User returns after 100k-hours ban to continue conversation that got them banned | Hacker News Reader

User returns after 100k-hours ban to continue conversation that got them banned

pcgamer.com

275 pointscampuscodi138 comments

I tried to return to my Habbo Hotel account in 2016 after a 10 year ban. After some struggling to login, I contacted support, and found out that they delete any account banned for more than SIX MONTHS! I waited 9.5 years to log into an account that didn’t exist. RIP “Mr. Funnyshoes”

Oof, I still have mine from 2003. 14 Year old me, cute.

ArtMoney with a filter pack that allowed you to place furni in walls. You'd get room rights and then grief the place and you couldn't get them out without the same script.

Same as rigging someone's doorbell to TNT in Minecraft.

I miss those days.

Account's closed due to bans.

That game still exists?

Back in 2005 I figured out how to log in on multiple Habbo accounts at once. I would run casino rooms using the dice and use a mob of clones to make it look like real players are winning and betting big. If an actual real player ever bet and won, I would kick them, tear down the whole room, transfer the items to new accounts, and start it up fresh. I probably had a few dozen accounts banned.

I love this story. This is basically the plot of The Sting (1973).

I don't know about Habbo but I've seen several games that look like it. Apparently some people use them as a virtual office.

If i ever get to work at microsoft, i'll try and get my original hotmail account back

Hahahaha that’s a hilarious idea. I once applied to a company just to fix the fact that they banned emailing my domain name because it briefly had a lapse in registration. It was preventing me doing password recovery…they ended up fixing it after weeks of me emailing everyone i could find at the company and explaining in detail exactly why they couldn’t email me. Default sendgrid reputation protection behaviour, they had no idea.

Ex-MSN person here. Hotmail accounts are made inactive after 180 days of disuse, deleted after 360. I don’t recall the recycle time; however, you might be able to get it back if it’s been recycled.

Thank you! I guess i can re-register it, I'll try that!

What did you do to get a 10-year ban?

Hacked account. I assume they used it to scam folks

RuneScape (1) the original, deleted my accounts shortly after switching over to RS2. My usernames were pretty amazing. 'Cash Trader' and 'Gem Trader'. Ironically there were NPCs called Gem Trader... so sad to have your account(s) you worked on for what felt like forever randomly deleted as a kid. Along with any rare old items.

Around 6 years ago I was messing with my HN settings, and accidentally set my minaway to the equivalent to 6~ years (I set it to a random number w/o bothering to read what it did).

My first comment post-self-ban was much less epic though.

I was really hoping this was your first comment in 6 years, but alas not.

There is now a protection, you can't set it to more than 9999.

Oh no :(.

Some time ago, I asked 'dang to ban my account for a month or something, as I was trying a HN detox. He told me to set minaway to some stupidly high number, and e-mail HN when I'm ready to come back. I typed some digits and banned myself for the next couple thousand years. In reality, it took me ~year to decide to come back, after finally understanding that blocking HN only causes me to seek out inferior forms of Internet use.

So much this — I just end up looking at YouTube Shorts or something of that kind if I can’t browse HN. It’s the reason I’ve always removed the noprocrast option even after enabling it for some time.

Your account has been commenting continuously since it was created in 2010

e: totally wrong, my bad

> our account has been commenting continuously since it was created in 2010

They seemingly have a gap from July 14th of 2018, to 4 months ago.

you’re totally right- sorta blanked my mind that 2018 was already 6 years ago

1998 was 6 years ago

Just curious: Why didn't you email the moderators?

> In a Google Doc shared with the thread via social media, our hero explained how posting in SA's community had been an important part of his life, how he had done a lot of growing up and a lot of mental healing in the intervening 100,000 hours, and how he now regretted his life as an infamously abrasive poster.

It sounds like someone grew out of their 20s and mellowed out in their 30s. A tale as old as time.

That could sum up SA as a whole. The culture there has shifted a lot over time, but not due to an influx of new users, it's the same people who have been posting for upwards of a decade and have (mostly) grown up. The founder Lowtax refused to grow up but, well, you know the story and now the site is under new management.

So, I didn’t know the story - turns out Lowtax passed - but in searching I found a bemusing internet history of how Lowtax’s “banning of hentai on SA [was] ‘The Archduke Ferdinand Assassination moment that lead to QAnon’”

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/qro1ir/comment/...

