XboxPants posted:Also, the subject of splitting the thread was suggested by posters in the thread and CZS said it was off the table, and we had to either stop discussing the conceptual issues or have the thread closed. This is not a factual representation of the conversation. To quote myself from that thread: cinci zoo sniper posted:Which is to say that it is a failure of an educational thread, regardless of your anecdotal experience of it, and it will not be tolerated in D&D for much longer in its current form. cinci zoo sniper posted:An easy solution would be to have multiple threads, but since this is a budding thread as yet, I would simply much prefer to see goons post in a manner more conscious of these considerations. cinci zoo sniper posted:I'm definitely not splitting it, so it'll live or die by the quality and clarity of conversations in it going forward. That said, I also do feel that expectations are considerably clearer now, e.g.: cinci zoo sniper posted:If you want to make such posts in D&D, you will need to create a thread that leaves no doubt that the thread is about some system of belief, or to debate you personally, rather than about the factual nature of ChatGPT. cinci zoo sniper posted:The fact that different domains have different language to won't make it acceptable to anthropomorphize language models in D&D anywhere outside a thread titled “I believe that ChatGPT is human”.
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# ? Mar 27, 2023 22:28 |
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# ? May 10, 2024 22:32 |
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Rosalind posted:I am going to be so egotistical as to assume that I might be one of the people you're referencing here. To be honest, I am not going to return to posting in D&D probably ever. It's not fulfilling. Cocaine Mitch posted:I posted here for years but finally about a year or so ago I gave up and left because I was sick of how people could be such massive jackasses all the time and there were absolutely no repercussions. It was exhausting and mentally draining. Leaving this site was the best thing I've ever done for my own mental health and I honestly advocate everyone else to leave too. This place is a shithole that can't be saved. I just want to check both of these quotes are complaining about the same thing right? Because it seems to me there's two competing narratives for why "experts" (I have no idea if people posting anonymously on a message board are true subject domain experts, I just have the sources they cite) left D&D: 1. Over moderation. Where nobody can have fun, be casual or state controversial ideas without being punished for it 2. Under moderation. Where effort posts are met with "casual" reactions that chase them away without being punished for it. Personally, I like that the current moderation status quo has largely stopped D&D being the no man's land for c-spam and GBS fights. The fact that there's a lot less of these type of posts Turgid Flagella posted:Maybe it's time for d&d to become "d" & "d" - consolidate all threads down to one of two thread tags ("debate" and "discuss") respectively; using the Ukraine thread as an example one thread can be for lively, scholarly debate on the merits of arming Nazis to own The Other Empire and one can be a feel-good, vibes only thread to discuss and report on the ongoing Azov rebellion against That Other Empire Somaen posted:There are places you can discuss how actually, NATO provoked Russia into invading and actually, the holodomor is a made up conspiracy to make the soviets look bad that are more appropriate and you are very welcome to post there, why do you need to import that to DnD is appreciated
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# ? Mar 27, 2023 22:37 |
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gurragadon posted:Wouldn't most of those be handled in a better way than removing a well-established thread? OP's can be changed after the fact, if debate can't happen civilly then probations for not following that rule or thread bans, interesting is so vastly different to everybody that you as a moderator or anybody else have a right to close a thread for that. I have no interest in 99.9% of the threads on Something Awful and nobody has interest in everything. There isn't a process for determining whether a thread's embarrassing. It's not a word we use in moderation discussion amongst ourselves or one that appears in the rules. All I said was that if a thread is making D&D look like a place that is stupid or otherwise uninteresting, then that would be a factor in how we decide what to do with the thread, which could be closing it or just trying to moderate it differently. The fact that different people might have different perspectives and interests in regard to ChatGPT (and AI in general) is precisely why it seems like it could be better to have two threads. If you're interested in AI news and the nitty gritty, you could go to one, and if you're more interested in AI philosophy, you could go to the other. There wouldn't be a hard ban on discussing one area in the other thread (that would be practically impossible) but there'd be an understanding of what its focus was.
