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It's 2005 again, and the Revolution™ is over. A few questions.

Started by The Good Reverend Roger, December 02, 2015, 04:23:20 AM

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The Good Reverend Roger

Question #1:  So, just for a minute, pretend you're ECH.  It's 2005, and Lauren has been run off into the hills, Hugh is writing magickle thoughts to himself at the Obsidian Mirror, and Eldora is stuck in Flint, Michigan.  The server trembles at your merest whim, and noobs shit themselves in terror as you absentmindedly ratchet the action on your automatic pistol.  Scantily clad young ladies with white residue on their noses tiptoe around, posting grainy pictures of the needle tracks on their emaciated arms.  You are the new face of Discordia, blisteringly mad, unpredictably violent, and very much in control of the uncontrollable.  What do you do?  What do you do?

What is your plan for Discordia in the post-911, pre-facebook world?

Question #2:  Okay, it's 2015 again, and the Discordian horde has been gone for nine years.  Nine years.  The titans you remember have all fucked off, some out of butthurt, some just because they aren't who they used to be, and some just got really, really busy.  There was no "cancer that killed PD", it's just that the format is old, and doesn't attract any new blood.  There is a feeling that Discordia really has nothing else to say, that it has all been said and done.  All that is left is the edgy posturing of validation junkies on Facebook.  It is the darkest time for Discordia as a worldview since the Reagan/Thatcher days, and there you are, sitting at ECH's weirdly-crusty computer desk, brushing cocaine residue off the monitor and wondering if there's any life left in the old girl.  What do you do?

So, you have to ask yourself, "Is there anything TO be done?" 

Obviously, I have some opinions on this subject.  First, pour all the old stuff into two subforums. One for the kooks, and one for everything else.  That's right, just jam all the past glory into a massive, searchable pile of fun.  Maybe even make the whole damn thing read-only.  Tie off the stump, break the funeral parlor continuity of the joint.  Make a brand new area for posting...BUT.

But maybe change the format.  Forums as a community have had their guts slashed out by Facebook and Twitter.  There's no changing that, because Forums are by definition a closed system, and Facebook is worldwide, largely unmoderated, and - here's the killer - designed with "taste tribes" in mind.  I have trolled and thus seen everything from Star Wars cosplay pages to goldfish fancier pages (WTF, Britain?).

So maybe something else.  Maybe we do this:

1.  Apple Talk.  Chat/socialize.  Starts empty, gets emptied once a year, on a rolling monthly schedule into...
2.  The Archive.  Read-only collection of the awesome old stuff.
3.  The Kooks.  Peanut gallery.  Maybe as a subforum of #2.

Then, the meat.  A 'Zine-type format, comments enabled & moderated, with the pick of the litter being shoved onto the site's front page.  Politics, activism, fiction, science, you name it.  But all in one forum, with the "best of", again, going to the front page...Sampled and linked, of course.  There's only so much page.

I think this is workable.  The beauty of it is, it's something you link to social media sites.  Feed off of them, instead of the other way around.  Push the message, whatever you believe that message to be.

Or Kill Me.







" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Honestly, I think that what's happened is the opposite of Discordia being in its twilight years. Discordia is probably better known than it's ever been, there are more publications, materials are easier to find than ever before, more people have heard of it... it's just that it's gone aboveground. All  the underground kiddoes who made this board great in the day have grown up, and they took their Discordia with them. There is an entire wedge of the new generation of young adults whose parents raised them Discordian.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


The Good Reverend Roger

Quote from: Mesozoic Mister Nigel on December 02, 2015, 04:40:54 AM
Honestly, I think that what's happened is the opposite of Discordia being in its twilight years. Discordia is probably better known than it's ever been, there are more publications, materials are easier to find than ever before, more people have heard of it... it's just that it's gone aboveground. All  the underground kiddoes who made this board great in the day have grown up, and they took their Discordia with them. There is an entire wedge of the new generation of young adults whose parents raised them Discordian.

Can't argue that.  Except for what's on the surface - what's visible - is icky.  Jonathan Bost ranting his desire to see Prince William's son publicly raped.  Rachel Haywire shamelessly ripping off anyone who gets near her.  TDS freaks explaining that women are scum and blacks are inferior.

I feel the need to either take it back or to just walk away and deny I was every involved.