The short version of events as I recall is that Lowtax was basically admin in absentia for years, only occasionally showing up to beg for money while the volunteer staff actually ran the show, until he was accused of domestic abuse by his then-partner which followed a pattern of similar accusations by his two previous partners. That led to a revolt by the users and other staff, which pressured Lowtax into selling the site to one of the other long time admins and parting ways. The new owner revealed that the site was in fact financially stable, contrary to Lowtaxes fearmongering, probably because he had been skimming donations for personal expenses. Then Lowtax killed himself a year later.

reading that wonderful history lesson reminded me

1. Once again why no other site tried the "one time entry" fee to limit spam. Doesn't even have to be 10 bux; I think 1 dollar would go a long way to filter out 90+% of low effort trolls. And if they make sockpuppets: cool. money and easy banning.

2. A tale as old as time, but never let your personal biases interfere with moderation. If you really don't like something, codify it immediately before it offshoots into new competition.

3. damn, even before industry caught up anime-goers were persistent.

Twitter. Most spam is by paying users

I'd argue it's also due to an outflow of problematic users, such as what birthed 4chan

I remain unconvinced that the outflow was limited to problematic posters, but I am not a first hand user

It rarely is, but you know what they say about nazis at a bar. Same thing applies here. Even if there's one extra step of ironic nazism -> real nazis finding good company.

I was also also once banned from a forum for a few years. I kept going back there, never created a new account. Just waiting for the years to pass. It was not some crusade to get back, I was just curious and every few years when I would remember, I would check out the site. Until one day the site disappeared. It would have been fun to be able to log back in and just say "I am back".

I used to get banned from a forum, would use vpn to create a new account and identity with a new character and be a helpful poster until I had access to the social part of the forum and would immediately make a hilarious post with “I am back”.

There's a few of these characters in every SA-like forum, in a portuguese one, one of the major memes of the forum is that 99% of the accounts were alt-accounts (or "clones" as they were called there) of this one guy that was an edgy meme lord - for the same reason - avoiding bans. This thread reminded me of so much lost lore.

Talk about necroposting. I actually find this aspect of BBS/newsgroup/forum culture to be very intersting, and norms around necroposting vary widely between sites. I've noticed that many modern sites automatically archive threads after inactivity or due to age, such as Reddit and HN.

I wonder what the rationale for disabling comments on old posts on HN is? I can't imagine that is due to any technical limitation. I've often found old threads and replied to them when I'm able on platforms that allow it. When I find old threads on HN, I'm always a bit forlorn when that eventuality is forsworn. I suppose that's why reposts are allowed, but I can't reply in-thread to the same person I intend to when old threads are locked. It's just not the same.

Anyone else into posting on old threads? What's the oldest thread you've revived?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_forum#Necroposting

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/necropost

There is great comedy in resuming some argument after great delay as if no time has passed, the pettier the better.

I’m still waiting for a ban to end on my favorite CS 1.6 server so I can go back in and point out that people that awp mid on dust2 suck and probably have no friends.

In a not so amusing story, there was a scholar that was persecuted, suffered violence, and finally fled Italy in the 1920s. Once the war ended he was reinstated as a professor, and—a quarter of a century after being purged from his post—returned to his now war-torn country. His first lecture began thus:

"As I was saying in our previous lecture, ..."

Which scholar?

I had to search the book where I read it, and this is the guy :) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaetano_Salvemini

What was the book?

It's in Portuguese, no translation I'm afraid x) https://www.wook.pt/livro/agora-agora-e-mais-agora-colecao-7...

Six less well-known periods of the history of the past 1000 years, from a scholar of the Islamic golden age to political polarisation in Dante's Italy to the upheavals of WWII, with an always-present unifying undercurrent: the notion of human rights.

That sounds really cool, actually. I don’t read the language, but I appreciate the reference all the same. The description vaguely reminds me of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, which, along with its author, has come under some criticism, and is concerned with the reduction of violence rather than the arc of human rights.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur...

All of this probably speaks more to my own limited study in these areas, which I’m happy to have had broadened by you. Do you have any other suggestions for readings in the area of human rights, or generally?

They were lucky the forum still *existed* or the ban logic was still in place after 10 years... So many sites like MySpace have gone defunct or others have changed their systems, etc, etc.