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# ? Mar 27, 2023 22:52 |
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Rosalind posted:I am going to be so egotistical as to assume that I might be one of the people you're referencing here. To be honest, I am not going to return to posting in D&D probably ever. It's not fulfilling. Cocaine Mitch posted:I posted here for years but finally about a year or so ago I gave up and left because I was sick of how people could be such massive jackasses all the time and there were absolutely no repercussions. It was exhausting and mentally draining. Leaving this site was the best thing I've ever done for my own mental health and I honestly advocate everyone else to leave too. This place is a shithole that can't be saved. These posts remind me of the poster who revealed that they had a PhD in economics, and within minutes they were compared to a cop and a drone bomber.
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# ? Mar 27, 2023 22:55 |
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Thorn Wishes Talon posted:These posts remind me of the poster who revealed that they had a PhD in economics, and within minutes they were compared to a cop and a drone bomber. Or how Live and Let Die got doxxed with an AV purchase.
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# ? Mar 27, 2023 23:08 |
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Koos Group posted:There isn't a process for determining whether a thread's embarrassing. It's not a word we use in moderation discussion amongst ourselves or one that appears in the rules. All I said was that if a thread is making D&D look like a place that is stupid or otherwise uninteresting, then that would be a factor in how we decide what to do with the thread, which could be closing it or just trying to moderate it differently. If you split people into different threads when there are different perspectives on an issue that is just further splitting any community that has formed. A community isn't always in agreement but a Debate and Discussion forum worth anything always has threads where people are being challenged to think about new things. I would ask you to reconsider relying on overly subjective moderation principles like something being "stupid" or "uninteresting." This community is already incredibly small compared to others online and as long as people are in good faith (which is a rule to assume until proven otherwise) they should be welcomed. gurragadon fucked around with this message at 23:22 on Mar 27, 2023 |
# ? Mar 27, 2023 23:19 |
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Rosalind posted:But it's also exhausting to have every single word of my posts nitpicked and taken in the worst bad faith angle possible. Man I just want a place to relax and talk about health news and politics with people I mostly agree with but the amount of vitriol I would get for some of my posts was too much for me to handle. People questioned my professional judgment and called me bad at my job. I got anonymous emails questioning whether I actually was an epidemiologist (which made me afraid I was going to get doxxed). At least one person (who was also an educated user who no longer posts, ironically) wrote me like a thousand word essay PM about how naïve and wrong I am. i agree with this take - i think people mostly just want to chat casually and have fun. this really doesn't mix with politics because people also want to have their opinions validated without too much effort, and having to consider that they may be flatly wrong about something conflicts with the casual, chill, "this is a comedy forum" level posting folks generally claim to want for example, yesterday there was a discussion about housing being too expensive in america in USCE. in my opinion, this conversation was overall very low info and peppered with a lot of cynical claims like "landlords simply let thousands of units sit empty rather than lower rents" or "apartments are literally illegal because of wealthy boomers who pack zoning meetings" and stuff like that - just normal vague online complaints that don't really intersect with reality, but they do allow us to continue being mad and lamenting the state of the world. often it feels like we've never really gotten beyond the tendency of demonstrating virtue by being the most performatively upset person in the group. personally i think this is pretty poor quality debate or discussion, but i also feel like there's not really any point trying to counter these arguments, because all you are doing is essentially giving people homework in the hopes that they won't continue to invent reasons to feel bad about the world my bottom line here is that people simply want to post in a bad and lazy way, and there's nothing wrong with this! it works fine for chatting about sports or video games or whatnot! but when people want to post like this when discussing how to fix chronically expensive housing, or who is doing the most war crimes in ukraine, it's just not really a discussion thats worth observing or participating in, especially if the overall vibe of the discussion is one that's more like a support group for hellworld survivors anonymous rather than people who are curious about the causes and potential solutions of real problems. and there's simply better places to have more substantive discussions than on a forum which has a decades old culture of ritual hostility and scalp collecting
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# ? Mar 27, 2023 23:23 |
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Mr. Fall Down Terror posted:there's simply better places to have these kinds of discussions than on a forum which has a decades old culture of ritual hostility and scalp collecting Yeah, only a few clicks away in GBS, BYOB, C-SPAM etc. etc. (including D&Ds very own chat threads). Nobody has yet made a convincing argument why D&D generally needs to be more casual and chatty when there exists many other places to do so on this very forum. At the moment, it's still a pretty popular place to post and read from the users browsing numbers. Less than GBS or C-SPAM but about the same as PYF. And way more than any of the specific interest sub-forums.
