(or how I learned to stop worrying and love the Ban Hammer)
After my unexpected absence, I’m back but not entirely sure in what capacity. The reasons for my departure are a perhaps not-insignificant feedback for B3D. In short, the time investment to moderate was considerable and yet it wasn’t able to get discussion quality to what I liked about B3D, so I just popped out for some fresh air…
When Rys took me aside and handed me my first ban hammer (the Mark II with the limited edition cyan trimming; a more delicate hammer for considered ne’er-do-well removal), I was already a very active participant of the console discussions, so my role as Mod placed me slap bang in the middle of the conversations I was also a part of. Being self-employed and working from home, I could spare plenty of time participating and moderating. Okay, I couldn’t really spare that time, but I did anyway. We got to a very comfortable point, IMHO, where moderation was minimal and I was mostly just engaged in discussion.
As time rolled on and the population changed, the amount of moderation increased largely around the same personalities conflicting. Additionally, the number of active mods on B3D has always been low because most aren’t self-employed and working from home and wasting their mornings on it, but fitting in moderation around their Real Lives. Even with Rys promoting new members to Moderators, there remained basically three of us, BRiT, AlStrong, and myself. And frustratingly we hit the same problems over and over again. This feedback forum has plenty of topics started about what’s tricky in maintaining the B3D standard, but nothing particularly changed. To underline the point, upon my return now I see an outstanding Report that is exactly the same people as always!
So one day I’m feeling grumpy at the amount of bickering and cyclical arguments and how emotional people get over whether they are right or wrong and the amount of time and ridiculous number of words I’m spending mostly arguing about the discussions rather than the topics, and I’m thinking, “I really need to finish my game!” and I install a site blocker into Firefox. Over the next week I’m really aware how habitual B3D was, that I’d keep going to visit it between coding down moments, and the blocker gets a good workout. And this frees up loads of time! Not only do I get more development work done, but I even get time to play games a bit more. Ni No Kuni was a fabulous week’s break.
There was no plan or intention beyond what was needed at that moment. My gaming interest was well served by EuroGamer, with small, short lived topics and zero responsibilities. In particular, as a mod I felt it necessary to read pretty much everything in the Console space including members who rubbed me up the wrong way, whereas on EG I’m happy to just ignore people or drop conversations. A couple of B3Ders waved at me there which was nice. One asked if I was going to return to B3D – I didn’t reply and didn’t really know what that answer was.
Still, there were moments I missed the decent technical talk, such as the new PS5 with its downsized cooling solution (I’m sure Mr Fox has something to say about that!), and I knew it’d be nice to be involved in that again, but I don’t want to be dealing with console wars crap or GPU vendor wars crap. And I really mustn’t talk so bloody much!
So now I’m back in the room, and I really don’t particularly want to be moderating. It also appears Al has disappeared
cry so BRiT’s shouldering everything himself? And I just feel a healthy community should be able to carry itself meaning people can come and go, as many have, without it impacting the health of the community. The fact we have been several years with the same people generating the same noise shows to me that the present system isn’t ideal, yet no-one’s got a workable, actionable solution, suggesting the current noise:signal ratio is what we’re stuck with. Is it still better than the rest of the internet? Yes. Maybe that’s as good as we’re realistically going to get, but I really would love B3D to return to the place it was when devs connected with users in interesting ways. Of course, maybe the lack of devs is due to the changing face of communications, them moving to Twitter and Reddit or preferring the more populous ResetEra, and that in itself means less signal setting a lower baseline for new users?
After my unexpected absence, I’m back but not entirely sure in what capacity. The reasons for my departure are a perhaps not-insignificant feedback for B3D. In short, the time investment to moderate was considerable and yet it wasn’t able to get discussion quality to what I liked about B3D, so I just popped out for some fresh air…
When Rys took me aside and handed me my first ban hammer (the Mark II with the limited edition cyan trimming; a more delicate hammer for considered ne’er-do-well removal), I was already a very active participant of the console discussions, so my role as Mod placed me slap bang in the middle of the conversations I was also a part of. Being self-employed and working from home, I could spare plenty of time participating and moderating. Okay, I couldn’t really spare that time, but I did anyway. We got to a very comfortable point, IMHO, where moderation was minimal and I was mostly just engaged in discussion.
As time rolled on and the population changed, the amount of moderation increased largely around the same personalities conflicting. Additionally, the number of active mods on B3D has always been low because most aren’t self-employed and working from home and wasting their mornings on it, but fitting in moderation around their Real Lives. Even with Rys promoting new members to Moderators, there remained basically three of us, BRiT, AlStrong, and myself. And frustratingly we hit the same problems over and over again. This feedback forum has plenty of topics started about what’s tricky in maintaining the B3D standard, but nothing particularly changed. To underline the point, upon my return now I see an outstanding Report that is exactly the same people as always!
So one day I’m feeling grumpy at the amount of bickering and cyclical arguments and how emotional people get over whether they are right or wrong and the amount of time and ridiculous number of words I’m spending mostly arguing about the discussions rather than the topics, and I’m thinking, “I really need to finish my game!” and I install a site blocker into Firefox. Over the next week I’m really aware how habitual B3D was, that I’d keep going to visit it between coding down moments, and the blocker gets a good workout. And this frees up loads of time! Not only do I get more development work done, but I even get time to play games a bit more. Ni No Kuni was a fabulous week’s break.
There was no plan or intention beyond what was needed at that moment. My gaming interest was well served by EuroGamer, with small, short lived topics and zero responsibilities. In particular, as a mod I felt it necessary to read pretty much everything in the Console space including members who rubbed me up the wrong way, whereas on EG I’m happy to just ignore people or drop conversations. A couple of B3Ders waved at me there which was nice. One asked if I was going to return to B3D – I didn’t reply and didn’t really know what that answer was.
Still, there were moments I missed the decent technical talk, such as the new PS5 with its downsized cooling solution (I’m sure Mr Fox has something to say about that!), and I knew it’d be nice to be involved in that again, but I don’t want to be dealing with console wars crap or GPU vendor wars crap. And I really mustn’t talk so bloody much!
So now I’m back in the room, and I really don’t particularly want to be moderating. It also appears Al has disappeared
cry so BRiT’s shouldering everything himself? And I just feel a healthy community should be able to carry itself meaning people can come and go, as many have, without it impacting the health of the community. The fact we have been several years with the same people generating the same noise shows to me that the present system isn’t ideal, yet no-one’s got a workable, actionable solution, suggesting the current noise:signal ratio is what we’re stuck with. Is it still better than the rest of the internet? Yes. Maybe that’s as good as we’re realistically going to get, but I really would love B3D to return to the place it was when devs connected with users in interesting ways. Of course, maybe the lack of devs is due to the changing face of communications, them moving to Twitter and Reddit or preferring the more populous ResetEra, and that in itself means less signal setting a lower baseline for new users?
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