SA has mercifully managed to avoid the death-spiral that is the pursuit of infinite growth. I've been posting on SA for almost 20 years, and many people have been there even longer.

SA is the cockroach (in a good way) of the internet, it'll never die.

Reminded me the 32 year old "Linux is obsolete" thread on Usenet: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.minix/c/wlhw16QWltI

Was someone wrong on the internet again?

11 years is pretty good, but ...

4 years ago, I discovered that a flame war I had witnessed in rec.music.makers.percussion in the early 2000's was still going on after one side DIED

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24772142

In 2000, Rob Schuh was already infamous for the flames:

https://groups.google.com/g/rec.music.makers.percussion/c/aA...

The Robert Schuh File; How to Not Win Friends and Influence People. Off Topic, extremely long, and not pretty. also occassionally posted at alt.tonya-harding

--those who have chosen to guard themselves against Rob Schuh have done so with just cause.

If you have been bothered, taunted, insulted, attacked, cursed at, lied to, lied about, by one Robert Schuh, welcome to the club!

---

I believe he passed away around ~2010; people were celebrating his death in ~2012, and he continued to be mentioned until 2021.

https://groups.google.com/g/rec.music.makers.percussion/sear...

I mentioned in that thread that Schuh was a very interesting character:

https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/drum-and-drummer-643105...

A genius drummer, drum builder, bodybuilder, steroid user (when it was legal), convicted felon, a sufferer of chronic illness, and epic Usenet flamewar participant.

Wow! I remember him from misc.fitness.weights!

>Your account is unable to post or reply until Jan 1, 3000 1:00 am.

I guess I should set an alarm...

(This is a ban I got on the official World of Warcraft forums roughly 10 years ago. Funny that they don't hand out permabans ;)

I know both sides, being admin or mod and being a normal user. I never got banned, however banned users.

I realized that this very act can be devastating to one person while the rest (others involved, passive or active) simply moves on and in 99% of the time forgets about the issue.

Moral of the story: whenever there is some sort of asymmetry of people involved, one faces harsh consequences while the other or others don’t, do the same. Forget about it, this grudge is totally one sided.

Or build your own company out of spite. But never let a ban compromise your mental health.

> Or build your own company out of spite.

Or buy the existing company for $44B, rename and rebrand it, kick out the ideology you think wronged you, and install an ideology favorable to yourself.

just billionaire things [̲̅$̲̅(̲̅ ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°̲̅)̲̅$̲̅]

Related: mods in general have way too much power in communities like SA and Reddit. They apply bans mostly based on their personal biases. For example on Reddit all sorts of current topics from the Russia Ukraine war to trans to protests can get users banned in various subreddits, if you aren’t aligned to the echo chamber views of that subreddit. Worse, there are bots that will monitor comments or subscriptions and ban you for participating in some subreddits.

I am still bitter for getting banned from my EU country subreddit, for saying hamas dresses as civilians.

This is a sign that if Reddit dies, it will probably be because of the mods.

This is becoming so bad, that admins added rules that prohibits subreddits to have discussion about the moderation of another subreddit.

Reddit mods are not like the moderators of old, who usually had good judgment.

The Tesla subreddit collective proactively bans people who comment in any sub-Reddit they don’t like. I dropped a drive by comment on a subreddit that was Tesla related but apparently had the wrong opinion so I was banned from a number of other subreddits unless I deleted my post and apologized.

for SA, no one's really stopping them. This is a site who's old owner banned furries because he didn't like furries. That's just the realities of Malicious Dictator for Life.

Reddit is the core opposite. They have a few rules regarding legality mitigation and very much do care if the largest subreddits try to change the culture. But otherwise, they really do not care about the prattle of the intersub politics (you know, until they conspire and make things hard for admins). Reddit is first come, first served, mods are based on seniority (no matter how long they leave their sub), and the dismissal to any disagreement is "make your own subreddit". There are easy ways to mitigate this, but no financial incentive to do so unless they are breaking site rules (or extremely rare cases when a "head mod" tries to destroy a subreddit. like the r/wow fiasco from some 14 years ago)

>Worse, there are bots that will monitor comments or subscriptions and ban you for participating in some subreddits.

definitely one of the breaking points for me. I do not believe a mod's moderation should apply to what other activity you participate in outside of their subreddits. nor should a supermod ban you from 20 subs due to a disagreement in 1. But it hasn't hit that critical mass for reddit to care yet (i.e. a big enough mod hasn't gone rogue and threaten Reddit's money).

