... pot growers tend to be dysfunctional, undisciplined, come from abusive, broken or single parent families, have issues with substance abuse and psychological issues with depression being one of the primary problems.
I'll abuse my harvest all day
! In all seriousness, forums in general suffer from the fact that they are openly accessible, have a predefined purpose and structure, and no way of real democratic moderation (forums have only a few people who are "bestowed" with the ability to mod).
Open accessibility results in a constant flow of people new to growing asking the same questions over and over. On the PROs side, it, in theory, would allow the greater spread of information but given that the information is being diluted, bastardized, and rehashed along the way, is that really a good thing? I bet you "ADPC" (back when I was certainly playing with pokemon on gameboy and crash bandicoot on psx), even with the bickering inherit to most communities, still spread a good deal of information. Signal to noise ratio was higher. So the noise has to be kept down/managed.
By "predefined purpose", I mean the site owner probably set out to a) spread info/create a community and b) profit. Nothing we can do about the profiting part, as long as community expenses are paid, can't really bitch. While doing A, and choosing a forum software, and setting up a forum software, predefined subforums are created. Now this is all fine and well but its already imposing structure on us. Hell maybe I want my own "Quisque que?" subforum wherein I'm a mod and whoever posts in it, at their choosing, is subject to my moderation, and I can say "fuck [insert breeder here]" all I want. Surely, such an ability would still need to be controlled but what it allows for is smaller subsections being created. Some will be micro-small (0-10 people constantly in there), and some will be started by people like UB or GK and will be larger.
On community moderation: up vote, down vote, report. Up votes (similar to likes) are visible, down votes are hidden (until the currently logged in user reaches a certain point within the community wherein he is "rewarded" with the ability to see down votes) Voters are always kept hidden, vote counts are visible.
Think a Reddit-like forum, except instead of just /r/trees, it'd be /r/newbies, /r/soil, /r/hydro, /r/coco, /r/gudkarmasbdsmplaypen, /r/unclebensprovinggrounds, etc.
Meh, just a thought.
GK, while I usually take your posts with a grain of sarcasm, such a thing would not be a bad idea. In general, a lot of advice here is just given and not enough experimentation happens. When it does, the process isn't shared and it results in more information being "just given". I don't condone making a video ATTACKING someone (why does it always have to be personal?), but I'm all for showing someone else what is bad advice and what isn't, what works and what doesn't, etc. a three group experiment with video would be awesome.