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Useful Distraction posted:So is there an official stance on blanking avatars? Someone asked already but I don't think it was ever addressed. The general guide is something like if it's slurs, gore, NWS, doxxing, or something else wildly inappropriate.
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Oct 29, 2021 01:54
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I'm generally unusually pro-blanking, and here's my general ruleset: - Does this seriously impact the user experience of users at large? - Does this seriously impact the user experience of the user in question? - How long has the title been in place? - Is it funny? - Did the buyer bother with any meaningful amount of effort? i have blanked a lot of "yoda semi-graphically raping luke" avs over the years but there are a few still sticking around
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Oct 29, 2021 01:57
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Also, guy with the canada thread feedback carefully avoided naming me but his criticisms are absolutely correct and I'll bear them in mind next time a thread seems in need of a reboot. As should other mods when dealing with a thread they're not enormously familiar with. edit: gently caress i completely failed to make a really good joke about the Bear novel, let's just assume i made it Goatse James Bond fucked around with this message at 05:08 on Oct 29, 2021 |
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Oct 29, 2021 02:03
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30.5 Days posted:The official stance is that they should only be blanked in cases of hate speech or similar, and D&D moderators have been blanking all red text they see on regulars despite that. It's been brought up repeatedly. The situation has not changed. It's jeff's pocketbook so whatever. Have they? Man, I need to post more, I suppose.
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Oct 29, 2021 02:04
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30.5 Days posted:The official stance is that they should only be blanked in cases of hate speech or similar, and D&D moderators have been blanking all red text they see on regulars despite that. It's been brought up repeatedly. The situation has not changed. It's jeff's pocketbook so whatever. No, no we haven't. I've actually paid to reset my personal av. The only time we do is when its all the same av getting spammed but rule of thumb is it needs to sit for a week.
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Oct 29, 2021 02:06
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Useful Distraction posted:So is there an official stance on blanking avatars? Someone asked already but I don't think it was ever addressed. In addition to what Hand Knit laid out, I will sometimes start blanking avas (or replacing them with some stock avas I have) if a bunch of people have the same red text and it's been several weeks since they were purchased, since it kinda irritates me when half a thread has the same ava and after several weeks I assume the user is never going to clear it themselves.
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Oct 29, 2021 02:06
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and just to be clear, i don't blank redtexts exclusively for being low-effort, but it's a contributor to when i will push buttons for the other criteria
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Oct 29, 2021 02:09
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Every offensive or rude avatar I've ever been given, I feel, has said a lot more about the buyer than about me. They don't bother me at all, but I do think mods across the forum should feel free to exercise their judgment for avs that are egregiously gross or offensive. I turned avs off in 2014 and never looked back.
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Oct 29, 2021 02:26
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Thanks for these explanations. It doesn't entirely match my experience buying avatars, but is roughly close - I've bought probably 120ish this year. Some of them lasted days or weeks but some of them were blanked literally within minutes. One or two of the avatars I bought could probably be considered bad enough to warrant blanking, but a vast majority were just inoffensive forums drama and I saw blanking response virtually the same between the two. I appreciate the mods here spelling out their policies, it makes it more likely that I'll continue buying avatars, but I'll certainly continue to keep track of how quickly I see them blanked because my gut feelings about what I remember this year don't exactly line up here. There were also a couple of posters who seemed to get theirs blanked abnormally quick, so I might just have chosen posters who were given special treatment from the stated policies for whatever reason. And before someone inevitably says the money would be better spent elsewhere, I treat SA in general as an entertainment product. But I also give more than 10x as much to direct or mutual aid causes so my conscience is clean.
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Oct 29, 2021 02:31
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How are u posted:Every offensive or rude avatar I've ever been given, I feel, has said a lot more about the buyer than about me. They don't bother me at all, but I do think mods across the forum should feel free to exercise their judgment for avs that are egregiously gross or offensive. Your current avatar is pretty cool, have you seen it?
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Oct 29, 2021 02:31
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500 good dogs posted:Thanks for these explanations. It doesn't entirely match my experience buying avatars, but is roughly close - I've bought probably 120ish this year. Some of them lasted days or weeks but some of them were blanked literally within minutes. One or two of the avatars I bought could probably be considered bad enough to warrant blanking, but a vast majority were just inoffensive forums drama and I saw blanking response virtually the same between the two. Yeah its worth noting the Admin policy is to keep purchased AVs for at least a week for you (the buyer) to get the value, even for us mods. 500 good dogs posted:Your current avatar is pretty cool, have you seen it? And that one is my doing.
