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Not getting the xenophobia, myself. I'd be more convinced if there weren't threads to pimp people's Myspaces and Livjournals, and indeed if there was not a "Livejournal replacement thread" kicking around for when LJ is down. I haven't heard anyone say anything about facebook, except for Princess Swashbuckling, who wanted to kennel trolls on it, and Flyboy, who notes that the fact that the BNP has a facebook community does not endear it to him - there may have been something in the Late Shift - I would rather stand three times in the line of battle than read through the archives, though.
Something that DN says, I think, or at least alludes to, is that Barbelith as a community has developed a pretty good immune response to racism, sexism, homo-, trans- and sundry other phobias. It is far from perfect, and it betrays the bias of its general angles, but it is, I think, something that should be preserved, and actually reinforced. This is Barbelith's USP - it is no longer true to its original aims, really, but it does provide, as far as I know uniquely, a general discussion environment in which a wide range of bigotry is subject to criticism.
In terms of what went notionally wrong, I think the breaking of the joining, and the never-working of the banning, have caused enormous problems. I agree with Randy that Google is a huge issue, as well. The applications we do get, now, are primarily from people who want to talk about chaos magic or the Invisibles - essentially, people who are lookign for a Grant Morrison fan site or a chaos magic board, and who are done no favours by fetching up here instead. Or people who fit in perfectly well with the board ideologically, but cant the discussion gratuitously towards comic books, sci-fi films and/or magic. The deadness of the Head Shop and the Switchboard would have been unthinkable a few years ago, but the general expectation either of no response or of a very low standard of response have largely choked them off.
At present I think that Barbelith is a discussion forum, certainly, but it is also just a way of keeping people in one place, so that if we can get a working successor board together it is easy to give people an overview of what it will be like and let them decide whether they want to join it. That successor board will hopefully have open and more anonymous membership, robust moderation and banning, and may not only start us off with a fairly clean slate, but will also retain and energise good people here, make it easier for good members to join (and for bad members to be disposed of) and possibly entice some former members of Barbelith to check it out. If some continuity between this successoorboard and this board is to be assumed though, it is probably in our best interests not to let Barbelith itself go completely to shit, and to maintain some overarching expectations both of the standard of discussion and the topics under discussion - which is, incidentally, why the process of challenging actions like those of Kay, Mathlete or Claris Dancers is still valid, even if it does at times give the disspiriting feeling that the place is at its liveliest when people are having a fight. |
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