I once attended a track meet alone. I sat in the stands and took in the action — a solo spectator on metal bleachers in the rain. The competition was good. I watched a lot of athletes work really hard, and the races were closely contested. However, the experience felt less vivid than usual. This was because I was alone. I had no one with whom to confer.
Fandom is social. A large part of being a fan is the shared experience — the questions and commentary, varied perspectives, disagreements, and projections about future races. The emotions are big — the excitement, surprise, and fear — and are meant to be shared. They bubble out of your body like you are a boiling pot of water. You shout, discuss, and clap. You rise to your feet when the competition becomes intense. When you spectate alone, you have to reduce your boiling to a simmer. The big moments go unspoken, and the experience falls flat.
I want to point out the social character of fandom to clarify that I understand why people want to talk about sports online. I want to talk about them, too. I do not think we should quell this desire or eliminate opportunities to talk about running because that would diminish running’s fandom. However, I do want to examine an aspect of digital fandom that has mixed merit — the anonymous message boards.
Crowds of fans line the route for the 2022 Zegama-Aizkorri Marathon. Fandom feels more rewarding when shared with others. Photo: Toño Miranda
Anonymous Message Boards
By anonymous message boards, I am referring to websites that permit users to talk about running without requiring contributors to register their names (1). Generally, someone will post a topic, and many people will respond, writing whatever they wish.
Anonymous posting is not always a bad thing. Often these boards capture the enthusiasm of fans, a range of perspectives, and insights into tactics. Sometimes they are an early source of information about the sport — who is switching teams, which athletes are injured or returning to form, and which shoe companies are in decline. Occasionally, the boards are a site of whistle-blowing — of anonymous voices calling out bad actors when doing so publicly under their own names is unsafe.
The boards also function as a collective memory. For example, when an athlete is called “the greatest of all time,” someone inevitably challenges the poster’s recency bias — reminding everyone of past runners who perhaps better merit that title. Conversations about what makes an athlete the “best” ensue. This is valuable. We should talk about what it means to be excellent.
However, the anonymity of the boards is also a great liability. This is because, when people are free to speak without cost to their reputations, they often say horrible things. They wrongfully accuse athletes of doping. They gossip, lie, bully, and use unrestrained speech. They say uncharitable things without considering the impact of their words.
These message boards could be an excellent resource and a valuable part of running fandom. Instead, they are often one of the most loathsome corners of the internet.
Anonymous message boards have become some of the most loathsome corners of the internet. Photo: Shutterstock
The Ring of Gyges
Imagine a shepherd named Gyges. He seems like a good guy until he finds a ring of invisibility. Once invisible, Gyges uses the ring to kill the king, sleep with the queen, and become the ruler. It turns out that Gyges is not a good guy! His previous goodness was just a social performance. Being invisible makes him invulnerable, and he is finally free to do whatever he wants (2).
This is the Ring of Gyges story from Book Two of Plato’s “Republic.” Plato’s brother, Glaucon, tells it as a provocation to Socrates, to demonstrate that we perform just actions, not because we desire justice but because we are afraid of getting caught being unjust (3).
Before I teach this section of Plato to my students, I ask them a series of questions. I ask whether they are the same people in their dorm rooms when their roommates are present versus when they are absent. I ask whether they would live a day any differently if a camera were following them around. I ask whether it is preferable to die having committed a crime that no one knows about, or whether they would rather die blameless but wrongfully accused of some bad thing.
Basically, I want them to self-examine about whether their good choices are a social performance or evidence of a good character. I want them to consider whether a ring of invisibility would strip them of a veneer of scruples.
These questions matter because a good moral character is not a performance. A good character means acting above reproach with consistency, regardless of whether anyone is watching. It means that, when we are invisible to one another (or anonymous, like on a message board) we would extend the same respect, fair-mindedness, and charity to others that we do when we speak publicly under our own names. If we can’t do that, we are a lot like Gyges.
