Every moment you spend interacting with these people is a moment of your life wasted. I could say the same about video games, but I digress.
FYI: Usenet is still a great resource for discussion groups of a more technical nature (programming, etc.) and many of the groups are actually still fairly active all these years later and have great content, completely unmoderated. I like it because it's primarily old-timers who know their shit, and even if some of them are hard left-leaning (or race-trolling conservative, which I dislike just as much), in general anyone who uses the groups to discuss politics too much is shamed and filtered out.
One could argue that having the kind of heavy-handed micromanaged moderation that forums like Reddit do doesn't actually make them any better, it's just a way to enforce the site's intrinsic leftist ideology in the guise of making it a "well-run community" that's amenable to advertising. Pretty much all you need to self-police is a "block" feature and the ability to report and remove the most egregious offenders. Set it up the "right" way and you could probably effectively moderate the whole site with maybe two full-time staff.
But moderators aren't really there to facilitate effective discussion anymore, their purpose is pretty much content-sanitizers so that anyone who drops in by way of Google searches won't get offended and forget to support the advertisers.
Free speech is incompatible with making big revenue. So it's the same with Wikipedia. Same with Stack Exchange. Same with Twitter. Same with...
FYI: Usenet is still a great resource for discussion groups of a more technical nature (programming, etc.) and many of the groups are actually still fairly active all these years later and have great content, completely unmoderated. I like it because it's primarily old-timers who know their shit, and even if some of them are hard left-leaning (or race-trolling conservative, which I dislike just as much), in general anyone who uses the groups to discuss politics too much is shamed and filtered out.
One could argue that having the kind of heavy-handed micromanaged moderation that forums like Reddit do doesn't actually make them any better, it's just a way to enforce the site's intrinsic leftist ideology in the guise of making it a "well-run community" that's amenable to advertising. Pretty much all you need to self-police is a "block" feature and the ability to report and remove the most egregious offenders. Set it up the "right" way and you could probably effectively moderate the whole site with maybe two full-time staff.
But moderators aren't really there to facilitate effective discussion anymore, their purpose is pretty much content-sanitizers so that anyone who drops in by way of Google searches won't get offended and forget to support the advertisers.
Free speech is incompatible with making big revenue. So it's the same with Wikipedia. Same with Stack Exchange. Same with Twitter. Same with...