Been there, I get it.

My most recent reddit bans, I as a trans person was in a vaguely trans subreddit just trying to be postive and help out.

Person was talking about obgyn stuff, they never mentioned their gender, i typed it as they were a lady. They flipped out i misgender them.

Reddit banned me for promoting hate; I appealed. They replaced the ban with a warning. Meanwhile I'm trans and was just trying to help.

I go back to the original conversation and OP gets even more angry that I'm not banned for being a transphobe. They call me CIS and I explain that I'm trans and not CIS, that CIS is a slur they shouldn't use.

I get banned for promoting hate. I appeal, reddit overturns again. I went back for 1 more message and quit reddit. Censorious echo chamber with literally no value.

Ironically reddit then goes ahead and invites me buy into their IPO because I have a million karma. Lol ridiculous.

I am banned from stack overflow for 100 years. I have over 100k rep on the site. I was banned because of a rollback war on one of my own posts. It's probably for the best, the site is pretty much dog shit these days, from the cruel moderation to the rampant bullying and flood of crap questions.

I miss SO. I spent a good amount of time on there as a 15 - 17 year old thinking the stats would mean something to a future employer.

I remember revering Jon Skeet. I would post questions that I couldn't crack and I'd usually get a quick reply with someone explaining kindly and in-depth about the issue.

Barely into college was when they started auto-closing and marking as duplicates along with mods being little snotnoses. Big miss. I genuinely think volunteer / unelected mods are the downfall of any forum. On my backlog of ideas, I have "democratic Reddit"... doubtful I'll ever do it but if anyone wants to: there you go (the concept being mods are elected by and can be removed from their roles by a vote of active posters)

I am not sure HN's mod situation but my understanding is that it is essentially just two people and they are paid employees of YC.

I would like to learn more about your ideas for solving the mod problem. Although I do think it’s unrealistic to overcome the network effects of existing huge platforms. When a site like Reddit has tens of millions of users, I personally think it should be regulated like a utility. They should not be able to just ban users arbitrarily, when they’re just operating a communication service effectively, and one protected from competition by network effects.

> On my backlog of ideas, I have "democratic Reddit"

Hybrid computer-human social computing might permit that and much else. Consider a CS break-room candy machine which bribes undergraduates to grade CS 101 exam answers (eg [1]). It learns the characteristics, the strengths and weaknesses, of the graders, the gradees, the answers, and the questions. And can use highly targeted redundant cross-checks to address uncertainty. Eg "graders are giving this answer very different partial credit, so I'll show it to someone who has a history of doing partial credit well". An intelligently-applied small-integer redundancy of novice graders can thus emulate scarcer expert graders. And processes can be crafted from a mix of tooling and AI and humans - "this answer was left blank, and this one is clearly right, but this one has higher uncertainty, so involve wetware here".

So one could do "democratic" tracking of poster culture. Or elected mods. Or mods with rich AI tooling. Or sampled direct democracy. Or eternal-September filtering. Or anchor to a subculture defined by individuals or policy. Or... whatever. Or perhaps even allow colocated participants to live in their own little flexibly-specified worlds, with preferences on topics and people and thread characteristics - my netflix isn't yours, so why are we eyeballing similar threads on this page? Entangling location with personal interests seems so... "You are in a library and interested in topic X. So leave the library and drive across town to the library".

At least this all seemed a rich space of possibilities... more than decade ago. Someone else will have to comment on why that seeming opportunity seems so little mined.

[1] https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bjoern/papers/heimerl-umat...

SO is insane to me. I tried to contribute but I believe it was my third post where someone edited my answer "to tidy it up", wherein they charged the code in a manner that it no longer solved the problem, resulting in the answer getting criticized and voted down by others claiming it doesn't work.

I couldn't believe the audacity of someone to just edit another person's post and not put huge warnings up saying "Edit: Modified by ____, not retested, original code here: ___". Then I found out later that this is just common practice on SO. What a mess of a site.

Common practice because accounts get points for editing posts. Others are supposed to review the edits but when a certain critical mass of the population is all trying to game the system the whole thing fails.

