It's also just kind of strange in general to make someone's sexuality the butt of a joke - Josh was in his what, early mid twenties and Ethan was 18.īut also, like, what was the joke? Your moderator has been shipped off to be tortured and endure religious psychological abuse.lol jk not really? I'm not necessarily opposed to low bar dark humor but again, optically it's just really weird for a grown ass man to do to a teenager. There were members actually wanting to call the police about it, potentially that could have been a really serious situation had Ethan not told anyone about the vacation. I found the gay camp thread funny at the time too, honestly, but looking back on it, it looks pretty bad. I only commented because misremembering is one thing, it just seemed like that in particular was a very bizarre misremembering. I think he over reacted to people a lot and was just kinda uppy downy moody swingy in general. What I always found odd about her was the meanness wasn't couched in wit, or sarcasm, or over the top Britishness meant to be performative, like, it was just straight up meanness, no punch line, no I mean, looking back on Ethan's posts admittedly he did seem very angry a lot of the time. Yeah, Jenni definitely had a mean streak. But I am surprised they did away with them, since they seemed like the Clubs forum except kind of actually controlled who could post in them (though I'd guess they were harder to actually moderate, which was probably a factor). But "The Prof Babypus Grizzlyking Show" will always live on in my heart! Or at least that's how I remember it. I remember being part of a group that was just a few of us doing unfiltered shitposting or w/e, until they instituted a ban on, like, no exclusive groups or whatever, and they died off shortly after.
Social groups were also fun for a minute, there. And that was when Dratini's Den came around, which was one of those spinoffs that gets canceled before the halfway point of season 1, but I enjoyed it for those few weeks. The puberty thread was funny to me because Cipher arbitrarily decided that it had run its course and decided to put it out of its misery, which I got caught up in somehow and DID get banned for, but not by Josh. Pokemon's fan base is much older now, most of us aren't teenagers anymore and have a relatively decent grasp of topics like what's newsworthy and what isn't.Ĭlick to expand.Yeah, there was definitely at least one instance I remember where I was shitposting in a thread with a couple of other people, and Josh came in to ban them, and I was like, "Oh, ****, my time has come." But then I didn't get banned, so I just laid low for a little bit, but this makes more sense in retrospect. At any rate I definitely think its something to evaluate on a situational basis. So you needed someone willing to delete the thread (to prevent clutter) and PM the user informing why their thread was closed and do that for like 8 or 9 threads in an evening. Back when the forum was active, sifting through every article someone thought was newsworthy I imagine was tedious/ a pain. I thought social groups were cool but they died because moderators didn't wanna **** with it, which is fair.
This mostly boils down to what mods feel like doing I think. Though, to be fair JB these macros you were talking about were massive brony images people found Generalized threads killing activity It was always funny too because Josh would constantly whine and complain that people were "trying to be him" Yeah no ****ing **** dude, who else would people try to be given the environment got the reputation as the "problem" forum which was constantly **** talked by other mods and was over corrected when new moderation eventually came in.
You had all these people trying to carve themselves out a spot in the funny edge lord clique because the culture went out of it's way to encourage it, but the issue was there were people that just didn't get how to do that, and the method of "moderating" the unfunny ones was to troll them into submission, so Misc. They let the thread stay up, signaled to others it was okay to joke and be playful, but when people inevitably got sort of cringe with it, they slapped everyone with two week bans. If you weren't sufficiently funny, you were slapped with an infraction or a ban, i.e puberty thread, which was the most the most grotesque moderation I've ever seen. He went out of his way to create a forum culture where funny people had more leash than other members, even if they were deliberately trolling.