Entropy is fundamentally change. Change recognised as a negative. Change is inevitable. Nothing can stay the same. Therefore the only option is to be proactive about the change and control its direction. Thus avoiding entropy.

I can only speak for myself.

My politeness has limits. These limits are extreme-right militantism. Most forums that have rules enforcing polite interactions have also rules against hate speech, and as far as I am concerned, insulting a whole population made of billions of people one doesn't know at all is way worse than insulting one specific individual which mentality has been made univocally clear by himself. Someone who does the former deserves the latter. And I have not enough patience to do the latter in a classy way.

So, in my views, the GOG community has ceased to be classy when hate speech has started to be okay in it, shattering my impression of an overwhelmingly okay population. And my own further participation in GOG's loss of class is my response to the individuals who represent this trend. That being said, if such a response was more common, that is if there had been a mods-free self-moderating peer-pressure against extreme-right discourses, then GOG would have stayed a classy community in the frst place. Without requiring formal rules to be enforced.

That being said, I vaguely suspect that the indirect enabler for this shift to okay radical reactionary, xenophobic and racist discourse, may be found in the gamergate warzone. It is just a supposition, as I didn't follow the gamergate tread, but for the little I glimpsed, there's been a certain amount of collectively-self-validating sexist and homophobic postures around these themes, and this may have encouraged other expressions of that ideology on other subjects. If that's the case, well, there could be an identifiable tipping point in GOG forum's history, with identifiable reasons.

Also I do not think this can be repaired, because the image of the community, the mutual trust (in decency and intelligence), and global impersonal default sympathy, has ben shattered. Not, the GOG forum is just "the internet", and what is expected i it, what is expected of it, is no different anymore from what is expected from youtube comments or any other random internet zone. So, that's that. No particular GOG flavor anymore, just a total osmosis with the internet as a whole.

Self-moderation (the ideal form of forum management) works if there is a collective consensus on which discourses are or aren't deemed okay. This sets the "class" expectations within a community as something that is agreed on. Once the proponents of the nastiest discourses reach a critical mass, this consensus is gone, and the self-moderation can't work anymore : the peer pressure isn't unanimous enough to drown disagreements on the sort of speeches to encourage or discourage. Disagreements on it turn to little civil wars, and new informal norms are being established. A new collective flavor is established, reflecting the dominant sensitivity in the newly shaped community. It may be a mere impression, but I'd say that this has happened on GOG, and the dominant sensitivity has mutated in the course of these last three years. At least, the impression that the forums give me did. But, in sometimes different ways, this impression of change seems widespread. And there we are, dealing with it.

OMG what if GOG was a perfectly functioning anarchy before the downfall and if we discover what was the polluting factor that led to its decline, we discover the way to run an anarchial system perfectly??!! This will be a breakthrough in political science.

Now all we have to do is find the downfall factor.

Strangely enough, it's violent video games. :P

Hmm; the forum had violent games before. Which violent game may have specifically triggered the downfall if at all? If we may fix a certain time the downfall began we can trace it! So if the downfall started from January 2015, which was the time my REP started plummeting, it can be anything from January; which were........................?

As a counterpoint and agreement to Telika I'm going to post.

As many others have said there is somewhat of a golden past nostalgia assumed here that is false. That said, the conflicts shifted from the DRM area to more cultural areas in GOG. In the overall gaming world they didn't shift they just ignitied obviously. This shift without changing anything about the quality of the people involved, is much harder to avoid being biased about, and therefore seeing things as worst.

Where I disagree with Telika is on blaming the Gamergate contingent. I guess in this case I should say I kind of include myself in it, despite the truth being I don't really - my ideological roots are much broader than the GG context - it is too reductive for me and I don't fit into it that smoothly anyway. So take that as an admission against interest and give it whatever weight. I can post links to several topics years before GG about what would be now called SJW activism jumping the shark. Of course Telika would agree and just say GG was the final surfacing of that negative element that was always shitty and should have submitted to the changes coming into gaming.

Anyway, what really changed was the 2008 crisis. I saw a similar shift online around 9/11 and the Iraq invasion. Basically the larger insecurity people feel the more attached they will be to what they have. Unwarranted defensiveness and oversensitivity is IMO more of a problem in our current cultural context than perceived or real attacks. It wasn't a sudden change obviously, it was a gradual shift as more people lost jobs or had their individual circunstances deteriorate.

And yes, there is also a lot of truth to the volume explanation. As GOG grew its audience shifted and there are different netiquette standards and subcultures interacting.

I was joking Shadowstalker. :P

so the solution would be censorship then?

Okay, did everyone's sarcasm detector just go on the fritz at the same time? XD

It's my fault. I'm a no gooder.

Best action scene ever! :P

You know, that game would be pretty good if EVERY ENEMY DIDN'T LOOK EXACTLY THE SAME!!! :P

hmm... actually you're doing it wrong! you're not playing that game right if you're looking at the enemies, instead of shooting at them :)

but you're right and its not only the enemies but also the levels

What exactly do you mean by that? Please explain, now. How can you even say a thing like that?