Well stop necroing old threads.
this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
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I hope that words dies from our lexicon, what a terrible practice, shutting down discussion when it is the first result on google.
The issue of necroing old threads is All the participants of the conversation are gone, and if they do happen to still be around, they've lost all the context in which they were discussing. It's a way of getting the final word in.
If you want to have a new relevant discussion start a new thread. Then people who want to get up to date on the current discussion don't have to read the whole backlog. Which isn't relevant because if it's been 3 years since the last comment, people don't want to read 600 messages to get to that point.
Then, and only then, if you want to improve the Google search results, you can go to the necrothread and post a link to the new thread saying the discussions moved. I would still avoid doing that even. Google SEO is Google's domain, Google's problem.
But if your goal is to get into the Google search results, then you're not really serving the purpose of the forum, you're not really talking to the members of the forum.
But none of these are hard rules, politeness conventions. It would be Nice if threads got auto locked after a period of inactivity.
I think the reason you got your community warning, is you necroed four threads at the same time
The problem with closing threads is that now all the people in future will face a wall. Even if they'd create a new thread, that thread will only be visible to people who look in the forum and in chronological order.
Compared to the people on google, which is where everyone is, the people on the forum are a rounding error to zero.
Google does not host conversations (thank god, for now), so there needs to be a place for those hundreds of millions of people to find each other.
And more often than not, they find themselves on a closed old thread, unable to talk to one another.
Old style forum shutdown more discussion that they have ever hosted and they don't even realize it.
Old style forum are one of the worse information choke point of the entire internet.
This is why reddit has become the center of the internet and why putting "reddit" at the end of your search is so effective.
But now reddit is going to die and it doesn't look like there's going to be another "center" of the internet.
By your own words you were posting in somebody's forum, but you did not care about participating in the forum, you are just using their forum as a form of Google SEO.
That makes you a bad faith actor, and the moderators were correct remove your content from the forum. You did not genuinely want to participate, grow, or be a member of their community.
I absolutely do not care AT ALL about that forum, the only reason why I was even there is because they were the most relevant link for "security key steam login"
Just like I absolutely do not care, at all, not even at little bit about "https://lemmy.ml/c/steam", this is just where the discussion is happening at this present moment.
Then don't be surprised when moderators remove you when you don't want to actually be a member of a community. The forums are there for the community. They're not there for a Google SEO
It is a catastrophe that the stewards of most of the world's information think like this.
It comes down to what people's goals are: people run a forum, a discussion platform, because they want to see a community thrive. They want to see people interact. They want to be part of that interaction. Either through social means, or special interest, or aligned goals. They want a community.
Moderation fits into those goals, because it keeps the conversation relevant to the community that is being grown. Moderators are curators of a garden.
The internet is filled with totally unmoderated content, that would be your random blogger website that Google also indexes. The reason there's value in the communities is because of the moderation, because of the focus, because of being kept on topic, because of the spam removal. That's why Google sees those results as more relevant. That's why you want to be there.
Usenet and blogs exist right now, without moderation.. you could use them
Don't necro old threads. Agreed with the other poster.
But taking the opportunity to talk about hardware keys, it would be great if steam supported them. I don't run the steam app.
If everybody could just agree on fido2 and make that work everywhere I'd be very happy, and secure
Well, the thread is locked now and these were the tops results on google. So that discussion isn't going to happen now. We're going to have to wait until some tech catastrophe happens and the solution is going to be security keys.
I don't think it's valid to complain about "necroing" threads when they're the top google result. And it's a bad moderation practice to close threads at all when the discussion is not over, a sign of our diseased communication spaces and the awful concentration of power that moderators have to shape public discourse to their liking.
I addressed your issues in a different comment in the same post. Please see that one.
About the job of moderators: moderators have an incredibly important job, keeping the discussion relevant to the participants of the forum. There's a lot of noise out there, and without the moderators the noise would drown out any signal.
Luckily however we have lemmy! You can run a discussion forum here with any moderation rules you want.
I can filter the signal on my own just fine. I wish I could fingersnap all moderation out of existence because everywhere I look I see abusive moderators getting between me and the information I want. I have ZERO confidence that Lemmy will ever avoid this fate, the best clue to this is how every topic is concentrated on a single instance (easy choke point for moderators to control the discourse)
This is very unfortunate but Lemmy will eventually become just "reddit with extra steps" because the Lemmy moderators do not believe in fediverse decentralization.
You can moderate your own Lemmy community right now. I'll even subscribe to it. You can be the change you want to see.
You misunderstand, I am against the very concept of moderation. I do not believe in silencing other people. I don't need people going around deleting other people's stuff. I have no difficulty ignoring the stuff I don't want. And you might be tempted to point to some horrible person somewhere and I would say, I just don't watch these people. It has become a much MUCH bigger problem that everywhere I go, the stuff I'm looking for has been deleted by moderators, the people I want to talk to have been unpersonned from the internet. I see moderators as an obstacle to overcome, not a baton to wield against others.
Right. So if you run your own Lemmy instance you can leave it unmoderated. You would be in control to not do anything. And it would be the Utopia you want it to be. You have full control here.
You don't have to wish for other people to do it you can do it.
It's almost as if the mods explained the reason for their actions! Unthinkable!
You're missing the comment I left in there. Anyway, enjoy your google results leading to closed threads with no answers.
FYI, your comments were deleted. I'm guessing they're only visible to you
I can't see them either, they have been purged entirely. Now all thread major threads about security keys are closed and people who think security keys are about card trades(??) and how they don't protect their precious cards have had the last word that it's not important to them....
Can't you just start a new thread?
It would never be seen by the vast majority of people, I don't see the point of creating yet another discussion when there was four of them already going and were some of the top links on google for "steam login security key"
Google results are not static. If your info was useful it'd end up on top eventually
But there's not going to be any info. All the people who had relevant information, came in from google, hit a closed thread and then left. There will not be a future conversation until the dead wood is cleared by a forest fire.