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# ? Mar 27, 2023 23:29 |
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Cocaine Mitch posted:I posted here for years but finally about a year or so ago I gave up and left because I was sick of how people could be such massive jackasses all the time and there were absolutely no repercussions. It was exhausting and mentally draining. Leaving this site was the best thing I've ever done for my own mental health and I honestly advocate everyone else to leave too. This place is a shithole that can't be saved. Yeah it's not as bad as it used to be like it was at the heights of when the_steve and Majorian were mods. the_steve especially used to quote me in the succ thread then ask them how long he should probe me for then I'd get a dozen messages from those weirdos gloating about how owned I was. I'm a generic white noise poster, the fact that I was some crazy villain in their eyes worthy of that amount of attention showed how both toxic and boring that entire thing just was. The Koos era started by punishing anyone who wouldn't take some jackass who'd been trolling for years doing SYQ poo poo at good faith immediately and it drove away a fair bit of whatever regulars are left. So we took a problem of a group of posters on another forum harassing D&D regulars and punished the D&D regulars until most left, I mean this status quo I think is better then the old one I guess, it's hard to tell it just feels lovely in a different way it took all the soul out of D&D. At this point I don't think there is any fixing it and it will just dwindle till probably the next big election in 2024.
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# ? Mar 27, 2023 23:30 |
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Most of what's taking place here has been making me feel more confident about an earlier appraisal I had of the D&D Ukraine thread It had four strikes going against it from the beginning 1. It is an emotionally charged topic about a grim situation producing extraordinary misery, and provokes lots of anxiety 2. It is an irregular high-volume topic, sometimes with extraordinary bouts of news creating a flood of activity, sometimes with stale periods that drive people to inane back and forth or clear topic drift 3. It is an ideologically charged topic with a mostly unambiguously lopsided moral analysis 4. Because of some legacy neglect entirely out of scope of either the thread or D&D as a subforum, the topic was like a lightning rod to entire groups of unbelievably lovely posters that would work themselves with brigade bait and eventually tide over into waves of impulsive and inexhaustable apologia and war crimes denial and other ... extremely fun garbage. any one of the four makes a thread harder to navigate and usually requires that you err on the side of caution in repeatedly containing posting that might have been entirely fine in different contexts but could easily become a shitfest for this particular subject matter outside of D&D, ukraine threads became a sitewide intervention issue with apologies and a recognition that things had to change drastically to even permit other communities to be allowed to have a thread discussing it so I would say that the "moderation seems excessively strict" was a practical guarantee in any situation in which the outcome we're discussing isn't "thread closed and locked for being a complete disaster"
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# ? Mar 27, 2023 23:33 |
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cinci zoo sniper posted:This is not a factual representation of the conversation. To quote myself from that thread: Just admitting to 5 rule violations. SMDH Obviously moderators should be expected to uphold the rules, not break them.
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# ? Mar 27, 2023 23:51 |
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fez_machine posted:Yeah, only a few clicks away in GBS, BYOB, C-SPAM etc. etc. (including D&Ds very own chat threads). Nobody has yet made a convincing argument why D&D generally needs to be more casual and chatty when there exists many other places to do so on this very forum. it needs to be casual and chatty because that's what people want, in different flavors. people don't want to defend their posts as if they were dissertations, they want to tell people to shut the gently caress up. we're not going to be able to mandate people only make informed posts, that is outside of the capacity of moderation. something awful is just a smaller version of what we've been learning about the internet over many years now - larger networks simply lead to more arguing, deliberate contention and trolling. smaller networks are gatekept to keep out overly combative or difficult people. if i've got smaller networks that meet my discussion needs, what can this place offer me when i'm bored with being purposefully combative at folks who have opinions i dont like?
