I apologize if this comes across as a dramatic “I’m leaving post”, so I’ll try to avoid that, but I felt some things needed to be explained before I go.
This is a story in two parts: a success, and a failure.
Success
To the extent that I have lobbied for Quarter To Three to update to modern forum software I think that part has succeeded wildly 🎉.
-
I’ve financially supported the forums to the tune of $24k (two years), plus covered the original migration effort, monthly hosting, CDN, and email costs. And I was happy to do so, as the qt3 forums have been a part of my life for almost two decades – and partially inspired the Discourse project itself!
-
So many rounds of your community feedback have been incorporated into Discourse, from user defined color schemes, to the “last visit” line, to live reply indicators, and so on. It’s all documented in the original transition topic. We worked hard on this, we continue to work hard on this, and we’ll even eventually get to Ignore, I promise.
-
With the Amazon Affiliates plugin, plus the Patreon integration, Tom has a way to make a reasonable living that doesn’t bombard people with mostly ineffective and adblocked display ads.
-
The forum is now on high quality, living breathing open source software that is updated frequently and very likely to not just survive, but thrive.
To be clear, nobody owes me a goddamn thing for any of this. The whole point of Discourse is freedom – that communities should collectively own themselves, not be owned by others. That is why Discourse itself is, and will always be, 100% open source and freely distributable, so nobody is beholden to any company for the privilege of operating a community, and you can always upgrade to the latest version of Discourse for free, forever.
Failure
One of the reasons I was comfortable “investing” a tidy sum in the qt3 forums is because I felt they had a future – a core backbone of really interesting regulars who I enjoyed interacting with, and who I thought produced some very high quality posts on the regular. Quality people, quality content – just add some better, modern software to the mix and hot damn, this is a place we could all keep coming back to and even growing, into 2030! Awesome! 🙏
But how do communities survive over decades?
I think to understand community survival, you have to look at the major problems, the actual events that broke up communities. I wasn’t really around for the old 2011 forum schism – pastebin copy here, so you don’t need to log in to read it … but even after the fact, I felt it was deeply unfortunate that the community had fragmented so badly as a result of that event. It’s true that a handful of those people I wasn’t sad to see leave, but there were a bunch who got caught up in that event that I did miss, who were reliable contributors in the past. Could better forum software have somehow prevented this schism?
The more I dug into it, the more I researched, the more it became clear that the root cause of that debacle was the unilateral decision making of one moderator / site owner acting alone. I’ve seen a similar effect on another early (and still active) Discourse site, where the site owner essentially went rogue and started arbitrarily chopping people’s heads off in the community with permabans. To be clear, it was completely within his rights to do this… but the community never really recovered from that event. And in fact it still hasn’t. It limps along, but as a shell of its former self.
In the end, even using our own software, I was forced to conclude that no forum software, however amazing, can save any community from the bad decisions of a single site owner acting alone. It is literally impossible.
I do not mean, and it is not my intent, to single Tom out here. Everyone has bad days, everyone makes mistakes, and for that matter not all of us have dispositions that are conducive to moderation duties, myself absolutely included. I think any forum where a single owner / admin calls all the shots is deeply unhealthy and prone to all the exact same problems. No software can save you. It’s only a matter of time with the “one man’s law is absolute” setup until the next community schism.
So part of the investment effort here at qt3 was to elevate @Telefrog and @stusser into trusted lieutenants that are Tom’s peers – because a) first of all, these guys are awesome, I am a big fan of both of them and b) without consensus moderation, we’ll slip right back into the old destructive moderation patterns that fragmented the community in the past.
I am sad to report that to the extent that I have lobbied for Quarter to Three to become a community that’s moderated by a group of moderators making decisions collaboratively together, I have failed utterly and completely. There are effectively zero cases (perhaps outside of obvious spam) where moderation is carried out without Tom’s express permission, and the rare times it does happen are quickly met by behind the scenes staff category posts chastizing them for taking whatever action they took. Maybe this is my fault. I have an aggressive style of pushing people toward a goal; perhaps I could have been more successful with a gentler, more subtler “behind the scenes” style of negotiation, and that’s on me.
Regardless, whatever the reason, I have failed in this task.
Sure, moderation is trivial when there aren’t any real problems. That’s easy mode. It’s barely worth discussing. But when those rare problems do occur in the community, tough calls need to be made. And those tough decisions made in time of crisis represent the truest nature of your community leadership, what you really believe and stand for. And recent events have made it abundantly clear, crystal clear, as clear as an azure sky of deepest summer …
… that when tough calls need to be made, it will be the unilateral and capricious decision of one site owner, without any input from the community, much less any fellow peer moderators … exactly like it was in 2011.
And that, sadly, is something that I cannot in good conscience continue to be associated with. If the site owner is unwilling to make any meaningful moderation decisions collaboratively, or to take on the emotional labor necessary to ensure continued survival of a community … then there’s no future in that community.
At least not for me.
I thoroughly enjoyed my time here, and I was (and am) happy to contribute what I could towards this community’s future survival, both in content, support, and otherwise … but that time must regretfully come to an end now. Please anonymize my account as soon as you can @tomchick (or if you’ll allow them to, @stusser, or @telefrog).
So long, and thanks for all the 🐟