Our Musings topics give Destructoid community members the chance to have their voices heard on the front page.
Seeing as Destructoid is hosting a PAX panel next week entitled, "how to make online gaming communities suck less," we thought it'd be downright irresponsible not to involve you, the actual residents of this hear Dtoid gaming community, in on the discussion.
It goes without saying that most gaming communities are something approaching horrendous: full of trolls, flaming, and attitudes of bullsh*t entitlement and superiority, it's no surprise that the vast majority of people who visit your average gaming blog never bother to set up accounts and post their opinions.
But how do we fix it? How do we make online gaming communities more welcoming, interesting, intelligent places to be? For this special weekly musing, we'll be reading aloud some of the best suggestions at our PAX panel (Friday, Unicorn theatre, 2:30).
Feel free to hit the jump for further instructions.
Put "Weekly Musing" in the title of your cblog, and be sure to choose the Monthly Theme tag.
We may still promote good musings to the front page, and the "I Suck at Games" theme is still going on, but we also want to be able to involve the Dtoid community in our PAX discussion.
The theme is pretty obvious, I think: gaming communities suck a little, and we need to find a way to mitigate that suckage. If you've got any questions, ask them below.
Contest:
1:00 PM on 08.28.2009
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I myself just went mad because I stuck around. I eventually thought Phil was actually Cthulhu speaking to me in his native tongue.
The end.
Now, if there were a function to allow 24-hour muting, that would be genius. Or allowing the offender to see their own posts, but say something snarkily self-depreciating to the rest of the world. Oh well, a man can dream.
Ditching the super-professional BS and having a staff featuring a wide variety of distinct personalities helps. It makes it more likely that a visitor will find something (an opinion, an attitude, etc.) to latch onto. Could you imagine a Destructoid with a toned-down Jim Sterling or Anthony Burch? I can't.
Bonus points go to a staff that is willing to actually interact with the community an a regular basis, whether that be trolling, commenting on articles they didn't write or answering questions brought up in the comments. Too often the only time you hear from staffers (besides their articles) on other sites is when they messed something up and are telling people that 'we will fix the problem soon,' or when they are warning the more opinionated visitors that the ban hammer is on the way.
The community blogs section of Destructoid is, of course, a great way to promote a community... but I'm sure you've already thought of that one, right?
Make gaming communities suck less by not hiring editors who hate the community and/or start shit in the community.
Chad could make a list of 10-15 steps on "How to be more awesome like Chad Concelmo".
1) Get more Chad Concelmo's/Jims/Anthonys involved. Completely outspoken Editors (read: characters) the community loves. More Editor blog involvement/Editor commenting. There are a large amount of Editors who respond to the community (Ant, you and Ashley Burch come to mind, as do a lot of others like Holmes, Chad, and Jim): more of that=stronger community.
2) Get rid of the extreme trolls. You're always going to have trolls: always. Nix the ones who consistently shit on people's opinions, or worse, the people who don't want to hear them/are offensive or unbecoming to new members to the extreme.
3) Don't hire people like Summa. Their egos are way to big to be held in a team environment. They'll inevitably split the community, and some of the members will side with these enigmatic demogouges and their lies of how they "quit the site", when they were really forced out.
Also, "attitudes of bullsh*t entitlement and superiority"
I would lump that in with my #2. Despite how long you've been here, if you're not staff, you don't really have any special privileges, and shouldn't be mean to new users for no good reason.
I'll be thinking about this, hopefully I can come up with enough ideas/things to address to write up into a blog post.
I like dtoid because the posts are profane and occasionally OT. I'll take that along with the occasional troll that I can just scroll past.
<3 dtoid; Kotaku can get fucked. =)
Fucking agree 100% dude.
Trolls won't but who gives a shit about trolls. Like you, random person who commented somewhere before me: who gives a shit about you? <---trolling
I believe in giving a spotlight to bloggers, but I'm not sure about rewarding them. The flipside to that is others get overlooked because of favouritism. Fuck that, especially after what happened with Kotaku. The failbloggers still have to go though. I know that makes me out to be a snob, but they just waste useful space on that scroll-list.