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# ? Mar 27, 2023 23:55 |
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Mr. Fall Down Terror posted:it needs to be casual and chatty because that's what people want, in different flavors. people don't want to defend their posts as if they were dissertations, they want to tell people to shut the gently caress up. we're not going to be able to mandate people only make informed posts, that is outside of the capacity of moderation. something awful is just a smaller version of what we've been learning about the internet over many years now - larger networks simply lead to more arguing, deliberate contention and trolling. smaller networks are gatekept to keep out overly combative or difficult people. if i've got smaller networks that meet my discussion needs, what can this place offer me when i'm bored with being purposefully combative at folks who have opinions i dont like? but again there's a whole range of places on this website that do this? Why does D&D specifically have to be that place?
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# ? Mar 27, 2023 23:58 |
fez_machine posted:but again there's a whole range of places on this website that do this? 'Debate' generally implies the presence of more than one opinion being presented - what it sounds like the most terminally academia-brained posters want is a strict form of discussion that only recognizes the validity of what can be validated through the accepted thoughtschools of "liberal" capitalist doctrine, elementary, high school, and college curriculum pumped out of privately-held textbook companies with a stake in upkeeping the capitalist order. There are never going to be studies that meet whatever rigorous criteria these complainants would expect because the closest you could study is polling public perception on whether or not the gross accumulation and hoarding of housing is amoral but you can find plenty of rent-seeking apologia in academia to bury the moral argument in.
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# ? Mar 28, 2023 00:07 |
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Turgid Flagella posted:'Debate' generally implies the presence of more than one opinion being presented - what it sounds like the most terminally academia-brained posters want is a strict form of discussion that only recognizes the validity of what can be validated through the accepted thoughtschools of "liberal" capitalist doctrine, elementary, high school, and college curriculum pumped out of privately-held textbook companies with a stake in upkeeping the capitalist order. why not just post in CSPAM about this stuff? Why D&D?
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# ? Mar 28, 2023 00:10 |
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fez_machine posted:but again there's a whole range of places on this website that do this? we already have a subforum for posting in serious academic tone and it's been dead for years, because people don't want to post there a lot what people want to do is repost other people's bad opinions that they read on twitter and argue about them until someone gets mad enough to get punished by a mod. just by looking at what the most popular subforums are, we can deduce how people prefer to post, and trying to mandate people post a different way is simply not a good use of moderation effort versus just posting like they want to post anyway but within certain guidelines of not calling each other nazis too often fez_machine posted:why not just post in CSPAM about this stuff? because people want to fight. they crave internet fights. the places where people don't fight are boring and i'm not going to post on this site 8+ hours a day without some excitement
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# ? Mar 28, 2023 00:12 |
fez_machine posted:why not just post in CSPAM about this stuff? Why have D&D at all, then? BFC can handle all the discussions related to macro- and micro-economic policy, GiP can handle all the discussions about foreign policy, LAN can handle all the discussions about regional politics, why not just post in those forums about those things? The purpose of making these opposing arguments in public isn't for the benefit of the one arguing the position - it's to expose someone who might not visit cspam at all to the ideas of materialism or class consciousness where they otherwise may not be exposed to it all.
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# ? Mar 28, 2023 00:15 |
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Turgid Flagella posted:'Debate' generally implies the presence of more than one opinion being presented - what it sounds like the most terminally academia-brained posters want is a strict form of discussion that only recognizes the validity of what can be validated through the accepted thoughtschools of "liberal" capitalist doctrine, elementary, high school, and college curriculum pumped out of privately-held textbook companies with a stake in upkeeping the capitalist order. Just because people don't want to debate your frankly unhinged opinions doesn't mean they are "terminally academia-brained" — whatever the gently caress that means.
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# ? Mar 28, 2023 00:21 |
Thorn Wishes Talon posted:Just because people don't want to debate your frankly unhinged opinions doesn't mean they are "terminally academia-brained" — whatever the gently caress that means. Can you expand a bit on what about the belief that the existence of shelter as a commodity reserved for the privileged that can afford it conforms to the definition of "unhinged?"
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# ? Mar 28, 2023 00:24 |
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Turgid Flagella posted:Can you expand a bit on what about the belief that the existence of shelter as a commodity reserved for the privileged that can afford it conforms to the definition of "unhinged?" I cannot for the life of me understand why sane people choose to leave the site rather than deal with this kind of argument.
