Oh, I've been in that kind of forums before. And no such thing as chaos and insanity is common, all the good users stay generally because there is nobody with the power to ban and those little few who do, are delighted with their community and choose not to ruin it interfering unless of course, something breaks the law.
Ifl such places with very little moderation are democracies, heavily moderated places like gamespot are dictatorships?
AgentA-Mi6
The problem is that you're approaching the idea of a democratic forum with the implicit (and possibly subconscious) assumption that everyone would more or less be in the same frame of mind as you are. This happens all the time when people get into political debates, and they always seem to be surprised to find out that that isn't exactly the case.
Like I said, if you get a large group of people together and put no authority in place exerting power over them, it's inevitable that you will get a mob mentality develop. In a true democracy, 51% can do whatever they feel like to the other 49%, and the 49% will have nothing they can do about it except to leave.
Of course, the way that this is subverted in places like the United States is to have a constitution in place that specifies that rights of the minority, such that no one can take them away, even if 51% of the population wants to. But if something like this was put in place, it'd be kind of like the Terms of Use that we have on GameSpot. And if we put it in place, we'd need someone around to interpret it and make sure it isn't broken. And those people would be... kinda like moderators - fancy that. :P
Self-regulation works fine in a community of a small, insular group of people. But GameSpot has thousands of members, many of whose best attempts at an argument is just insulting the person's console of choice and calling the person stupid. The more people you have, the more potential for mob mentality, and the less viable a system of self-regulation becomes.
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