What is going wrong with the Forum? | Page 9 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

That’s cool that the site owner, Joe, weighed in with such a long and thoughtful commentary. I gave the example of Paltalk chat, and I could also cite the example of Twitter where I have been quite active for some 2 years now. On Paltalk, there are some rooms there with 50 to 100 people who are all actively participating, and so my appetite for having vibrant discussion among many people is satisfied on merely a numerical level, but amusingly I have to say most of the time the quality is so abysmal it’s almost not worth it. Similarly for Twitter there’s plenty of participation going on, however, on Twitter there’s almost zero ongoing discussion between people. It just seems odd that on the internet with millions of people as a potential pool to draw from, that It’s So Hard to find any kind of a platform or venue where there’s ongoing discussion, which can range all the way from the respectful but fruitful disagreement & debate, to the silly or abusive, but has a middle range where one must expect — and allow — a little of both in order for a viable center to thrive, in my humble opinion.

I just don’t think there’s any good logical reason to suppress flow of conversation outside of the clear extreme examples of death threats, doxing, repeated abusive speech. One also has to take the structure and nature of the venue into account. For example, on this forum you have an architecture of many different sections, and then within those sections many different subsections, then within that, many different topics. Given that overall architecture, it doesn’t make sense to me to treat one of those little areas of topic within the vast complex beehive of the forum itself, as if it’s somehow threatening and dominating the entire forum. It’s just one cubbyhole within a vast array of cubbyholes organized into different sections. So if inside one of those little cubbyholes called “Paul is dead” a couple of people start posting a lot of stuff that seems wacky or weird or otherwise annoying and they keep on going, it’s not like their activity in that little cubbyhole is spilling out over the whole forum and infecting the whole forum like a poison gas. Reasonable people who don’t like their activity can just ignore particular cubbyhole (or if they had the stamina and patience they could articulate some counter arguments — not to try to persuade those theorists because they’re probably beyond persuasion, but just for the record), and proceed to be active in the hundreds of other honeycombed cubbyholes of the forum. 

Well one big factor I think is difference in temperament among people. I seem to be a kind of person who likes controversy and likes to argue and even if I get annoyed by someone else in the argument I consider that just part of the fray, and see the overall context as an atmosphere that helps make ongoing discussion thrive and interesting, certainly more so than no commentary or response at all (see my postings with no responses in the songs category, recording and musicology, John lennon, and Ringo about his drumming, and many others, far more than have received responses), or bland commentary like “boy I really like that album of Paul’s!” Or “Paul was playing great in that concert in 2014!” If that’s the sum of the content it’s not that interesting. Other than that, there are occasional postings where somebody provides some interesting or useful data about the Beatles, and that’s cool, but it’s not really conducive to discussion or conversation, it’s just stuff that one could find anywhere on the internet.

Just as with Twitter, I realize that this forum really isn’t a place for conversation! Sure there have been moments here and there in the last 3 months I’ve been here where the conversation starts and goes on for two or three postings, but if we were to metaphorically compare conversation with a cozy yet roaring fire in a fireplace that lasts all night, the fits and starts of conversation here are like a sputtering Bic lighter that’s running out of oil.

@Expert Textpert 

@Expert Textpert 

This is the nefarious man behind it all (in the middle in disguise)