I relate. But maybe we go back and peruse the dramatic threads now and then. See how the more violent personas are getting along.

100k hours = 11 years, 334 days, and 17 hours

That doesn't sound right.

"2024-07-14 9:04 am BST" - "2013-02-14 10:24 pm BST"

equals 11 years, 149 days, 18 hours, 43 minutes

(it is 100,018 hours as mentioned in the article)

100,000 hours equals how many hours again?

I think that the time between ban and new post, which is 100,018 hours, was less than the other user's claim about how long 100,000 hours is.

In other words, if 100,018 = x, then 100,000 can't be greater than x.

ah ok thanks, yeah I didn't follow that

I don't follow either of you :(

The poster who was banned for 100k hours posted after 11 years, 149 days. Therefore, 100k hours cant be more than 11 years, 149 days.

I wonder what a second HN with a $10 fee would look like.

X did the same experiment last year. $10 won't stop spammers and trolls

>$10 won't stop spammers.

Are you sure? It sure seems to me like it would if every spam spree resulted in account shutdown with the result that to continue to spam, the spammer had to pay another $10.

I think the argument you want is that it discourages desirable signups too much.

Dunno - here's a list of 38 bots currently (last 4 hours) active on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41024612

part of a larger network. The cost is perhaps $500 to have a group that can cordinate votes to raise the profile of posts (for marketing and other reasons), to downvote | flag negative coments, etc.

With AI such things can fly more and more under the radar and will be seen by some as a valid expense for the gain they seek.

> a group that can cordinate votes to raise the profile of posts

Are we calling that spamming now?

Read the comments made by the listed accounts in the past few hours and describe their content.

That is called "warming up" spammer accounts, a technique most spammers use and the warmup method and timing will vary by the intended use. Some spammers don't really know how to do this correctly.

I did something similar to this a long time ago on IRC when channels would be operated by "power trippers". I made a bunch of accounts spread out over months, then would slowly join them to a channel with a power-tripping operator. When they would kick/ban myself or others for disagreeing with a statement, a warmed up account would reply. They would kick/ban and another account on another IP would reply ... and so on. So there are multiple use cases for warming up accounts. Sometimes I could get another operator to kick/ban the power tripping operator and sometimes it was just entertainment. Eventually they would realize that 65+% of their audience they were power tripping in front of was just me and they would never know if they kicked all of "me".

Sometimes that part is called "astroturfing"

> Are you sure? It sure seems to me like it would if every spam spree resulted in account shutdown with the result that to continue to spam, the spammer had to pay another $10.

I talked to someone who worked at a PR firm that used puppet accounts and voting rings to get things upvoted on sites like Reddit and HN.

$500 would be a relatively small part of their budget from what they charge clients. An obstacle, yes, but not a show stopper.

The $10 barrier only works if users are actually at significant risk of getting banned for breaking the rules, Twitter just let the bluecheck spambots run rampant.

Yes. Twitter is rampant with people posting outright Nazi praise among lots of other social ills.

I spent a few hours reporting the obvious ones on 4/20 just to see if anything would happen, mostly out of curiosity to explore the rabbithole and chain of accounts. Out of 50 reports: 0 bans, suspensions, or deletes.

The posts were all consisting out of direct threats to other users or support of genocide. I didn't even bother reporting the Hitler praise because I knew that wouldn't cross the line for X.

It was always free to sign up and participate. The $10 is for a checkmark and some premium features.

If anything the spammers and trolls are the main people buying the blue checkmarks to try and make their obvious 10-min-mail-ass account look at least partially legitimate at first glance.

It needs to be coupled with effective and merciless moderation towards that behavior. When your single spam post costs you $10 and it was deleted and you were permabanned within a few minutes, the only thing it's effective at doing is draining your wallet. That's not so say you don't see that behavior on SA, but it's pretty unnoticable unless you go looking for it (and it keeps the lights on there).

twitter has created the problem for themselves of few moderators relative to users, allowing spam, and giving the benefit of the doubt to suspected bots

Maybe something like https://lobste.rs/ where you have to get vouched by another poster before you can comment.