Just ban the assholes and that's it. BANHAMMER!
Maybe implement some sort of reporting system, and have that reporting system prioritized, for ex have old and contributing members assigned a points system by the staff and analyze the reported posts/blogs based on those points. BUT, make the points system invisible to the end-user or there will be elitism and segregation.
Copy pasta time, folks.
I'd love to see more c-blogs drip with decent spelling and grammar. Contain more depth and personality. And have actual, valuable information and entertaining insight into the world of video games.
Also, more community involvement... Meaning, more attention and comments should be given to a worthy c-blog. Ignore the others.
And, lastly, more interaction between different community members, rather than the same group of veteran DTOID robots speaking to each other.
Basically - More, more, more community involvement and interaction between DTOID rookies and veterans. It'd be sweet to have DTOID veterans and/or more editors respond and get involved in discussions.
And please, don't feed the trolls. Ignore their bridge, find another route.
=)
2. Do not allow the community to act as a police force, if you have someone in charge of curbstomping shitty behavior, let that man do his job instead of having the people act like massive assholes and chasing people way because they made a mistake or broke some unwritten rule.
3. Much like Mags said, don't have editors that love to start shit, see every Jim Sterling post ever.
4. As an editor, be someone that people can respect and things will go smoothly for you, see Ashley, Hamza and Samit as good examples and see Jim and Anthony as bad examples.
5. Don't applaud the behavior and don't add to it, its not funny to see some poor shmuck's derailed thanks to some morons discussing some irrelevant and then seeing an editor or worst, the very found of this site contribute to the inane conversation.
6. If the community wishes to contribute to overall better the site in some aspect then make sure that you do it with EVERYONE, don't make exceptions for people that have been here longer or because they are popular, all this does is make you look like a hypocrite.
7. No circlejerking, to many times a group of people get popular and its like a club nobody can get into or worse yet the newbie is insulted and treated like crap for things the circlejerkers engage in constantly. The community should feel open to everyone.
So at its core my argument is do the complete opposite of this place and you'll have the greatest gaming community on the planet.
@Magnalon
Hahaha, your post is laughable.
"1) Get more Chad Concelmo's/Jims/Anthonys involved. Completely outspoken Editors (read: characters) the community loves. "
Chad is ok but your other 2 are a big problem, your parenthesis should go like this (read:assholes) as most of the time those 2 do nothing but spark mass arguments here, Jim being the biggest problem in this regard and Anthony just constantly coming as condescending and arrogant.
"2) Get rid of the extreme trolls. You're always going to have trolls: always. Nix the ones who consistently shit on people's opinions, or worse, the people who don't want to hear them/are offensive or unbecoming to new members to the extreme."
So that's what? 80% of the community here?
"3) Don't hire people like Summa. Their egos are way to big to be held in a team environment. They'll inevitably split the community, and some of the members will side with these enigmatic demogouges and their lies of how they "quit the site", when they were really forced out."
On the other hand, don't hire people who do nothing but troll and flame bait in most of their articles or worse, insult writers that no longer work for this place such as the little snipes I see some editors make at someone like Leigh for example who is 10 times the writer than say Jim or Anthony.
Its even funnier to see a site who's built on not taking games seriously playing host to Anthony's videos when they are the definition of taking something to seriously.
Its funny how I haven't bothered with this place in almost 2 months and the very first thing I see is this weekly musing theme and a few hypocritical posts, don't ever change guys.
"1. Do something about the trolls, not just a slap on the wrist or unban them quickly, actually DO something."
and then later say that someone's post was "laughable" for saying the same thing? All within the same post, no less.
People taking games seriously is fine... I mean, that's why we're all here in the first place. But people need to stop taking other peoples' opinions so seriously. People need to stop feeling they need to justify or defend their purchases by putting down the competition, and realize that by stubbornly refusing to accept any other console, they are DEPRIVING themselves of great games.
regards.
http://www.song66.blogspot.com