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Regulation

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If this is the kind of introduction new visitors to your Internet community site are getting, your site will be a black hole inside a week. The good, the bad, the ugly, and the mediocre will all be quickly swallowed by the loud, inane, and insane among your "guests."

Having some experience with this kind of site, I thought I should throw out a few words of caution. People are always going to be people, no matter where they congregate. In real life, there are community mores that constrain public behavior within reasonable boundaries and make intelligent discourse possible. If those rules governing polite behavior suddenly disappeared, it would take about an hour for someone with a "bumpy" personality to take over the event and make the entire area unhealthy for human habitation.

The same thing happens time and again even in regulated chat spots. People who post online tend to bring their own sense of appropriateness with them, and personalities can easily clash when you throw ten or fifteen people together. What could they attempt to call one another if there were no enforcement of rules guiding politeness? Suppose they were discussing something of great importance to themselves, such as religion or politics. Would they restrain their tendency to question the heritage or intelligence of other correspondents in the absence of rules governing nastiness? The answer is usually "no."

Why Must We "Rule" the Boards?

For a few years, I assisted in administering a few discussion boards on CompuServe (come on, it wasn't THAT long ago). During the course of a day, I would be forced to remind several persons that they should be nice to the other denizens of the boards. They should refrain from calling others names, and they should remember that others might not think much of their ideas, either-so everyone had to bring their best behavior to this quasi-public discussion site.

For the most part, this regulation worked fine. There were times when a particularly strong, "loud" person would essentially take over the discussion, but there were effective ways to stop that, too, and give everyone an opportunity to take part in constructive conversation. Regulation does not mean that a dictatorship is in place, only that the community of online writers gets to see the input of more than a few personalities. Sharing can be really fun, and that was the whole idea of the discussion boards anyway.

Freedom vs. Regulation?

Does regulation damage the possibility of free

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