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Maybe make a separate Chapo thread since a lot of people that clearly subscribe to the viewpoints of that podcast seem to have VERY specific views, concerns and interests with regard to U.S Politics that can more than take up pages and pages of discussion on their own and very noticeably tend to lead to really bitter arguments and accusations being thrown around when there's even a hint that somebody disagrees with one of these types of takes. I know a lot of people feel that splitting up topics too much as opposed to having a general thread about a countries politics hurts discussion, but again when a sizable group of posters have a VERY specific outlook and axe to grind that doesn't always jive with what is currently dominant in the news cycle or even mainstream America and gets really REALLY REALLY upset for pages at a time when it feels it's collective viewpoints are being challenged then it kind of warrants it's own separate discussion thread IMO because it just becomes too irreconcilable a situation otherwise. I mainly just want to be able to post something within the rules of D&D or the thread, but that hasn't been deemed a sanctioned viewpoint or concern by the Chapo brand of leftism (ultra over the top hostility by default and eschewing of basic civility) without worrying if it's going to trigger an 8 page meltdown or not. It's been a huge problem with USPOL for years now. I'm personally all for pushing progressive politics as a long time NDP voter, but I frankly still do not see how aggressive hostility and deeply unpleasant conversation is supposed to help that cause. Like sorry but I personally and strongly reject that Chapo outlook on politics and discourse the same way I reject Far-Right Trumpist hurling of insults and demonizing Democrats and people like AOC, Bernie Sanders etc. or really anybody that disagrees with what Donald Trump thinks on a given day. It's just wholly unproductive and deeply unpleasant to me, and if people want to be that way then I'd kind of like to see that brand of political discourse get it's own dedicated thread for it instead. It's not the political beliefs themselves, it's the style of discourse that sucks balls frankly and that I just kind of don't want to participate in and why I don't browse or post in USPOL nearly as much as I used too. Anyway I also want to echo that maybe posting real news/opinion could be more productive than posting random twitter people that just appear to affirm a VERY specific viewpoint or situation that a particular poster has an axe to grind about and then using that as a springboard to complain about something or someone at length. I personally don't think that it's always that productive towards an extended dialogue on U.S Politics. To me a lot of it just appears to be going out into the wild and looking for literally anything that confirms a feeling or idea one already believes in as the "one true correct take" (often a very negative one) that a poster wants to have and then saying "AHA I knew this was that way! Goddammit such and such is so terrible, everything will always be terrible". It just feels at times I don't know....kind of performative, and like I can skip right past it since it often doesn't really contribute anything to the conversation at large and either you just ignore it and don't post (my preference usually), espouse some sort of agreement with it, or you raise an objection and then your probably getting the 8 page meltdown so why would you ever do the latter. There's a bit of a balance to be struck between just letting what is immediately in the news dictate the entire course of a conversation since that doesn't exactly generate debate and discussion and of itself vs. constantly forcing the conversation back to VERY specific axe to grind tangents via use of twitter posts or absolutist opining that IMO in some cases have been exhausted for fresh discussion. All that said I honestly really don't know if USPOL can be improved at this point though if it hasn't been able to be already. Like I think a lot of regulars may just be at the point now where they are entrenched in a particular outlook/mentality and hold lasting grievances with other posters that dictate how a conversation will play out before anything is even said. Thus there's quite possibly just no way to reconcile it all anymore. It's kind of started to feel like a microcosm of where U.S Politics are at in Washington in a way where an entire political party has just stopped talking to or acknowledging the other and seeks to mis-characterize to bolster it's own specific agenda.
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Jan 5, 2021 19:55
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USPol is a pretty good firehose of breaking news and I'd have to do some more thinking on how to make it less of a mess. I agree with previous posters that one persistently problematic thing is posting tweet hot takes of a news headline that are meant only to generate rage and are complete misrepresentations of the actual content of the tweet. I don't really use twitter directly, but apparently at one point twitter would prompt you to confirm that you'd actually read an article before linking it. A relatively simple fix would be significant probes for posting tweets that clearly mislead or misrepresent the articles they reference. Those tweets are meant to provoke rage and often lead to 1-2 pages of rageposts responding to the tweet. It does nothing but poo poo up the thread. Basically, if you post a tweet and get quick responses along the lines of "did you even bother to read the article beyond the headline" you should eat a probe. edit: Kale posted:Maybe make a separate Chapo thread since a lot of people that clearly subscribe to the viewpoints of that podcast seem to have VERY specific views, concerns and interests with regard to U.S Politics that can more than take up pages and pages of discussion on their own and very noticeably tend to lead to really bitter arguments and accusations being thrown around when there's even a hint that somebody disagrees with one of these types of takes. I know a lot of people feel that splitting up topics too much as opposed to having a general thread about a countries politics hurts discussion, but again when a sizable group of posters have a VERY specific outlook and axe to grind that doesn't always jive with what is currently dominant in the news cycle or even mainstream America and gets really REALLY REALLY upset for pages at a time when it feels it's collective viewpoints are being challenged then it kind of warrants it's own separate discussion thread IMO because it just becomes too irreconcilable a situation otherwise. CSPAM exists
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Jan 5, 2021 19:56
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If USPol is going to be an aggregator of breaking news and discussions of that news along with general politics chat, we need to not have absolutely dead wrong, inflammatory twitter hot takes. USPol is a firehose of news and short discussion? Ok fine. But that firehose should pump water and not piss.
