As many of you who know me are aware, I play the horses, although modestly. I have my own program that a relative programmed for me, and I use it daily, in conjunction with conditional odds betting on an ADW (legal online parimutuel betting site).
Because I don't know everything there is to know about horse racing, I visit several forums related to the topic. One of these is known as Pace Advantage, where everybody there
does know everything there is to know about horse racing. The forum is owned and operated by a man named Mike (all last names are known, but are withheld for privacy reasons), who started the forum in 1999, when he was in his 20s, and who built it into far and away the most popular forum about horse racing on the internet, while making much money for himself (despite what he says) off of ad banners and fees from those wanting to directly advertise their products. That's only fair, since he did all of the work.
Mike's business model is one used by social-interactive sites: "Controversy Makes Money," referred to hereafter as CMM. I'll get back to the "P.A." forum later.
One of the earliest examples of CMM was an ad jingle by the then R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, for their Winston brand of cigarettes. The jingle, created in 1954, was "Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should." The word "like" was deliberately used: the brain child of the William Esty advertising company, specifically executive William Bowman. Mr. Bowman knew that the Grammar Gremlins of the time would come forward, hop on their soapboxes, and claim that the slogan should read: "Winston tastes good
as a cigarette should." And come forward they did, by the millions. The media picked up on it; Walter Cronkite refused to recite the jingle in its original form, and CBS had to get an announcer to do so. Poet/pundit Ogden Nash wrote a poem about it. Merriam Webster (the dictionary folks) came under fire for citing the jingle as an example of colloquial use of "like" as a conjunction, while refusing to disavow its use. Media sources such as the Chicago Tribune, and other various self-acclaimed experts on everything, heralded it as the advent of a general decay in values (an eerily accurate portent, although not specifically because of the jingle). This was all cool to Reynolds Co., as it generated a shipyard full of free advertising, which vaulted the Winston brand to #2 among cigarettes within a year (it reached #1 in 1966). All of this over a single misplaced word. TL;DR: People didn't have a lot to do with their free time in those days.
Fast forward to the present, and our discussion of CMM. As examples of two social-interactive sites with polar-opposite views on controversy, we'll take two other social interactive sites that I visit: the HTR forum, and Yahoo News comments.
The HTR site is virtually void of controversy. Friction isn't welcome there, and the members honor that. There are only a handful of posts there on most days. Almost all are on-topic and to the point. People play nice there. Those who don't are removed, with their posts deleted. There's no outside advertising or ad banners. Site owner Ken doesn't want controversy or ads. The money to pay the forum costs comes out of his royalties for the sale of data files for the HTR program.
Contrast this to Yahoo News. It's comment section is a haven for every Hard-Right, White Supremacist, chest-thumping freak; every Hard-Left nut, the teenage (by age or maturity level) trolls who are drawn to such, wannabe Rush Limbaugh types, and attention-whores in general. 90% of the hundreds-of-thousands of comments per day are off-topic, mostly personal insults, name-calling, harassment, stalking (until Yahoo recently changed their interface to make stalking another user more difficult), baiting, and outright trolling. Dissenters are treated to an onslaught of down-votes and a slew of canned (copy-paste) replies. Plagiarism runs rampant. If you don't speak "Fox," you can expect to be bombarded with insults.
And that's the way Yahoo wants it. It costs money to run their site. They know that politics, executions, domestic abuse, shootings (or anything to do with guns), and other sensationalist topics draw their readers like magnets. Most aren't there to read the stories; they're there to comment. Many read no more than the headline, or perhaps the first few sentences, before making a beeline for the comment section to do battle. A comment, often pasted from a Notepad list, is entered, other comments are read, voted on, and replied to, and the reader moves on to the next story. There's no worry about knowing how the comments are faring with other readers; Yahoo notifies the user every time a "thumbs-up" vote or reply comes in. This means re-loading the story, reading the replies and/or tallying the votes, replying to the replies, etc. Each re-visit loads the story again, and it also loads the banner ads again. Yahoo has it down to a science: they deliberately put controversial stories on the "front page," usually with baiting headlines to draw the readers in, and usually with a political slant one way or the other to invite controversy. It works well for Yahoo. There are users there with over 40,000 comments; this since Yahoo reenacted commenting in 2010. Not oddly, their revenue skyrocketed when they did so. Of course, so did bandwidth and other costs, but the net result was more profit for Yahoo. There is virtually zero moderation there; people are on their own, and those with a thin-skin don't hang around for very long.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. have the same mentality; they allow just about anything that won't get them into trouble with the law or those willing to file lawsuits.