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Oct 29, 2021 02:36
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500 good dogs posted:Thanks for these explanations. It doesn't entirely match my experience buying avatars, but is roughly close - I've bought probably 120ish this year. Some of them lasted days or weeks but some of them were blanked literally within minutes. One or two of the avatars I bought could probably be considered bad enough to warrant blanking, but a vast majority were just inoffensive forums drama and I saw blanking response virtually the same between the two. I have no idea if this works, or if it is possible but it is also possible that other posters basically do the reverse you and drop a bunch of cash to reverse the avs, since I believe there are several resources out there that can show past avatars.
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Oct 29, 2021 03:23
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Telsa Cola posted:I have no idea if this works, or if it is possible but it is also possible that other posters basically do the reverse you and drop a bunch of cash to reverse the avs, since I believe there are several resources out there that can show past avatars. Nah, that's what gives it away: they're not getting new avatars (well some do, but that's not what I was talking about) they're just completely blank like what mods/admins do. And I doubt anyone is spending 5-10 dollars on a blank avatar instead of changing it to something else like their old avatar (which costs the same).
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Oct 29, 2021 03:28
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People have actually bought waves of blank titles instead of redtexts before, for the record.
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Oct 29, 2021 03:37
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I genuinely can't imagine paying a thousand dollars for avatar changes that randomly gets reversed because a mod decided it wasn't funny enough.
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Oct 29, 2021 03:38
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30.5 Days posted:I genuinely can't imagine paying a thousand dollars for avatar changes that randomly gets reversed because a mod decided it wasn't funny enough. I would never pay a penny to reverse one, either. I've had a new av in mind for a couple months, but with 500 good dogs buying me a new one every few weeks I haven't bothered to waste the money.
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Oct 29, 2021 03:42
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Deteriorata posted:I would never pay a penny to reverse one, either. I've had a new av in mind for a couple months, but with 500 good dogs buying me a new one every few weeks I haven't bothered to waste the money. Sorry to disappoint but according to my email receipts I've only bought one for you. Or maybe that's a good thing because it means you've caught the attention of many an avatar purchaser!
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Oct 29, 2021 03:47
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fool of sound posted:This framework would mean that any response to the question "how can you vote for Joe Biden in the face of Tara Reade's accusation?" is bannable as rape apologism. Vocally disbelieving Reade is bannable under the general "do not cast aspersions on accusers" rule, as is believing her account but arguing that, under their personal moral calculus, other matters won out. This isn't a theoretical catch-22 either, the hesitancy to formally ban it in the 2020 primary thread was in large part due to people doing just this, and I strongly suspect that these calls make a lot of posters who would otherwise participate in the MeToo thread hesitant to do so. It doesn't have to. I don't know if anyone is calling for that. Less calls to drive out wrong think. More "here's why you are wrong" while keeping the "you idiot monster" to yourself. fool of sound posted:This isn't just a D&D issue either; I don't think the games mods would be super happy about calls to ban everyone who still plays WoW for 'supporting rape' or similar, nor would CD mods probably allow liking Kevin Spacey's acting in K-Pax to be called rape apologism. Obviously these aren't a 1:1 comparison for a number of reasons, the point is that lots of wealthy and powerful people are awful, and acting in a way that benefits them is not the same thing as supporting them. Right. This is why there should be a crew chat for people who really like USPOL the way it is and want to whittle away the problems, while rebuilding D&D itself.
