I don’t usually follow the Serious Discussion forum, for four principal reasons:
0. I believe that
all forums should be for serious discussion—or at least, for
high-quality discussion. I don’t want to contribute to the Bitcoin Forum following some internal version of the well-known “Lifecycle of an Internet Forum”, whereby old-timers are driven out by trash. Inevitably, the old-timers then proceed to found a new forum—where the lifecycle repeats, just as inevitably. I would prefer to either contribute my energy to making the ordinary topical forums good places to be—or leave this place entirely.
1. I dislike the idea of my signature being suppressed. I need my
PGP key fingerprint! Why should I be punished to combat spam? Likewise as for the post count rule. Rather than than take these restrictions upon myself, I will choose to post elsewhere.
2. Excluding new accounts from discussion can
decrease quality.
Vide my “Newbie”
debut in the Development & Technology Discussion forum, made three days after I started actively posting.
That would have been excluded from “Serious Discussion”.
3. A quick skim over threads in “Serious Discussion” shows that its rules do not actually guarantee discussions more serious than I could find elsewhere. Perhaps the
overall S/N ratio may be higher; I’d need to read that forum more to find out. But if I desire a very serious discussion, I would rather seek out, say, the best threads in Dev & Tech. Those are
serious.
I’ve had the foregoing thoughts ever since I first saw notice of “Serious Discussion”. Now, I am driven to air them by a bit of irritation: I created a brand-new
role account sooner than I’d intended, due to having inadvertently discovered a relevant thread in Serious Discussion. I wanted to use the new account to reply there. I bought a Copper Membership for it.
Then, I realized that it is disallowed from posting there; I’d forgotten the Jr. Member rank requirement, since I rarely ever pay attention to that forum.
I suggest that Copper Membership should permit immediate posting in Serious Discussion. I just tried; it doesn’t. Willingness to pay a nontrivial fee is likely to be a far more reliable indicator of quality than the ability to farm an account for activity, with
no merit requirement to reach Jr. rank. Moreover, the nontrivial fee makes the ban hammer much more painful for those who may be inclined to create throwaway accounts.
For Serious Discussion, at least, this would provide the
“legitimate means to bypass” mechanistic rules as mentioned below.
Amidst an Internet “gimme” culture wherein most people expect everything for free, anybody who is willing to
pay money for an Internet forum account must be presumed to be—well,
serious about it,
ipso facto.
As for the “Ivory Tower”: I’ve never set foot in there. I am excluded from posting in the Ivory Tower, and will remain so until sometime after Activity Period 1257 starts at 19:40:00 (UTC) today, 13 March 2018. Although I know the virtues of lurking (and did so
long before I even created an account), I would not read a forum where I am
forbidden from replying.
Although I am not at all against exclusivity, it is important for any strict social exclusions to be based on other than fully mechanistic application of rules such as the activity system; and where mechanistic rules are used, it is important to provide a legitimate means to bypass them where warranted. Think of it as a social safety valve. Or perhaps now that the merit system is in place, merit (which is non-mechanistic) should be used as the criterion for “Ivory Tower” access.
For my part, the most valuable discussion I’ve had here has been in Development & Technology Discussion—most of all in a self-moderated thread, where I can nuke trolls without heed to their cries of “censorship”. That is
my ivory tower.
