In the vast world of Internet forums, there are many different ways to run them. They can be as nice as a flower blooming in the morning dew or as mean as Simon Cowell on 1 hour of sleep. But no matter how they are run, there are consistents, and one of them is the Internet flame.
It’s hard to tell when all of this got started. When was the first time that someone decided to call someone else a stupid moron that deserved to be beaten up naked in an alley for posting their opinion? No one really knows how it started, just that it has become a time-worn tradition.
See, but I’m not here to bash it at all. No, as always, I see the buttered side of the bread.
Flamefests are an eternal source of 1upsmanship. I mean, where else are you going to get a place where, given the fact that a moderator doesn’t lock or remove the thread in question, two people can go at one another until they’re literally red in the face and wanting to choke their opponent through the monitor? The game never ends, but it’s great to see people try. It’s like they are desperately trying to see if the other person is going to say that their point of view is the only correct one, because you know that happens. Hey, there is such a thing as a cold day in Hawaii, right? Maybe they’re trying to play on that one chance that their debate opponent will actually die of frustration at their keyboard. People win the lottery all the time, too, so why not that?
What about the entertainment value? You know, there’s a reason why our society is completely and utterly de-sensitized to some level of violence, and that’s because it’s on tv all the time and right in our faces. We get a thrill out of seeing it, kind of like some modern version of Gladiator – except that the only thing the two combatants are going to lift is a cheeseburger or another bag of Cheetos. I swear, if Jello Wrestling was somehow translated into an online sport, it would be two people sitting at computers throwing insults at one another in a chatroom. Sure, moderators might feel like stepping in and dropping the lock-bomb on a flame war, but where else are you going to get your kicks? Reading some boring blog like this one?
And let’s not forget the content generation. If you want walls of text that have little to no meaning and make you want to rip your eyeballs out, don’t allow flames. But if you can some good reading for a rainy day, let a flamefest happen and watch the pages flow. I’ve seen flamewars that lasted 50 pages or more. Yeah, after a while people just fail at coming up with new ways to say they wished their mother had slapped them and dropped them on their head after birth, but seeing the endless circle go round and round just never gets old.
So for all those uptight moderators out there who somehow think that good content actually needs to have some thought and respect behind their posts, let a good flamewar happen once in a while. I think you’ll see that it’ll be an “epic” tale told. No one talks about the time in history when nothing happened and people lived happily in their little cities and villages. They talk about the time the villages and cities were razed to the ground, their buildings on fire while charred bodies lined the streets and half-burning residents ran around screaming.
Good times.