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Oct 29, 2021 04:21
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astral posted:People have actually bought waves of blank titles instead of redtexts before, for the record. frankly that's more baffling than even the laziest redtext imo and believe me, i know lazy redtexts
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Oct 29, 2021 05:10
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buying blank avatars is actually a pretty good troll, respect
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Oct 29, 2021 05:13
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astral with all due respect tho, how I remember the page drop down issue is way funnier than reality so I'm gonna stick with how I remember it
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Oct 29, 2021 05:14
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500 good dogs posted:Thanks for these explanations. It doesn't entirely match my experience buying avatars, but is roughly close - I've bought probably 120ish this year. Some of them lasted days or weeks but some of them were blanked literally within minutes. One or two of the avatars I bought could probably be considered bad enough to warrant blanking, but a vast majority were just inoffensive forums drama and I saw blanking response virtually the same between the two. ngl, here's one weird trick to make gjb much more likely to give your purchases the benefit of the doubt, even the lazy pictureless ones with text that annoys me: keep the gangtags
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Oct 29, 2021 05:15
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Why are the mods fooling with redtexts in the first place
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Oct 29, 2021 05:20
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Cease to Hope posted:Why are the mods fooling with redtexts in the first place We aren't....we can either blank them or leave them alone, and blanking involves approval. That's not the same thing as having Opinions on them, tho we are of course free to pay $$$ to change anything but the only avatar I've ever purchased since being modded was sedisp's. Sometimes an avatar is low effort and boring. Risks being replaced
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Oct 29, 2021 05:22
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Epic High Five posted:astral with all due respect tho, how I remember the page drop down issue is way funnier than reality so I'm gonna stick with how I remember it In the early radium days, threads were mandated to be capped at 100 pages because they actually would slow the server down thanks to some extremely inefficient queries for posts from a thread. I believe radium did some work to improve this, and it was further-improved by Choochacacko in ~2012, which is why the biggest problem with long threads these days is a client-side one. Perhaps that's what you were thinking of?
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Oct 29, 2021 05:29
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astral posted:In the early radium days, threads were mandated to be capped at 100 pages because they actually would slow the server down thanks to some extremely inefficient queries for posts from a thread. I believe radium did some work to improve this, and it was further-improved by Choochacacko in ~2012, which is why the biggest problem with long threads these days is a client-side one. Perhaps that's what you were thinking of? I was specifically thinking of the original Trump thread but it's also really funny to imagine capping threads at 100 pages nowdays lol. I remember the thread being told the page drop down or whatever was reaching 8Mb and was messing with things it needed to reboot. A good idea in the end. I can believe it was only client-side issues but I believe to believe otherwise
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Oct 29, 2021 05:32
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its really funny how much stuff can be a question of either radium code or the fact we are operating on loving Vbulletin from 2000, old enough to drink
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Oct 29, 2021 05:48
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Main Paineframe posted:I wanna highlight this, because it's a pretty strong example of the cliquishness that's gone wild in D&D. The polls thread wasn't "the election thread for USPol regulars", it was a place where people could discuss actual day-to-day election news without getting bogged down in constant circular arguments about whether voting was a moral choice, endless relitigation of the 2016 primaries, breathless predictions of what 2024 would look like, and so on. The constant conflicts between supporters of various candidates made the election thread a pretty poor place for following the day-to-day news, and therefore the polling thread was created to hone in specifically on the progress and prognosis of the election itself without being drowned out by the larger ideological conflicts. It's pretty ironic how you're accusing me of being dismissive, while proceeding to condescendingly insult the other thread way more than I did the polls thread (which I didn't even insult at all, aside from commenting on who comprised its posters!). Do you really not see the irony here? And it's not like "posting a recent poll" is more substantive or usefully informative. It's just the exact same "reacting to stuff in the news" posting (which also occurred in the other General Election thread). Hell, you're the one who likes to complain about people just reacting to tweets, but that's functionally the exact same thing. It's not like some random poll from a presidential election is high-brow serious journalism that can drive any sort of fruitful discussion. It was just window dressing for chatting about the latest election events and drama (which is basically what both threads were doing, only with one having more arguments). Also, I'm not even being "dismissive" of it in the first place - I'm literally advocating for the existence of such a thread and its success (at least from my perspective) in allowing the other general election thread to exist. Almost everyone got what they wanted; people who wanted to just comment on the latest polls and spitball about the election outcome could do that without being bothered (or being bothered as much at least, and with moderator action being less controversial against people who did try to start arguments in the polls thread).
