Re: A GS democracy?
GS is not technologically special. It is not something that wont be replaced if one day it stops functioning. There are tons of vBulletin/joomla/drupal powered sites built by Pakistanies, and thanks to the ease of building these sites now, there are going to be tons more.
What does help GS is that it has a good market share, being an early adopter. Good people, and good management of those resources. A major change in environment may result in losing that, and then I am afraid there is nothing to keep GS from becoming one other vbulletin enabled pakistani forum.
on a different note, ideally i wouldve liked some sort of automatic way of moderating the forums minimizing to the extent possible any need for moderators. it eliminates almost guaranteed issues of bias and politics with humans. technology is the approach being taken by companies like google and youtube not an archaic, heirarchical system of power over which petty people consistently bicker. ideas like:
- bots that parse the pages and find obvious curse words catering for common tactics like abbreviations and misspellings
- bots with a rule base for detecting when a slanging war is occurring. I dont think this is a very difficult machine learning problem.
- bots with a document categorization algorithm to detect when something is off-topic.
^ Actually related ideas are discussed here
I made some headway writing an auto-mod but it got put on the backburner.