terry writes:

I joined POA ( I am an Aussie also for those that dont know), and
while there is certainly no discrimination against non americans, I
find that interesting aviation discussions are few and far between
amongst the general chit chat. Its more like a social chat board than
a genuine aviation discussion group. I guess thats what you might
expect to happen when you have strict rules about how people have to
interact with each other, the friendly types stay around and become
good friends, nothing wrong with that of course but I already have
enough friends ( 3 counting my wife) and I just want somewhere to go
and talk technical stuff about flying.

Talking about serious issues on which people have strong opinions tends to
lead to arguments, and many poorly moderated forums get around this by
simplying outlawing any serious discussion. They don't do this in so many
words, but the character of the moderation is such that nothing but friendly
small talk survives.

The fact is, when people discuss conflicting and strong opinions, most rapidly
resort to personal attacks, degrading the quality of discussion. Few people
can remain objective when defending their own opinions or when addressing
other opinions with which they disagree. Social chit-chat avoids this,
although it's not very interesting. People who have opinions that they've
adopted wholesale from others (that is, opinions that they have not arrived at
through personal reflection, which makes the opinions impossible to defend)
are particularly prone to fall prey to emotion in very short order.

This is why moderated forums are relatively free of stressful flame wars, but
are also generally very boring and uninformative. Conversely, this is why
unmoderated forums can cover fairly weighty subjects, but at the price of very
high noise levels and extremely acerbic personal flame wars.