Applying the Zeroth rule on Gamespot

by foggy666 on July 31, 2008 Comments

While we all were new users once, it seems that a lot of new guys came to gamespot as of late, it seems that the whole community is being saturated by people who joined few weeks or months ago, I don't say it's a bad thing but many people that I used to see are gone. I admit I never was too involved in the community here at gamespot, heck I joined in 2003 but for many years I didn't even post in the forums or in my blog. I guess like in "Fight Club" you choose your own level of involvement. Maybe with the summer people get more bored and try to find a new community to be part of, our own virtual village.

It's funny that this "surge" of new comers happens the same time that GiantBomb opened their doors, and some GS users left, while others share time between the two. I opened an account too, even the same user name, but GiantBomb is the same place, just less mods, but the same topics, questions and debates. Both have the same threads pretty much glued to the front OT page, some users even post the same thread simultaneously at both sites. Which warrant the question: did users go to GiantBomb just feel they are part of something new, while doing the same thing they did here?

Well, GiantBomb apparently is without corporate corruption that struck the very core of Gamespot, but the forums were never affected by the main site, after all the forums are made by the users.
One thing happens all the time here on Gamespot: users that are known in the community cross the fine lines of the ToS and get banned. Some open new account and start again, some get very angry and don't come back, it's like killing your own gene pool, usually the people that get banned (I don't mean the account suicides) are borderline trolling and flaming because usually the threads they are in have some "interesting" topics, and when a mod see that and use the "ban-hammer" they actually harming the whole community, after all you don't have that many intelligent posts (no offense).

It can be compared to the 3 laws of robotics the first being "A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm." in this case its the not a human being but the ToS, but remember that eventually R. Daneel understood that robots must act in the interest of all humanity and not merely individuals, in this case the individual rules of the ToS sometimes harm the whole community, and without it there is no Gamespot, making the ToS obsolete. Sometimes a mod must act in the interest of the whole community, and not the dry rules of the ToS.

Of course for a mod it's much easier to follow hard rules rather then some subjective understanding of the importance of a single user to the whole community, and after reading the last sentence I understand that for a human being its impossible to act upon zeroth rule of "community before ToS", as so I predict that eventually this impossibility will destroy Gamespot, because the mods are not gods in their understanding of the community, yet the ToS will statistically remove all the meaningful users in the community.