You know, Walt and I were chatting one day about how maybe we should just boot about a half-dozen people from the PointBuzz forums just to try and bring the focus back to actual discussion. I don't even read the forums there much anymore, let alone post in them. I'm getting to that point on CoasterBuzz as well.
That half-dozen are people who post a lot. I mean a metric assload, in fact. But I'm not sure how much they're really saying. This weekend around the campfire, Cindy even said it was basically the same half-dozen people who posted all of the time about dumb shit, trading "inside" jokes and whatever, and making something public feel, well, not. Not exactly what she said, but I'm paraphrasing.
Historically, after doing this for almost ten years (holy crap!), these folks tend to come and go and it takes care of itself. Aside from spamming, we let stuff just happen, and I don't remember the last time we actually banned anyone. But at the same time, I really feel like I want to "take back" what I've been spending time and money on for the last almost-decade so that it's fun for me again.
Of course, people always like to accuse me of being a jerk or whatever, and that's fine. I'd like to think I'm just calling out people being stupid, but that could be further interpreted as being arrogant. It still comes down to wanting to enjoy what I write the checks for.
At the very least, I suspect there's a club member only forum coming to CoasterBuzz. When looking the cards mailed or the bulk of people registering for events, I realized that very few are active in the discussion. That's a problem, since they're not the freeloaders, those are the people really paying the bills. That's something to ponder.
I have to admit I've cut back my reading and posting on the CBuzz forums a great deal because I'm tired of reading the same crap from the same people.
Although there have been some interesting debates, there are times when the same few beat a dead horse to death and just can't let go of their prejudices. Some of it is so stupid or irrelevant to begin with, then it degrades into people bashing and name calling. And some of the worst offenders sound like 13 year olds when I know they are much older than that.
I'd bet I could name all six, too.
Yeah, I'm not sure what you can do about it, though, without engaging in censorship. I think the ideal thing would be for the members to take back the site themselves. Unfortunately, many of us, myself included, just stop participating due to our agitation with it and that gives them free reign.
That's a big problem on Digg. One solution is to come up with some type of "editorial" board of appropriate size who understand our community style. Let them vote up the good ones, vote down the bad ones, with the majority of posts getting neither. After a certain number of votes, good posts are highlighted. Bad posts can be dimmed and, at certain level, could be hidden.
I'm not sure how it would work in real life, but it'd be an interesting experiment.
What about having normal Diggish voting but any action wouldn't be taken until a large number of votes were totaled. For example, A topic wouldn't get publicly "buried" until 50 users voted it down.
The idea of personally burying a topic that a user won't ever care about is something that could be taken from the concept even if it never went all the way.
I visit both sites (pointbuzz, coasterbuzz) everyday and have a hard time weeding through all the banter to find the real discussion threads. I would welcome a member's forum on both sites, then maybe I would be able to get to know other club members somewhere other than just the events.