Viva Lewes Issue #132 September 2017

COLUMN
Chloë King
Drawing fire
I posed my first ever question
on the Lewes Forum this week.
I asked people to tell me what
their favourite posts on the site
are and why.
It was not popular. I attracted
fewer replies than a subsequent
thread defaming an antiques
dealer and another, slagging off
a commenter with poor spelling
who was slagging off old people who were slagging
off young people.
In fact, in two hours I gleaned just two down-votes
and one reply chastising anti-cyclist rants.
“We get attacked for not having bells, not using
cycle paths, emissions...” they wrote.
One must never let it be said that we aren’t
incredibly nice in Lewes.
You see, the Lewes Forum is SIMPLY NOT
REPRESENTATIVE OF THE GENERAL
POPULATION OF OUR OPEN AND
FRIENDLY COUNTY TOWN.
By mid-afternoon, I scored my first troll.
“The threads I hate most are those from DFL's
pretending to do research,” they wrote. “Utter
w@nkers.”
My parents moved here from London when I
was two, the wankers. They didn’t even have the
decency to stay in London where I might have
had a Labour MP. Instead, they brought me to
Lewes which is too nice to leave and too awful
to not contain a load of bigots hiding behind IP
addresses.
I’m really going to incite some hatred on the
Lewes Forum now. In fact, someone has already
brought up that David James Smith article on my
thread. I’ll quote: ‘some London t**t’ and his ‘illraised
urchins’. Oh boy, not that.
So I ask the warm fluffy community of my
personal Facebook page what their favourite, most
loathed or most remembered
Lewes Forum posts are, and
the stats are as follows.
Of seven to respond, two have
received direct personal abuse.
Two recall groups they are
associated with being smeared.
One remembers reading
threats of violence towards
homeless people and another
recalls a poster making ‘sexual comments’ about
her pre-teen daughter.
It’s not all bad. Over on the forum, someone likes
“threads where people lose things and others try to
help them find them.” Funny that. One friend got
five down-votes for trying to help locate a lost cat.
For the sake of balance, I ask friends that live
outside Lewes whether their local communities
have online forums, and if so, what the overall
tone tends to be.
The jury’s out on East Dulwich Forum. One says
it's “a godawful cesspool of trolls with occasionally
good local trade recommendations,” another
declares it friendly and loveable.
The ‘Penge Tourist Board’ is “fantastic,” the
Catford version “supportive,” and Herne Hill:
“useful”. ‘Haslemere Rants’, on the other hand,
“is abominable,” but it’s “nothing compared to the
Bordon one”.
Obviously my research is grossly limited, but
having made a quick comparison of these various
platforms, a few things spring to mind.
Anonymous forums are more likely to attract
embittered, obnoxious, abusive arseholes.
It’s possible to mitigate this by implementing
some form of moderation, by publishing clear
guidelines, and by categorising threads into subgenres
so users can find stuff that’s relevant. For
example: ‘parents and tots’, ‘stuff for sale’, and ‘the
swirling, whirling, fiery gate to hell’.
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