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# ? Mar 28, 2023 00:28 |
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Everyone, we're here to debate and discuss. No not like that! Now please resume the discussion. No not the debate.
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# ? Mar 28, 2023 00:28 |
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Turgid Flagella posted:Can you expand a bit on what about the belief that the existence of shelter as a commodity reserved for the privileged that can afford it conforms to the definition of "unhinged?" You're not looking for a debate or a discussion. You want a Kindergarten playground shouting match.
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# ? Mar 28, 2023 00:30 |
Pander posted:I cannot for the life of me understand why sane people choose to leave the site rather than deal with this kind of argument. Ah yes, the absolute abuse of being exposed to the idea that landlords are parasites
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# ? Mar 28, 2023 00:31 |
Turgid Flagella posted:Ah yes, the absolute abuse of being exposed to the idea that landlords are parasites Actually, if you had some basic loving biological literacy you'd realize how ridiculous this comparison is landlords - a title held by actual people - are mammalian in nature and categorically cannot be considered parasites
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# ? Mar 28, 2023 00:33 |
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Turgid Flagella posted:'Debate' generally implies the presence of more than one opinion being presented - what it sounds like the most terminally academia-brained posters want is a strict form of discussion that only recognizes the validity of what can be validated through the accepted thoughtschools of "liberal" capitalist doctrine, elementary, high school, and college curriculum pumped out of privately-held textbook companies with a stake in upkeeping the capitalist order. See this is exactly it! This post perfectly encapsulates why I don't post here any more. It calls me names, it interprets what I posted (which was basically just "I'd post here more if people are nicer") in the most bad faith way possible (suggesting I only want people to post adhering to some sort of corporate capitalist orthodoxy), and suggests that I made some sort of outrageous request (that people post with a level of academic study rigor). And it's written so perfectly too for plausible deniability because I'm not mentioned by name of course. You can't call me "terminally academia-brained" to my face because that would get you in trouble. This is exactly why I don't put in D&D any more. Thank you for proving my point in a thread about feedback about why people don't post in D&D any more.
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# ? Mar 28, 2023 00:34 |
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Just want to chime in with the crowd and say CZS is doing a great job with the Ukraine thread. Moderation is very strict, but it's a topic that seems to bring out the worst in posters if "debate" is allowed.
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# ? Mar 28, 2023 00:35 |
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fez_machine posted:why not just post in CSPAM about this stuff? Because they already know it and because it's a serious, well written argument that has no place there. Rosalind posted:See this is exactly it! This post perfectly encapsulates why I don't post here any more. That post wasn't about you though Harold Fjord fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Mar 28, 2023 |
# ? Mar 28, 2023 00:37 |
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Turgid Flagella posted:Why have D&D at all, then? Because people want a high effort grey posting forum about a range of general topics? That's it's niche. Harold Fjord posted:Because they already know it Why is this a problem?
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# ? Mar 28, 2023 00:38 |
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Turgid Flagella posted:Ah yes, the absolute abuse of being exposed to the idea that landlords are parasites Why don't you start a thread about it, rather than continue to derail the feedback thread?
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# ? Mar 28, 2023 00:38 |
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also lol Turgid so riled up they went on a multipost spree big mad about the grey forums
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# ? Mar 28, 2023 00:40 |
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fez_machine posted:Because people want a high effort grey posting forum about a range of general topics? That's it's niche. This is not a high effort forum. The idea that it is holds back D&D because it's constantly in conflict with what it is on paper and what it is in practice.