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Oct 29, 2021 07:49
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Here's what I've got time to write up atm. Enforce the existing rules DnD has rules, and they are mostly pretty good rules. In USNews, for example, people are supposed to contextualize their sources and read what they link- and bad faith is supposed to be reported. However, the rules are virtually never enforced. This lack of moderation in a remotely serious space invites, and indeed encourages, abuse. The abusive users are able to control the scope of discussion because they have no reason to change their behavior. Users are invited to respond, in good faith, to the abuse of others, no matter how persistent or virulent. Effort is met with deliberate misrepresentation and personal attacks. People who put forward more effort or provide information, and mods who attempt to create standards for moderation, are immediately and continuously attacked. Moderation is made difficult, and individual moderators get targeted for abuse, as part of a deliberate strategy to make moderation as difficult and unpleasant as possible. Users will, with a straight face, claim that discussion from a shared reality, or rejecting sources of misinformation, or any other basis for moderating arguments, is impossible, and intractable insulting conflict is the only possible state of affairs- and they will follow it up with every line of attack they can think of. Recommendations: Take those rules you've written up, number them, enforce them, and include which rule is violated in the reason. It will be very unpleasant for a period as a group of assholes try to find a way to get you to stop, but eventually you get to actually remove them and you won't feel like coming up with excuses to not read the queue. Enforce rules consistently and do not guilt yourself out of moderating Where efforts at moderation do occur, they are reactive and do not reflect an underlying shared set of goals. What's even worse is that they are sometimes reversed, or even apologized for, not because there was some error in the decision, but just because...the mod felt bad? It's as if you believe that your goal is to be popular with everyone, which is...really not a way moderation can ever work. When moderation decisions are reversed, they create a standard of permissibility for abuse, and invite further abuse along the same line. It's basically a giant red flashing sign saying "hey trolls, do this!". It immediately affects every other user in the thread, and worse, it also guarantees that future moderation on the same subject will be even more difficult. It permanently cedes the discussion to whomever gets the validation. Recommendations: In the same way that agreement was previously needed to implement some punishments, mod consensus should be required to reverse a probation. If you've just probated someone and feel guilty and want to apologize or otherwise equivocate, go take a walk or wash your hands or something. You've developed a deeply perverse relationship to your role. Do not engage assholes One strategy abusive users deploy is to notice when a mod opens up by participating in discussion and specifically make them as miserable as possible. They know the mod is invested in the subject, and that can be used to trip them up and get them to react in a way that can be used against them. Recommendations: Do not engage with assholes. Specifically bring other mods in, immediately, when it appears that users are either following you from thread to thread to start arguments, or attempting to get you to react on a particular subject. For the love of god, ban abusive users I believe the greatest underlying issue here is a failure to understand what banning bad users represents. The decision to ban an abusive user is not just about whether or not you remove that user from the forums. This is fundamentally the wrong way to understand the effects of your decisions. The choice is about whether you remove the abusive user, or, through your inaction, you remove all of the users that the abusive user will drive to leave the space- and all the users who are no longer interested in joining, because of the reputation it's developed. Assholes are not going to stop being assholes because you verbally warn them or give them a probation. Tinkering with the number of threads, or creating spaces to "vent", or to contain or attract abusive users, does not work. Instead, as we've seen, they will socialize around and identify with their opposition to moderation. The long term effect of not banning users is that the forum has an active, semi-coordinated and absolutely rancid counterculture of abuse. If Jeffrey/admins/mods are unwilling to actually remove bad actors from the space, then any other moderation activity is doomed to failure. Recommendations: I think there have been some monthlong probes in this thread. That is an excellent start. How about you just keep using those, and more, from now on? This should be a core moderation policy. You are responsible for what the site is This is, whether you want to acknowledge it or not, a social media platform, and you're responsible for many of the same outcomes and issues that face the people who run 4chan or facebook. That's what the work entails. The difference is you have more personal control and the scale of the task can be far, far more manageable. It's true that the users in the community can define part of what SA is, but that is not an excuse to pretend that you are not the people with actual power over the forum. You are responsible for clearly delineating what it's for and what it does. You are not going to be able to escape responsibility for the results of your actions or inaction. Recommendations: The DnD mods should meet- like, maybe actually have a phone or discord voice call- and discuss issues and questions of how the forum should operate. This should happen whenever there's a significant issue, and any such call should actually lead to some kind of conclusion and plan of action. I know, this sounds like way too much work, but you're basically having to undo a deficit of moderation and planning that's now many, many years in the making. Once the basics are laid out, this sort of thing would be much less necessary.
