I'm a former IC ZZL/P Mod = AMA

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Why is the tech powering the boards on 24/7 so lousy? No search feature, hard to embed content from other sites, sounds like the moderating tools were limited. If the community is what keeps the subscribers then why not improve the backbone of the community?
 
SnoopRob said:
I have no idea anything happened to DeanKeaton.

I just checked and he hasn't posted for more than 2 years.

I hope he's just like a lot of other folks who drifted away for some reason and that nothing serious happened.
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He's still posting on BoB and seems to be doing well. He's not there a lot. He's fairly occupied with his music.
 
Just to add (ha!), for those who keep saying "but the ads", the ad supported model of internet content has basically failed. Yes, ads are everywhere, but the ugly reality is the platforms - Facebook and Google, mostly - take most of the money. And no matter how targeted a site is, the platforms will always be better at getting ads in front of the right eyeballs, either because they are better at targeting or they just can get so much greater volume.

The only hope for small sites is subscription. (that's why so many blogs and zines use Substack and Patreon now). And people only subscribe for something they can't get anywhere else. Hence Snoop's correct concern about insider knowledge, and more generally the PTB's correct judgement to prioritize paying users over posting users.
 
I have always been so fascinated by the sheer lack of self-respect that it must require in order to whine about moderators on an Internet message board. Heck, we’ve got a poster on this very thread doing it. It’s so baffling. I have no earthly clue how anyone could possibly get themselves so worked up about other anonymous message board posters with goofy made up usernames talking shit to or about them. I would actually be genuinely curious to try to understand the psychology behind it.

I posted over the weekend on r/conservative a defense of Dick and Liz Cheney- the fucking Cheney’s!!!!- and got bombarded with people calling me names and telling me to do things that made even my profanity-loving self blush a little. Didn’t bother me one bit. Didn’t whine and cry about being oppressed or censored, didn’t scream and beg for moderators to step in and ban people, didn’t cry about how r/conservative is so hostile. Just laughed about it, took some notes for stealing a few insults for future use on PackPride, and went on about my day.
 
CFordUNC said:
I have always been so fascinated by the sheer lack of self-respect that it must require in order to whine about moderators on an Internet message board. Heck, we’ve got a poster on this very thread doing it. It’s so baffling. I have no earthly clue how anyone could possibly get themselves so worked up about other anonymous message board posters with goofy made up usernames talking shit to or about them. I would actually be genuinely curious to try to understand the psychology behind it.

I posted over the weekend on r/conservative a defense of Dick and Liz Cheney- the fucking Cheney’s!!!!- and got bombarded with people calling me names and telling me to do things that made even my profanity-loving self blush a little. Didn’t bother me one bit. Didn’t whine and cry about being oppressed or censored, didn’t scream and beg for moderators to step in and ban people, didn’t cry about how r/conservative is so hostile. Just laughed about it, took some notes for stealing a few insults for future use on PackPride, and went on about my day.
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You must've been hunting for some anarchy walking into r/conservative to stir it up.

That's one of the most insane subreddits to ever exist. Truly a glimpse into the multiverse.
 
NCK9 said:
Why is the tech powering the boards on 24/7 so lousy? No search feature, hard to embed content from other sites, sounds like the moderating tools were limited. If the community is what keeps the subscribers then why not improve the backbone of the community?
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This question is why you are posting on this forum here. Because of how much I hated the software on KU's 247 site.

I'm sure it would cost money to fix/change the forum software they are currently using but wow, it would be worth it. There was a banner on the KU site saying 247 just got a Missouri sports community to join, PowerMizzou, so I took a peek and a bunch of people were like wow this forum software fucking sucks. I had a good chuckle.
 
CallMeTyler said:
You must've been hunting for some anarchy walking into r/conservative to stir it up.

That's one of the most insane subreddits to ever exist. Truly a glimpse into the multiverse.
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Haha they are something else but I do go over there to forcibly expose myself to what the right wing is saying about certain topics. There was a post about how Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney are Marxist traitors, and I simply posted a graphic about conservative legislation that was passed under the Bush/Cheney administration, and then a graphic of the scorecard that showed Liz having one of the most conservative voting records in modern day Congress. They were not pleased.
 
NCK9 said:
Why is the tech powering the boards on 24/7 so lousy? No search feature, hard to embed content from other sites, sounds like the moderating tools were limited. If the community is what keeps the subscribers then why not improve the backbone of the community?
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I have no fucking idea. The absolutely terrible software that 247 uses is one of the greatest mysteries I've ever encountered.

I'll start off with a couple of things I know and guess a bit from there...

1) 247 did not understand message boards in the least before they acquired Scout. They had message boards, but they were a ghost town at every site.

2) 247 was convinced that it was best to build their own software instead of using off-the-shelf message board software + customizations. My strong hunch is that this is a cost-saving measure.

You have to realize that for most 247 sites, they don't necessarily have deep communities of subscribers that populate a message board with a lot of discussion, much less enough folks who aren't subscribers to have free message boards. I'm not convinced the 247 actually sees the message boards as an important part of their mission, instead they focus on information procurement and distribution. The sites that do best over the long term are those who have deep communities of folks, but many of them are legacy communities that have existed for 20+ years now. As a site that started in 2010, 247 likely guessed (correctly) that they couldn't compete on the community aspect against the legacy sites and so they didn't build out the message board infrastructure needed for those communities to thrive.

IC is not like the standard 247 site for most other teams. Most of the sites do not have a terribly large or vibrant community of folks who discuss their teams, instead the focus is on inside information. And so that is where 247 focuses their attention.

My hunch is that 247 - as a network - doesn't derive very much of its revenue (or at least its profit) from message board participation and so improving the message board experience is not a particularly high priority. Sites like IC are very much an outlier within 247 and so in many ways what IC needs in terms of message boards and what the average 247 site needs are not at all aligned. My hunch is that the changes that 247 would need to make to have good message boards would be expensive to roll out over the whole network, so the goal is that the board software be "good enough" that it doesn't actively run off participants on the few boards where the message boards are well-populated, but that they're not going to sink real money into the software.
 
rodoheel said:
Ooh, I've got a good one: which banned ZZLP poster got caught the most times trying to return under a new alias?
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Viper and his aliases totally take the cake.

I'm not even sure who he was, but there were times he'd create and have banned over a dozen aliases in a single day. And he'd do it for days on end. The weird thing is that he didn't start on IC, he came from somewhere else in the network (Ohio State, I think).

In terms of actual IC posters, I'm pretty sure OCS is up there near the top.

To be honest, after awhile we simply stopped worrying about who was behind the troll accounts and just went about our day after banning them.
 
NCK9 said:
Why is the tech powering the boards on 24/7 so lousy? No search feature, hard to embed content from other sites, sounds like the moderating tools were limited. If the community is what keeps the subscribers then why not improve the backbone of the community?
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We asked for years.

247 is basically awful
 
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