The post you are reporting:
I love forums. LOVE THEM! But there are problems with them. What Matt Edwards is saying (and, I admit that I do have to agree with him to a certain point) is what PaulB echoes somewhat - the people who hide behind an anonymous icon feel utterly free to spurt whatever bullcrap they want. But the positive value of forums is simply exponential. Amid all that crap and bile, there is a wealth of useful, meaningful knowledge and shared wisdom, if people take the time to filter out the scum (easily done with the little "search" box). I simply cannot even begin to guess at how many times I have found forums to be the ONLY source of useful info at times. An unusual query about a special effect, or a weird problem on a bit of software, or a lesser known recipe, or a poorly advertised helpline number, or a good supplier of timber fixings... I could go on forever with this list but these are all things that FORUMS have helped me with. Google is great at indexing forums because there is so much text for it to spider through.
It's like everything in life, all good things in the world attract *****, lots of them, and before long the "good" users are mixed equally with the "bad" users and it's the "bad" users that ruin the reputation for everyone.
You'd have thought that my favourite forum would be the big movie one on IMDB.com, but nothing could be further from the truth. This is a perfect example of Matt Edward's hate campaign, a forum so packed with ill-informed morons slagging the hell out of movies and each other that it really is a wasteland of barren intellect and venomous human sewage. There's few other forums like it. It's the most savage, depressing, futile experience on the web. But, there are countless great ones out there and I believe forums are a shining example of what industrialised technology blended with political freedom of expression can achieve, and overall they are outstanding.
I suppose that forums are still very new in the grand scheme of things, we just haven't fully figured out how to use them in a broad social sense. One day we will but we have to go through this turbulent period first while we learn.