Redeeming the Anonymous Message Board
Thus far, I have made two claims. Anonymous message boards are of great value for running fans when used constructively. However, the anonymity of message boards is a liability because people can say what they wish without cost to their reputations. Anonymity permits vices to reign unfettered.
So, what can we do to redeem these spaces? Here are a few possibilities.
1. Make Them Not Anonymous
Ideally, we would all grow in virtue. We would speak well to each other across contexts, regardless of whether we were being observed. Then we would not have to worry about anonymous message boards growing sour.
To be clear, I think we should do this. I think we should grow in virtue. But realistically, raising the level of morality of contributors is an implausible solution here. So maybe our boards should not be anonymous.
People tend to display more prosocial actions when they are being observed (4), so maybe we should take away the anonymity option. Alternatively, there could be restricted anonymity — registering under a username, with the site managers having access to your real name so there is some level of accountability preserved. I do not know whether this is plausible. I just know that what we are doing is not working.
2. Be a Moral Buoy
You can withdraw from a bad culture, or you can change the culture for the better.
I often hear runners say they have stopped visiting the running message boards entirely. Personally, I can only handle them periodically, in small doses. However, if everyone who notices the problems on these boards withdraws from them, they will become deeper sink holes.
An alternative is to contribute positively to the culture of these boards. Be a moral buoy. When you visit, you can try to write something kind or thoughtful, or to redirect the conversations in a constructive direction. If enough people do that, we can generate higher standards of interaction.
We can all try to contribute in a positive way to online forums. Photo: iRunFar/Eszter Horanyi
3. Create Civility Checks
In their 2008 book, “Nudge,” economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein propose civility checks as a way of nudging people to reconsider harshly worded emails before sending them (5). When you write something insufficiently civil, you receive a message dissuading you from sending it in its present form.
Maybe message boards could do something like this. When people try to post terrible things, a nudge could suggest that they reconsider. Would this always prevent incivility? No. Some people intend to be mean. But others might reconsider their contributions, and, over time, these reminders would encourage people to become more self-aware about their posting tendencies.
4. Set Moral Reminders
A final possibility is to have moral reminders in place that communicate the positive intent of the message board. You can debate, disagree, criticize strategy, and make other comments that engage seriously with the sport, but things like ad hominem attacks, non-sequiturs about an athlete’s appearance, or crude remarks are not acceptable. These seem like obvious and reasonable expectations for a public forum, but it can help to state things explicitly to remind contributors how to contribute well.
Final Thoughts
Obviously, we could eliminate the message boards entirely. Many running fans do not visit them anyway. However, I think they have some merit — as places to generate excitement for the sport, assess, ask questions, and function as a collective memory. I am hopeful we might find some way to preserve the good and reduce the bad.
Call for Comments
- Do you use online message boards to talk with others about running?
- Do you have any suggestions for how they could be improved?
Notes/References
- I have two websites in mind, but I will not name them here. This is because it is not obvious to me that they are unique in the landscape of sports fandom. There are many anonymous message boards across sports and other hobbies. I also want to focus this conversation more broadly on character and why people often act poorly when they think that no one is watching, rather than to indict particular websites.
- Republic 359d-e
- Republic 357b, 360a-d. Like Socrates, I think virtue is in the class of things that is both good in itself and for its consequences. I think what we learn from this story is that Gyges did not have a good character, not that no one has a good character or that justice is not desirable in itself.
- See Bereczkei, T., Birkas, B., and Kerekes, Z. (2010). Altruism towards strangers in need: costly signaling in an industrial society. Evol. Hum. Behav. 31, 95–103. See also Leimgruber, K. L., Shaw, A., Santos, L. R., and Olson, K. R. (2012). Young children are more generous when others are aware of their actions. PLoS One 7:e48292.
- Thaler, R.H. and Sunstein, C.S. 2008. Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Yale University Press, pp. 235.