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Jan 5, 2021 20:02
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When I used to post I always usually post a direct link to the article, quote (with bold as needed) and then some context/my own thoughts. I always thought it was a pretty good way to discuss the meat rather than the hot takes.
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Jan 5, 2021 20:04
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I also use USPol as a news aggregator, but I've found it to be a lot less useful lately. There are two big problems in my opinion. The first is tweets from randos being shared as ragebait -- this clogs up bandwidth for actual news and I think it's fair to expect people to post some context with their tweets to explain how the topic or the tweeter are newsworthy. (Also not posting tweets from unreliable sources would be rad, but I know that's harder to define.) The second is what feels like the eternal topic of former presidents -- I'm not saying there is no place in D&D to discuss Obama vs. Bush policy or whatever, but not where it is now. Recently I've felt like some current stories don't get discussed in USPol because the thread is too busy arguing about Which President Was Worst, which again blunts the thread's utility for me.
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Jan 5, 2021 20:04
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axeil posted:The anti-intellectualism is a serious problem and has utterly destroyed this place. It used to be a place where people with actual real world knowledge in things like public policy, law, finance, government regulation, etc posted. It's now just become a screaming chamber where people grind axes. quote:When I first arrived at Dartmouth at the end of the 1980s, I was told a story about a well-known (and, at the time, still-living) member of the faculty that in a small way illustrates this problem and the challenge it presents to experts and educators. The renowned astrophysicist Robert Jastrow gave a lecture on President Ronald Reagan’s plan to develop space-based missile defenses, which he strongly supported. An undergraduate challenged Jastrow during the question and-answer period, and by all accounts Jastrow was patient but held to his belief that such a program was possible and necessary. The student, realizing that a scientist at a major university was not going to change his mind after a few minutes of arguing with a sophomore, finally shrugged and gave up. (And then everyone clapped!  )All joking aside, axeil is completely right. But it has two effects: 1. The subject-matter experts don't post here (and SA has a huge number of subject-matter experts at this point, it's astonishing) but 2. They won't see value in a D&D where there aren't other subject matter experts. What D&D was traditionally good at was you could be reading about some sort of missile program you've never even heard about, and suddenly someone who worked on it would pop their head up and give you the ins and out and, right or wrong on the politics of the thing, contextualize the broad information that was available and why people like them in the field perceive it the way they do. But now, there is an active disincentive to even clarify what your expertise is or where it comes from, because expertise is suspect.
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Jan 5, 2021 20:08
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I lurk USPol, and the worst problems it seems to have to my eyes are the completely horrendous aggroposters that never seem to get probated (and when they do their posting pals whine about it), and posting of random tweets to get outraged at. A few times I've noticed someone post a stupid tweet, it gets talked about and dismissed because the source is iffy, two pages pass, and the same loving tweet is posted again by someone else.
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Jan 5, 2021 20:13
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I'm sorry if this earns me a probe or something posting about posters, but I think USPOL is pretty good, except for a couple of handfuls of posters who are extremely antagonistic about pretty much any subject. Some of it is slapfights between posting enemies, but a lot of is just people posting aggressively about literally everything. I'm like a red hot super-marxists leftist, but the self-proclaimed leftists in USPOL is making me consider joining turning point USA, because of the extremely antagonistic nature of their posting - I honestly suspect that might be the purpose. It's not just leftist obviously, there is plenty wrong with everyone involved, but there is an extremely oppressive group of anti-posters in that thread. More generally, imo one of the problems is with the moderation. The 'no posting about posters' is really good in a normal thread, but in USPOL it gives way too much space to the political equivalent of flat earthers or anti-vaxers, and it's definitely been instrumentalized in the thread. If you've ever had the displeasure of having an extended conversation with one of those, it's literally impossible to 'out argue' anything with them. No matter how much the rational debate ideal is to 'attack arguments not posters'. They'll produce innumerable sources for their bogus poo poo, and when you point out that those sources are less than credible, they'll turn the discussion to what a credible source is and why they should listen to main-stream sources who are just bad, and then repeat it over and over again with other shoddy sources. Or better yet, find a single case that sorta/kinda (at a certain angle, in a certain light) supports their argument and endlessly hammer that single case over and over, while ignoring everything else. Like recently there was a spat of "actually trump has done fine on covid" posts, there is the whole "russian election interference were just a couple of facebook posts" line as well, not to mention the ever popular "obama was just as bad on climate change as trump has been". Each of these so utterly ridiculous that it is either bad faith right-wing trolling, someone with a really tenuous connection to