I can always do the latter.  I'd like to try the former.
" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

Q. G. Pennyworth

Okay, here's what I would do:

Overrun r/discordia, steal it from whoever the admins* are now, it's not crazy hard to do with a subreddit. Also start r/discordiaprojects or something like that. Rule both with an iron fist.
Let people link whatever junk they want to in the general, save the works in progress for the projects sub, and when projects are finished promote the hell out of them on the main sub.
Bully a bunch of the existing Discordian groups to get on board (assuming there are any that aren't objectively awful).
Keep PD up largely as a repository for the projects that don't suck.
Ruin everyone's parties when they start announcing that their Discordia is being a racist prick whose preferred games are "annoying people without challenging the status quo." Start raiding. Nine Discordians will give you ten answers to what Discordia is, but my Discordia is ripping new assholes in people who use philosophy to justify being a useless dick. Useful dicks or GTFO.

*Apparently Cram is one of the admins, so even easier than I initially thought.

LMNO

I like this idea of "social posts eventually dumped into archives" and "meat".  Especially if it's easily linkable.  There's plenty of good stuff here.  I'm reminded of the FB group "The Best Of Tumblr", which eschews the racist/SJW/porn* and just posts screenshots of really cool or weird one-offs.  I could get behind that.



*Although, "racist SJW porn" as a genre could be interesting.

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Quote from: The Good Reverend Roger on December 02, 2015, 04:46:25 AM
Quote from: Mesozoic Mister Nigel on December 02, 2015, 04:40:54 AM
Honestly, I think that what's happened is the opposite of Discordia being in its twilight years. Discordia is probably better known than it's ever been, there are more publications, materials are easier to find than ever before, more people have heard of it... it's just that it's gone aboveground. All  the underground kiddoes who made this board great in the day have grown up, and they took their Discordia with them. There is an entire wedge of the new generation of young adults whose parents raised them Discordian.

Can't argue that.  Except for what's on the surface - what's visible - is icky.  Jonathan Bost ranting his desire to see Prince William's son publicly raped.  Rachel Haywire shamelessly ripping off anyone who gets near her.  TDS freaks explaining that women are scum and blacks are inferior.

I feel the need to either take it back or to just walk away and deny I was every involved.

I can always do the latter.  I'd like to try the former.

That's true enough. If the only place on the Web people are forming their impressions is Facebook, it's pretty gross indeed.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


East Coast Hustle

I'll be the first and most vocal to admit that I was a much better "rebel leader" than I was an administrator/curator. And the whole "my life got REALLY busy" thing is only partly to blame, I really just don't have any natural aptitude for management and it turns out that "I have a few ideas and some semblance of charisma" is not a workable substitute and may even be wildly counterproductive in the long run.

I have thought for a few years now that the original intent of PD.com would be better served by tying it more closely to the new model of the internet - social media integration, blog posts, etc. but I have always let a combination of inertia and fear of what you all would think of that idea hold me back from voicing it.

So...I can't tell you how glad I am to see this thread. This place is and has been an amazing collection of minds and an amazing vehicle for us to develop ways to actually shape the world as we see fit, in whatever small a fashion that may be. I am 100% behind the OP.

Actually, I'm 99% behind the OP. Truth is, I hate cocaine as a recreational drug and that residue on my monitor is actually from all the cornstarch that is required to keep my balls from sticking to me legs with every step.

Seriously, though. Yes. This. I'm all for it and will be happy to help in any way I can even if that means relinquishing or restructuring whatever vague and mostly ceremonial position of authority I still hold here.
Rabid Colostomy Hole Jammer of the Coming Apocalypse™

The Devil is in the details; God is in the nuance.


Some yahoo yelled at me, saying 'GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH', and I thought, "I'm feeling generous today.  Why not BOTH?"

Pergamos

The part you describe as the meat sounds like a blog. Nothing against blogs but they were sorta the thing before forums.

Faust

Yeah, the void for a vocal platform hasn't been filled yet. The big thing is social media integration (linking content like lego blocks.

For a while facebook was a platform for discussion but they have actively worked to stomp that out.

Instead people are saying less and less and just linking articles instead of voicing opinions.  Which is good for facebook and the linked content because they get advertising revenue.

We're now living in an age that actively encourages a technology for cookie cutter opinions, where any finer detail is lost. Because of the pace that template information can be disseminated, less people are interacting (digesting and replying) to bodies of text.