I never really understood, how lobster is working or is supposed to work. I don't know any other HN posters, let alone lobster posters personally. How would I ever find someone to vouch for me? And why should anyone, since they don't know me personally either? Do people just randomly vouch for others then? Or is it like a closed society kind of club? Or do people do some vetting procedure, that they personally like, and then vouch for others, that they vetted?

I think there's been some people who have had e.g. multiple successful articles on HN that got them vouched for on lobste.rs (and presumably had some sort of public contact to let them know to create an account), but there's also been people that just invited all their coworkers. So defacto it's sort of like a members club with occasional honorary membership.

Just ask on their IRC channel. The bar is set very low.

it's just an online forum, so "vouching" is not a particularly big deal. So if someone is vaguely aware of you from somewhere else online they'll probably give you an invite, or even if they've never heard of you but you have some kind of public footprint they can look at. Or if something you've built or written ended up on the site, that's pretty much an automatic invite since people should be able to participate if something made by them is discussed.

How does one get an account on that site? I saw a project of mine get submitted there and wanted to participate in the thread but signups were closed. Do you have to be invited?

https://lobste.rs/about

> The quickest way to receive an invitation is to talk to someone you recognize from the site. If you wrote a link that was posted, please reach out in chat, we'd love to have you join the community. Finally, if you can't find anyone you know in the invitation tree and didn't author something posted to the site, consider getting to know the community in the chat room.

Thank you!

I’m on some Substack forums where everyone is a $5/month paying member. It helps a bit.

That would just kill off the community, since there is some natural attrition that always happens in a given community that has to be compensated for with new users (and moderation to guide these new users).

The problem facing HN IMO is not so much about spammers but low-effort comments and jokes (what dang calls reflexive vs reflective[1]).

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Like thinking fast vs slow. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow

> While it's funny to imagine it cancelled, in all seriousness I don't think it'll be out before 2016 tbh. Would be happy to be proven wrong. I guess we'll wait and see.

What a strange thing to post in 2024 after a 10 year ban. Makes me wonder if it's a bot with a message stuck in queue and it's been trying until now. Far-fetched I know but not as unlikely as a human doing the same thing.

The joke is that he is pretending to be stuck in time 11 years ago, while we in 2024 know perfectly well what actually happened in 2016.

keeping a local machine up for 11 years (or even spinning up a cloud task for this one esoteric purpose) would be even more impressive than just keeping a reminder in google calendar and logging in. I certainly know I have none of the same hardware I had in 2013. That was 4 laptops, 6 phones, and 2 console generations ago.

A repentant sinner story that will justify all bans by association. Posted shortly after a real world ban yesterday!

I guess the Code of Obedience hawks can point to a successful struggle session.

Except that reasoning by analogy and association is flawed.

They had a long time to think of a clever rebuttal. Hopefully it was a good one.

Last sentence of article says he was proven to be right ~8 years ago. That's the most interesting bit to me.

This is why we need heavenbanning:

https://x.com/nearcyan/status/1532076277947330561

Isn't it kinda dangerous or inhumane to isolate a user with ai-generated response that agrees with their views on everything?

Yes shadow banning and variants that go beyond are inhumane. It’s like something you would expect in black mirror

Yeah, it's deeply evil. But that's how the "lovers of power" think. No hell is too awful for anybody who dares cross them.

Reminds me of someone who got shadow banned upon registration without knowing it and after months of people not responding to his helpful and useful replies finally found out about it.

I find it to be pretty evil.

Update: Found it, https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/351buo/tifu_by_postin...

What's the advantage of heavenban compared to shadowban?

From the platform perspective, user is engaged meanwhile a shadowban is soon going to turn into a user that leaves.

Democratic election of moderators seems like an obvious good idea. But nobody does it. Why do you suppose that is?

EDIT : I guess hn sorta does this. Garner enough upvotes and they give you various powers.

That seems like it would be nothing more than a popularity contest in most cases.

If the forum members are smart then "by popularity" is a good way to pick a moderator.

AFAIK StackExchange / StackOverflow does this.

There's no link to the actual forum post in the pcgamer article, or am I missing it?

3/5 Major American political topics enter the chat.

https://xkcd.com/386/

Something Awful "community."

It's in the name, but it had its warm points. SA more or less started the idea of "Let's plays" for games. Written walkthroughs that later transformed into youtube playthroughs that would spawn some of the first gaming content creators.

I joined very late, though. Wonder how the older days were.

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