something which will result in this thread filling up with meaningless noise. These threads are popular, and draw out hundreds of replies where the person replying tries to either (a) generate signal in order to piss off the OP, or (b) generate noise in order to piss off both of the people who think (a) has a prayer in hell of working.
If the OP is feeling brave, check out Encyclopedia Dramatica, which tries to explain the “culture” of such boards. It will be full of links to boards with this perversely horrific noise level. Every time you load the page at one of these places, you should expect:
(a) there will be NSFW and possibly illegal images loading in your browser (turn off caching)
(b) there will be someone trying to convince you to download a virus (don’t follow ANY links)
It is the sewer, the cesspool, the very bottom of the internet. You’ve been warned. Good luck, and have fun!
I can see how some would say this, but actually I think some of these imageboards are among the funniest, most creative, and most interesting places on the web. Obviously, your mileage, and others’, may vary (wildly).
By the way, my nomination for the original question: the comments section of any online newspaper, if that counts.
I don’t know how I found this treasure, but one board I visit consists of only 5 semi-elderly ultra-conservative Southern baptists. Three of them are pastors and one is a Vietnam war vet. Its a hoot, especially for talking about politics.
Intelligence-wise, its about as bad as the white supremacist board I occasionally read except instead of using the n-word they pray for each other (otherwise its the same political viewpoint).
Yeah. But discussing other boards isn’t a the same as a board war.
And if that happens, shouldn’t that be when the moderator should step in? The rules is “no board wars”, not “no discussing other boards”. Isn’t it?
Well, yeah. But you didn’t jump in with the warning because of topic drift.
You can meet some of the most knowledgable and humble people in the world on a martial arts message board, but the Internet Tough Guy to be found there is the highest order of the breed.
I totally forgot – I used to frequent Christian teen message boards for kicks, and they terrified me. What’s worse, some of the kids debated things like homosexuality, abortion, etc. and anyone showing any sort of lenience would get shot down by a moderator who basically played God and got the final word in every discussion.
One word: Brides.
Wedding message boards are crazy.
And two words: Cerebral Palsy.
When my daughter was young I used to hang at a message board for parents of kids with CP. The board was riddled with adherents of every crazy alt-med snake oil you could think of. They were vicious. When my daughter had her second round of orthopedic surgeries (quite painful and difficult, but necessary at the time), one of the other posters told me that my daughter would grow up to hate me for ‘handing her over to butchers’ in her childhood.
Yikes.
I imagine that scientifically-minded parents of children with autism encounter this same sort of thing at autism message boards today. In fact, one of the snake oil treatments (Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy) that was in vogue for CP when my daughter was younger is now being marketted for autism.
It highly depends, you can tell that most people take the trolling with a huge grain of salt, it’s like playing a giant game where everyone has to be a dick but since it’s a game no one means it. Unfortunately, it can be ruined, and is quite often, by people with ctrl+c/ctrl+v bound to their left and right mouse buttons and scrubs who actually troll seriously.
Imageboards get bad raps for their bad sections, 4chan has tons of great, mostly civil sections. /Po/ (Paper and Origami), /tg/ (tabletop games… well, mostly, don’t mention D&D for fear of the dreaded edition wars), /ck/ (cooking), /co/ (comics and cartoons), and, of all things, /x/ (paranormal) are all civil 99% of the time. But they all get a bad rap because of (and I hope I’m not out of line of the rules here) /b/, which is the only thing most people, even avid internet users that avoid 4chan, ever hear or know about. (To be fair, some other areas that you’d think would be pretty normal can get mean, not mentioning any names)
Also, futaba channel (the Japanese “predecessor” to our chan boards, stemming from 2channel in Japan itself) isn’t that bad, even if it does have a little bit of an anon presence.
The Game
You just lost it.
cough Anyway, in general the trend I find is the more mainstream the board topic, the likelier it is to attract truly horrific posts and opinions. Newspaper comment blogs, parenting boards, gun boards, game boards, stuff that the general populace is comfortable with, will generally be the worst of the lot. As you get more nuanced or obscure in the board topic, the more likely it is you’ll be able to weed out the dregs. A message board about video games in general will be awful, a message board about a particular game will be pretty bad but decent discussion can be had, and a message board for a particular group (guild or another subset of a game’s fans, like mod developers) will be pretty constructive. Exceptions abound, of course, but as a rule of thumb I think that works well.
Oh, if you turn the gain down on all of your righteous indignation emotions, you can find some great stuff. I love some of the hysterical threads that get started there like “No, this is Patrick” and “I accidentally the whole thing”. It’s like a Monty Python sketch that starts the same way but ends differently every time – digital improv theater, if you will. It also has pictures of people forcefully emptying watery bowels at each other in great syrupy brown gouts (and competitions to find the most disturbing example of such photographs!), horribly misogynistic memes like “Falcon Punch”, and tongue-in-cheek irony trolls being joined by a chorus of troglodytes who really do believe that blacks/Jews/whoever are evil/demonic/stupid/whatever.
It is full of culture - just like a Petri dish that’s been splashed with water from the East River.
I agree! I was only pointing out the mainstream “anything goes” (in this case /b/) channels. I have found the folks on /ck/ and /co/ to be very courteous and helpful.
It pains me to say this because I respect the men and women who serve in our military. But I have seen some horrifically cringeworthy posts on a military-oriented board. From people who were old enough to know better.
But I don’t hang out on gamer boards so I can’t compare.
Like Lynn, I’ve seen some parenting message board that make me want to weep for the future of humanity.