The exceptions are tumblr and reddit, but both carry a horrible curse in that in the case of tumblr the loudest, most vitriolic posts rise to the top, and reddits case, the most well phrased truisms.

It galls me that online communities are losing traffic to the link/like factory, the outrage culture, and the echo chamber.

We have all grown up and none of us have very much free time, and I feel like there are a million and one distractions (work, tv, games, books, going out with people I know, time with the fiancée), but I'm doing what I can to to think if there is a way to subvert these.

I've tried using the facebook integration for publicising content from here and for discordian projects. The little bit of publicising I did for any projects that have come up over the last couple  of years I've been posting to the Blog.
I didn't expect much from it but it seems to get a lot of hits and every so often I see something being cross posted.

If people wanted to start publishing on that, (I've been posting any kind of discordian projects that come by, and comic reviews on the rare occasion I do them), of anything really, we could use that as a platform to launch our content out into the wild again. The only thing is, I don't know will that generate discussion, but it could be worth using it as fishing bait to see if there are people out there who would come in to join the discussions.

I've been meaning to do a bit on Rogers book publishing but I haven't gotten around to it, if we had multiple people working on it, it would appear a lot more active and we'd be able to cover a lot more topics.
Sleepless nights at the chateau

Meunster

There is another of the big 3 sites that discuss things. Where only a few boards are racist. A site that shares a lot of the same values of Discordianism.

Also why are we making the next stage of Discord online?  Social media is for talking about irl. We should do more irl events even if it's just one guy being crazy in people's faces.
Poe's law ;)

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Quote from: Meunster on December 08, 2015, 06:04:42 PM
There is another of the big 3 sites that discuss things. Where only a few boards are racist. A site that shares a lot of the same values of Discordianism.

Also why are we making the next stage of Discord online?  Social media is for talking about irl. We should do more irl events even if it's just one guy being crazy in people's faces.

Speak for yourself. I have people I do IRL stuff with. Some of them are from this board.

Having an online location for meeting and communicating is useful.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


President Television

Quote from: Meunster on December 08, 2015, 06:04:42 PM
There is another of the big 3 sites that discuss things. Where only a few boards are racist. A site that shares a lot of the same values of Discordianism.

Also why are we making the next stage of Discord online?  Social media is for talking about irl. We should do more irl events even if it's just one guy being crazy in people's faces.

Problem with 4chan is that sure, only a few boards are racist in themselves, but they spend so much of their time shitting up the rest of the place that it might as well be /pol/ and /int/ across the board. And /lgbt/ keeps to itself for the most part, but it's pretty much /pol/ for gay men. /r9k/ is its own kind of vile. At best, you have boards like /tg/ where the Nazis run up against opposition of equal strength, but even there you get people complaining about shit like DnD 5e being inclusive to transgender people, even if there is a strong contingent telling them to chill the hell out. For a site founded on the premise of absolute freedom of speech, 4chan is actually pretty firmly authoritarian. If there were some centre of opposition to /pol/ on that site, I might be willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, but it's nowhere to be found. Instead, it's declared Tumblr to be its enemy, and in so doing exacerbated Tumblr's toxic qualities.
My shit list: Stephen Harper, anarchists that complain about taxes instead of institutionalized torture, those people walking, anyone who lets a single aspect of themselves define their entire personality, salesmen that don't smoke pipes, Fredericton New Brunswick, bigots, philosophy majors, my nemesis, pirates that don't do anything, criminals without class, sociopaths, narcissists, furries, juggalos, foes.

Faust

Quote from: Meunster on December 08, 2015, 06:04:42 PM
There is another of the big 3 sites that discuss things. Where only a few boards are racist. A site that shares a lot of the same values of Discordianism.

Also why are we making the next stage of Discord online?  Social media is for talking about irl. We should do more irl events even if it's just one guy being crazy in people's faces.

4chan is interesting from an ecological point of view. It has been the internets septic tank for a long time now, but it does seem to change over time. It used to be meaner, it used to have a lot more people involved from different hacking groups but that's reduced over the years. There's even less attacking of random peoples social media pages, or website invasions. I'm not saying thats a good or a bad thing, its just more insular.

Culturally, its probably at its most sanitised, minimum pedophila, gore, death threats, but it does still act as a platform of semi-anonymous  discussion.

I don't keep up with it enough to see anything to interesting going on but its probably there.
Sleepless nights at the chateau