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Oct 29, 2021 07:53
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I'm a long, long-time reader, not a poster. I am generally impressed with the foreign policy discussion. E.g., in the China thread, the moderators never allow discussion to be derailed with inapposite comparison to America. While I think the focus on semantics (genocide, cultural genocide, etc.) can be counterproductive, I've very much enjoyed reading it. As many others have mentioned, one or two moderators do tend to personally engage in a confrontational, slightly intimidating way with posters. I think they should be extremely cautious entering heated arguments, and should avoid snark at all costs. However, with other moderators, the effort NOT to act in this way really shines through their posts. And, honestly, it would take an impressively public-spirited fellow to spend time curating a forum without being able to lord it over the plebeians just a little. How many forums do much better? Topic-policing should be done with an extremely light touch. E.g., if a discussion on sexual assault begins in the U.S. politics thread, it should almost always be allowed to run it's course. If the discussion becomes heated, all the better. I've seen dozens of interesting debates short-circuited by moderators requiring everything be in its proper place. In all but the most drastic circumstances, I think moderators should wait the discussion out, then politely remind the posters about the more specific thread. (I can tell moderators try to do this. Generally the "clear out" message is something like: "This topic has run its course." My preference would be MUCH more leeway.) I do think a decision should be made on on "decorum." I.e., is it really allowed to casually insult those farther to the right than you? I get the feeling some posters want to do this, but then they end up outraged when someone farther to the left does the same to them. I am reminded of the (likely apocryphal) story of the American G.I. participating in the liberation of Paris. He sees Frenchmen hanging other Frenchmen, and Frenchwomen being ostracized and sexually humiliated. When he asks what's going on, he's told, "They're collaborators." The bewildered G.I. responds, "But you're ALL collaborators!" C-Spammers come into this forum, see politicians being called "chuds," and say, "But you're ALL 'chuds'!" Dopey analogy, I know. In general, I think the sheer existence of C-Spam points to some issues with the way this forum has been run. Still, perhaps D&D's thesis and C-Spam's antithesis will make a beautiful synthesis! Ha!
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Oct 29, 2021 09:04
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I can echo endorsement for the use of fewer threadbans and more long probes or real bans for people who just can't avoid repeating bad behavior in a given thread. I understand the idea of keeping otherwise productive posters out of narrow spaces they can't control themselves in, but as said it gives two unwanted side effects of not having a clear path to return while also giving them all the time they want to stew about it in the rest of the forum to hurt their own moods and those of others. Also I was a bit surprised that the thread seems to be lighter on long probes as is than many others, so it's not like moving that direction would be draconian by SA standards. As for what triggers such treatment it should be clearly explained and consistent. But still it needs to have some open subjectivity and flexibility, since any hard and fast boundary of "not touching you" in a contentious space will be weaponized. That's directly at odds with objectivity and consistency, but that's a universal dilemma of disciplinary systems.
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Oct 29, 2021 10:44
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Nothing says "don't use the report button" like eating what feels like a retaliatory probation for using the report button. Thanks for proving how unsuited you are for this volunteer job, CG. eta: I thought some context for this might help. Lib and let die at Oct 27, 2021 11:18 posted:It is a rather vague sentiment, "Do it again, Uncle Billy" fool of sound at Oct 27, 2021 21:18 posted:Lots of people are reporting posts in this thread even though every single D&D mod is reading it.  I reported 2 posts in USNews ~an hour before this probation went through (to his minimal credit, alongside the probation for the post I reported) Lib and let die fucked around with this message at 14:30 on Oct 29, 2021 |
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Oct 29, 2021 12:45
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Ytlaya posted:It's pretty ironic how you're accusing me of being dismissive, while proceeding to condescendingly insult the other thread way more than I did the polls thread (which I didn't even insult at all, aside from commenting on who comprised its posters!). Do you really not see the irony here? And it's not like "posting a recent poll" is more substantive or usefully informative. It's just the exact same "reacting to stuff in the news" posting (which also occurred in the other General Election thread). Hell, you're the one who likes to complain about people just reacting to tweets, but that's functionally the exact same thing. It's not like some random poll from a presidential election is high-brow serious journalism that can drive any sort of fruitful discussion. It was just window dressing for chatting about the latest election events and drama (which is basically what both threads were doing, only with one having more arguments). Epinephrine fucked around with this message at 14:53 on Oct 29, 2021 |
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Oct 29, 2021 14:31
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The split between the polls thread and the election thread allowed two different cliques of posters to post about the same thing in different ways without making GBS threads in each other's pool. It was a great way to handle such an extremely contentious issue, just creating two different spaces for two different groups to hang out and chill and do their own thing. But to pretend as though there wasn't an ideological divide is kind of silly. The election thread was clearly a Bernie cheer box (and eventual funeral procession), and the polls thread was happy to root for the Democratic establishment and against the Republicans. Despite it being ostensibly against the rules, many posts in the polls thread were how terrible the Rs were especially Trump and there's nothing wrong with that. I think it's a good model for the rest of the forum, although at this point I'm not sure if there are enough posters for there to be separate factions.