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# ? Mar 28, 2023 00:44 |
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sorry should have said higher effort forum edit: as has been said nobody actually wants a super high effort forum
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# ? Mar 28, 2023 00:45 |
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Thorn Wishes Talon posted:"terminally academia-brained" — whatever the gently caress that means. it's the same thing evangelical christians do except talking about the word of Jesus Christ and how the only thing that prevents this immortal truth from being realized is excess corruption from secular ideas. basically just a whole built in excuse for why my arguments are never bad, i am simply speaking to people who are too inferior to admit my arguments are good not a great way to share or learn about new ideas but a pretty good way to just start fights if getting into internet fights is your thing
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# ? Mar 28, 2023 00:46 |
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fez_machine posted:sorry should have said higher effort forum It's poo poo posting with a boat that gets rocked easier then the other forums
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# ? Mar 28, 2023 00:49 |
Aegis posted:Why don't you start a thread about it, rather than continue to derail the feedback thread? Because I'm only using that as one example of something I've talked about over and over again, a school of thought that Neil Postman describes far more eloquently than I could: quote:In this way, social researchers can see themselves, and can be seen, as scientists, researchers without bias or values, unburdened by mere opinion. In this way, social policies can be claimed to rest on objectively determined facts. In Technopoly, it is not enough to argue that the segregation of blacks and whites in schools is immoral, and it is useless to offer Black Boy or Invisible Man or The Fire Next Time as proof. The courts must be shown that standardized academic and psychological tests reveal that blacks do less well than whites and feel demeaned when segregation exists. In Technopoly, it is not enough to say it is immoral and degrading to allow people to be homeless. You cannot get anywhere by asking a judge, a politician, or a bureaucrat to read Les Misérables or Nana or, indeed, the New Testament. You must show that statistics have produced data revealing the homeless to be unhappy and to be a drain on the economy. Neither Dostoevsky nor Freud, Dickens nor Weber, Twain nor Marx, is now a dispenser of legitimate knowledge. They are interesting; they are “worth reading”; they are artifacts of our past. But as for “truth,” we must turn to “science.”
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# ? Mar 28, 2023 00:49 |
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Gumball Gumption posted:It's poo poo posting with a boat that gets rocked easier then the other forums I honestly don't see much poo poo posting in D&D. To prove my point there's the new AI thread with a mere 2 pages of posts in it, can you provide 2 examples of poo poo posting from that thread? fez_machine fucked around with this message at 00:53 on Mar 28, 2023 |
# ? Mar 28, 2023 00:51 |
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fez_machine posted:Why is this a problem? Doesn't matter, through your selective quotation you've effectively acknowledged the problem that is obviously more serious fez_machine posted:I honestly don't see much poo poo posting in D&D. I can find at least
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# ? Mar 28, 2023 00:54 |
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Rosalind posted:I am going to be so egotistical as to assume that I might be one of the people you're referencing here. To be honest, I am not going to return to posting in D&D probably ever. It's not fulfilling. You are, and, yeah, this is the trajectory that the current decision to promote the harassment and bad faith that the mods find "funny" has produced. The absence of SME users is, in turn, blamed on the act of moderation. fez_machine posted:Yeah, only a few clicks away in GBS, BYOB, C-SPAM etc. etc. (including D&Ds very own chat threads). Nobody has yet made a convincing argument why D&D generally needs to be more casual and chatty when there exists many other places to do so on this very forum. The purpose was to ensure that the people who want to undermine moderation could have a community. Rosalind posted:See this is exactly it! This post perfectly encapsulates why I don't post here any more. And the users who do it get to control the space, and get their own unmoderated spaces revolving around undermining discussion, and get infinite chances. Meanwhile, SMEs like Rosalind just leave.
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# ? Mar 28, 2023 00:56 |
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Deteriorata posted:You're not looking for a debate or a discussion. You want a Kindergarten playground shouting match. Yeah I don't see how the Ukraine thread would be better by someone reposting Russian Propaganda endlessly about how poor Russia was forced to invade Ukraine and wipe out their culture, the people looking to post it aren't doing so they can debate the merits of said propaganda or post evidence one way or another they want to yell at the libs, be a toxic rear end in a top hat then complain about how their viewpoint is being silenced when they get a 6er after breaking a dozen rules.
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# ? Mar 28, 2023 00:56 |
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# ? May 10, 2024 22:32 |
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socialsecurity posted:Yeah I don't see how the Ukraine thread would be better by someone reposting Russian Propaganda endlessly about how poor Russia was forced to invade Ukraine and wipe out their culture, the people looking to post it aren't doing so they can debate the merits of said propaganda or post evidence one way or another they want to yell at the libs, be a toxic rear end in a top hat then complain about how their viewpoint is being silenced when they get a 6er after breaking a dozen rules. Man, it's weird how this only affects people on your team and your posts like this have never made any good poster leave. Real weird.
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# ? Mar 28, 2023 00:58 |