The Foolishness of Internet Moderators

This one's by Masha, I thought it was well written and needed more attention.

Rule followers are not ethical or just people, their willingness to follow rules comes from their desire to express their frustrations through violence upon people who they are allowed to abuse when they are in a position of power or have the ear of a person in position of power. Women and weak men are often these types.

Moderators need to justify their violence upon the community. note, these people do not care why they are punishing people, they only care about excuses to justify it to the greater community. Online we see this expressed as moderators making generic rules. These rules are vague and could apply to anything but they sound respectable and allow the moderator to maintain their image of being a just character.

The reality of internet moderators. Because being a "Moderator" on an internet service such as a video game requiring a good chunk of time and constant attention to the website, the moderator is often a small world, little ideas type of person, their illusion of being a protector of a community is all that drives them in life and they try to find "threats" all the time. From past experience I found moderators work jobs which do not require a great amount of abstract thinking, they are occupied by learning how to obey systems such as learning the rules to a board game, learning the rules to a framework of political or philosophical thinking etc. The problem with these people is that they are unable to think outside the box, they do not understand that a philosophical frame work of thought was created by a man, same with the rules to a board game, they internalize systems as if they were base truths of reality.

The cycle of creativity to stagnation can be explained by this type of person mentioned above. Once a community is formed, the rules are not exact, people push and pull at the structure either making it better or worse, if this community grows beyond a certain size, you will start to get people coming in that start to believe the creators of the community are some sort of divine entity and derive a sense of community through their actions. The leaders then naturally will give these people moderator positions which causes the community to enter a stage of stagnation. These people will uphold the leaders positions by using the tools of the community to exclude people they feel "don't fit in". As the people who "don't fit in" leave, the community enters a cycle of decline. If the "community" is not a community but a forum for a product, this is not a problem due to the leaders having a monetary interest in keeping people around to sell more products.