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Oct 29, 2021 14:44
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Discendo Vox posted:Here's what I've got time to write up atm. I don't really read D&D threads any more so none of this affects me and you should all do whatever you think will work, but I wanted to chime in and say that this is the kind of thing I tried to do for about two years when I was a mod of this forum and I honestly don't think it will work. Expecting to turn an old comedy forum into a civil debate society is going to be very difficult, particularly when the people who you want to do all this work are volunteers scorned by most of the people posting here until they get burned out and/or doxxed. After realizing I had much better ways to spend my free time than figuring out who was on the "wrong" side of an argument in the UKMT thread, my takeaway is that less is much, much more when it comes to rules and probations and I truly believe that this forum would be better off if you let a lot of stuff slide. But it's probably also true that you and I want different things out of this site and I've already found ways to get what I want. Hope it all works out.
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Oct 29, 2021 14:50
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One of the major issues with DnD moderation is the same issue we saw over the course of the last 5+ years with Twitter et al dealing with Trumpist bullshit. The old paradigm of staying completely ideologically neutral and only calling balls and strikes breaks down when people start deciding being an rear end in a top hat is part of their ideology. People can always make some sort of strained arguement about how some punished behavior is actually a matter of ideological difference, and as soon as that happens rejecting that arguement becomes taking an ideological stand. So we run down a rabbit hole of increasingly obscure and numerous rules trying to trap bad actors who keep playing "I'm not touching you" games, because any mod actually exercising personal judgement gets harassed and declared ideological. So we embark on this fools errand of trying to define balls and strikes only to have them turn around in every one of these threads and start complaining about how the mods are issuing all these probes and thread bans on these stupid and obscure rules. Which, without the context of the history of "I'm not touching you" behavior do look silly. Mods need to be free to exercise some judgement and probe someone for being an rear end in a top hat without having to come up with some strict and exact legal standard about how "democrat party" is banned that will hold up in QCS appeals court. Don't probe people because they said "democrat party" and then try to justify later that people were using the term to troll the thread, probe people for trolling the thread. I feel like this keeps getting pointed out as a problem, but the only way it ever gets solved is if the mods/IKs are free to exercise some personal judgement without every probe disrupting the thread with people arguing about it, or going to QCS and going through years of post history to find out if anyone ever got away with posting something similar without a probe. Because that is what causes this, if a mod know they're going to be subjected to all this bullshit they're never going to want to push any buttons unless they have an ironclad objective proof of a specific rule violation, which gets us democrat party probes instead of "trolling and being an rear end in a top hat" probes. 6 people piling into a thread to bitch about a probe needs to go back to being punished harshly. Mods should feel like if a whole crew of people invade a thread knowingly violating rules/directives under the guise of "you can't probe us all" they can turn around and in fact probe them all without having to spend a day of drama justifying the original sixer in QCS court. Admins need to react to that stuff with "no gently caress off, you intentionally crashed the thread and got exactly what you dared the mod to do" instead of "hmmm lets entertain 12 pages of drama while we pick apart every sixer this mod has ever given to see if maybe there was anything less than perfect". Eventually, especially after Jan 6th, a lot of social media platforms finally decided at some level they didn't care if abusive behavior was couched in a political opinion, if your political opinion involves being abusive then it's not welcome here. Mods need to be free to take similar stands, and it's very clear they are not. Whether that is because of lack of admin support I honestly can't say for sure because I'm not privy to those conversations, but that is what it looks like to an outsider. Whatever it is though, nothing will improve as long as moderation is being done with one of the primary motivations being avoiding abuse. Jarmak fucked around with this message at 15:36 on Oct 29, 2021 |
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Oct 29, 2021 15:27
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Cpt_Obvious posted:The split between the polls thread and the election thread allowed two different cliques of posters to post about the same thing in different ways without making GBS threads in each other's pool. It was a great way to handle such an extremely contentious issue, just creating two different spaces for two different groups to hang out and chill and do their own thing. I think it's pretty obvious that there was an ideological divide between the "who is going to win the election" thread and the "are any of the candidates even morally worthy of being president, and should elections even exist" thread. That's not due to any explicit ideological enforcement by the mods, it's just the fact that people with different ideological positions tend to have an interest in different issues. Someone convinced that Joe Biden is just as bad as Donald Trump apparently isn't very interested in whether or not Joe Biden is forecasted to beat Donald Trump - either because they don't care who wins or because they don't believe in polls. It's not that the threads were intentionally divided by ideology, it's that the posters themselves tended to self-sort by ideology because people with different ideologies favored different subjects, had different posting styles, and approached posting with a different emotional outlook.
