I really like forums, but there is a good point against them: They have a LOT of community inertia: Standards and expectations passed down from long bygone days. Often cemented by posters who'd left to the march of time, shaped by moderation guidelines, and hopefully eroded by progressing social expectations.

This can make them incredibly daunting to the new comer, unaware of tradition and injokes, unsure of what steps may result in the soft *click* of a social land mine.

@IrisKalmia Forums that grow popular quickly develop a social condition similar to the "5 Monkeys and a Ladder" experiment, except almost everything is a different type of ladder with different levels of punishment associated.

Point systems help alleviate this by making it easier to find the ladders ahead of time, though they also more rapidly condition users to mirror the dominant culture.

Generally speaking, the larger the space, the more toxic that culture becomes. :x

@mawr Not much I can say to argue with that: Good moderation helps offset that, but how moderation is handled is one of those defining questions of every social group.

Good forums like any online community hopefully have internalized that it's not "Just words on a screen" into their standards by this point and are moderating accordingly.

It's sad how many places haven't.

@IrisKalmia Good moderation stems the tide of toxicity. In smaller communities, it can eliminate it near entirely, and have procedures to keep it at bay when it inevitably returns.

The larger scale, though, is way more complicated. The healthiest solution is to let communities branch off naturally as their members find points of division with one another. Mastodon is probably the healthiest model I've seen for keeping large scale communities healthy and connected.