Which brings us back to the Pace Advantage forum. Shortly after its inception, Mike decided that it was too expensive to pay for the ever-increasing traffic, and the bandwidth and server costs that come with it, so he brought in keyword-related banner advertising, and he allowed those who wanted to directly advertise to pay a fee to do so. Google ad-words pay decently, and the cost to advertise directly on his site isn't cheap. As most advertisers find out, sales of their products don't increase much from advertising there, a fact that is borne out by few advertisers staying for more than the first paid period. Around 2001, an "Off Topic" section was created, and this became almost as popular as the regular forum. The off-topic section was created as an offshoot of a Yahoo message board known as "horseplayersunited; which was created by two men for a separate purpose, but which was hijacked by the late Carl E., a.k.a. "peopleplayer" or "Peep," who had an agenda about Mike's then-heavy-handed moderating tactics on Pace Advantage. Peep created several personas, the most brilliant of which was a poster named "Frank Guru," who was an offshoot of his persona "Butch Butcheson" which was used by Erickson on the Wrestling Classics forum and later moved to the late Ken W.'s sports-book forum in 2001 when Peep took over moderating duties and to Peep's own forum thereafter. The personas used corporate proxies to make it appear that they were posting from different areas of North America (Peep lived in Canada). So well-done were these personas that they had nearly everybody fooled into thinking they were a different person than Peep. The character of Frank Guru infuriated Mike so much that he banned Frank Guru from his forum. Then Mike, the poster on Pace Advantage known as "Tom," and a man named Rick created the persona "frankkatus" to harass "Frank Guru" on horseplayersunited, with two purposes: to keep "Frank Guru" occupied and away from the Pace Advantage forum and because Tom and Rick enjoy(ed) trolling others. Of course, they were unaware that the whole ploy was a diversionary tactic by Peep to create a new and milder personna for the Pace Advantage forum, one that he successfully used until shortly before his death in late 2011. Carl's faux-mantra was "attack the post, not the poster," one that he didn't follow, as Carl also loved to troll people. As far as I know, neither Mike nor anybody else ever caught on to Peep's ploy, and they would be hard-pressed to know who the nicer personna was even now. Erickson used his fall-guy Butch personna on his sports-betting forums to create controversy, which fueled visits, ads, and referral income.
For a few months, the cloning on horseplayersunited went viral, with Peep creating about 60 characters, including a daughter of Frank, all who deliberately all typed and acted the same as "Frank Guru"; meanwhile, Rick and Tom created various characters to offset it, none of whom were very interesting. Finally, one of the founders of horseplayersunited, "Phantom," got tired of the nonsense and deleted the message board.
I was brought into all of this because "Butch Butcheson," which had originally been created by Peep to harass the owner of the Wrestling Classics forum, had plagiarized several of my stories that were published in a wrestling magazine in the 1970s and 1980s. The plagiarizing of this and additional copyrighted material created by me carried over to other forums, blogs, and venues, until I got a court order for Peep to cease and desist and to strike down most of the content, which he readily agreed to do. In the process, I had several long talks with the man, and learned much of what you are now reading, with the rest learned from other sources.
The business model of PaceAdvantage isn't much different than that of Yahoo, Facebook, or other social-interactive sites. Controversy generates more page views, and that generates more ad revenue. It also generates more server/bandwidth expenses, but since the fixed expenses remain the same, more bandwidth supported by ads generally means more profit. Therefore, controversy is generally tolerated on Pace Advantage, although Mike and the other moderator Craig "CJ" do sometimes delete off-topic content.
The bottom line is that the uncontroversial forum (HTR) is relatively quiet and non-trafficked, while the controversial forum, PaceAdvantage, is relatively rowdy and heavily-trafficked.
Which brings us to the theme of this article: Social-interaction sites are made for controversy. In fact, most wouldn't exist without it, or at least they wouldn't be as profitable. Internet goers are largely self-absorbed, impulsive, and they have the mentality of: "I can do whatever I want!"; the latter coming from the fact that the internet shields them from in-person attacks. This emboldens those who would otherwise (in real life) be timid as lambs, and it gives many an outlet to vent the frustrations of being timid as lambs in real life.
This isn't to say that controversy is NECESSARY for a site to be popular. I belong to more than a few forums where no name-calling or personal attacks are made. There are disagreements, and there is some spirited discussion of opposing views, but each side respects the other side's right to a different belief---or they aren't allowed to stay for long. These forums are fairly busy, because there's a definite niche of people who don't want all of the drama, trolling, and baiting that the other class of internet users delight in. In fairness, they aren't nearly as popular as the "anything goes" forums are.
I belong to the former niche, which is why I asked Mike to ban my name from the PA forum many years ago, as well as similar requests to moderators of other "wide open" forums. I don't mind disagreements, but it's far too easy for me to get drawn into hate fests. It's much better to steer clear. For this reason, I mainly post on more civil forums, including HTR's. Your mileage may be different.