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Oct 29, 2021 15:40
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A hyperstrict forum doesn't work because the forums in general have drifted from that. I remember when I first started posting on this site, I was terrified of posting (probably a bit too much), and things were in full capitalization era, etc. The site evolves, and while I (again) have no problem with D&D being the effortpost forum, much more shitposting is expected to be forgiven now than it would've been in the past due to evolving relationships between the userbase/their expectations and the mod. Probably because the userbase is smaller, people have more places to shitpost than they did before, or something more elusive that I can't enunciate. Even the sports forums are loosening up on rival puns after years of that being the firmest line drawn in the sand. I think it's a slippery slope to say, "Anything but the strictest application of the rules will lead to CSPAM 2.0." The cure for most toxic cultures on this site was either looser and more diplomatic moderation or, if it wasn't something that could benefit from that, nuking the problem area from orbit, a la GBS 2.0. I think D&D is the only forum on the entire site whose user base is asking for more probations and, like, okay, if that's what the user base wants, but don't expect to get outsiders of any stripe, even the most innocuous Goons with Spoons poster, to join in any time soon because it'll feel like a time warp for them and not in a pleasant way.
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Oct 29, 2021 16:02
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My impression of GE vs. Polliwonks was less Bernie supporters vs. Biden supporters. Bernie was probably pretty popular with both camps. It ranged from rejecting electoralism to Bernie as a compromise on the GE side, and ranged from Bernie supporters to Biden as a compromise in Polliwonks.
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Oct 29, 2021 16:07
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Probably Magic posted:A hyperstrict forum doesn't work because the forums in general have drifted from that. I remember when I first started posting on this site, I was terrified of posting (probably a bit too much), and things were in full capitalization era, etc. The site evolves, and while I (again) have no problem with D&D being the effortpost forum, much more shitposting is expected to be forgiven now than it would've been in the past due to evolving relationships between the userbase/their expectations and the mod. Probably because the userbase is smaller, people have more places to shitpost than they did before, or something more elusive that I can't enunciate. Even the sports forums are loosening up on rival puns after years of that being the firmest line drawn in the sand. I think it's a slippery slope to say, "Anything but the strictest application of the rules will lead to CSPAM 2.0." The cure for most toxic cultures on this site was either looser and more diplomatic moderation or, if it wasn't something that could benefit from that, nuking the problem area from orbit, a la GBS 2.0. I think D&D is the only forum on the entire site whose user base is asking for more probations and, like, okay, if that's what the user base wants, but don't expect to get outsiders of any stripe, even the most innocuous Goons with Spoons poster, to join in any time soon because it'll feel like a time warp for them and not in a pleasant way. The answer to this is "lurk before posting." Get a feel for what the forum is like before you jump in. Any set of rules will be tolerated as long as they are useful rules that promote the desired posting atmosphere. The sports forums backing down on rivals puns is a great disappointment. It was in important tool for keeping discussions civil and minimizing shitposting. I guess they prefer more of that, now.
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Oct 29, 2021 16:08
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