reality, or a posted by morons of such magnitude that they really should have their own thread to post in. Imo it's also a problem that moderators/IKs leans toward allowing a bunch of poo poo from certain preferred posters, while probing others. My ideal USPOL thread is one where there is a reasonable discussion/presentation of the most important US political news of a given day with an occasional food/star wars/whatever derail. I don't mind twitter news, as long as it's not just twitter hot-takes/rage-bait pretending to be news. Just for reference, when I say reasonable, I mean getting some of the good posters back, who has knowledge about things. Such as people who know about criminal justice reform or who are involved in getting progressives elected locally and so on. That's just not possible with constant extremely abrasive posting in the thread. Including a bunch of people who don't actually know anything about anything, but whose opinions on the subjects are really strong. e: I know some people are like laser focused on the terrible crime of hugboxes and echo-chambers on the internet, so just to preemptively clarify; that's not what I mean Revelation 2-13 fucked around with this message at 20:26 on Jan 5, 2021 |
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Jan 5, 2021 20:19
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Fritz the Horse posted:USPol is a pretty good firehose of breaking news and I'd have to do some more thinking on how to make it less of a mess. CSPAM isn't really what I'm looking for though is the thing. I'm not really looking for shitposting, but for relatively serious discussion threads on politics, only without the absolutist firebrand scorched earth posting and outlook that often crops up and makes conversation very difficult if not flat out impossible. Again typically it's when the thread constantly works itself back to very specific axe to grind sub-topics (usually accompanied with twitter hot takes that are supposed to serve as proof of concept) and being unable to go more than 24 hours without some form of "J'Accuse" style posting that usually seems to crop up out of stubbornly bad reads of what other posters are actually clearing saying about something if taken in anything approaching good faith. It's something that frankly just shouldn't be that hard at all, but again is frustrated by this VERY specific axe to grind style posting that has reached an impasse for months if not years and IMO probably needs it's own dedicated thread to post about in. The GE thread IMO was kind of serving that purpose for a while and I'd say USPOL strongly benefited from it while the GE thread was open, but then of course the election finally mercifully ended and that thread closed and that style of grievance posting worked itself back into USPOL and the quality of a thread IMO took a nosedive for it. Of course there's also the Poliwonks thread that IMO has never suffered from grievance-posting but that's also a pretty specific topic type of thread that cannot be the type of general politics discussion thread I feel like USPOL is attempting to be. It does IMO serve as an example though of how a specific topic type thread format for D&D and U.S Politics can be successful. SpiritOfLenin posted:I lurk USPol, and the worst problems it seems to have to my eyes are the completely horrendous aggroposters that never seem to get probated (and when they do their posting pals whine about it), and posting of random tweets to get outraged at. A few times I've noticed someone post a stupid tweet, it gets talked about and dismissed because the source is iffy, two pages pass, and the same loving tweet is posted again by someone else. They do, it's just usually not for very long (6 hours or a day or so) and at best creates a sort of grace period where the thread is able to breathe a little and open up again, but then the probation inevitably expires and the grievance-posting floods right back to the surface. Like I hate to say it, but it seriously strongly reminds me of Donald Trump's brand of political discourse. Entirely different wing supposedly being espoused, but just couched in a stream of such endless grievance and the hurling of insults that you'd almost mistake it for far-right Trumpist style discourse if you were skimming the thread. Kale fucked around with this message at 20:25 on Jan 5, 2021 |
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Jan 5, 2021 20:20
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Nietzsche posted:As a lurker, USPOL is probably one of the threads I keep up with the most, because of its value as a news aggregator. I like that there's one place I can go to to keep up on the news, rather than have to wade through Twitter myself. It has, however, become increasingly unpleasant to read, mostly because of the constant slapfights, relitigating the primaries, relitigating Obama, twisting other posters words, and so forth. Personally I would be fine with leaving USPOL the way it is (because people clearly want to argue about this stuff), but instead bringing back a US News thread that is more specifically focused on discussion of current events.
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Jan 5, 2021 20:25
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Kale posted:It's something that frankly just shouldn't be that hard at all, but again is frustrated by this VERY specific axe to grind style posting that has reached an impasse for months if not years and IMO probably needs it's own dedicated thread to post about in. The GE thread IMO was kind of serving that purpose for a while and I'd say USPOL strongly benefited from it while the GE thread was open, but then of course the election finally mercifully ended and that thread closed and that style of grievance posting worked itself back into USPOL and the quality of a thread IMO took a nosedive for it. Of course there's also the Poliwonks thread that IMO has never suffered from grievance-posting but that's also a pretty specific topic type of thread that cannot be the type of general politics discussion thread I feel like USPOL is attempting to be. It does IMO serve as an example though of how a specific topic type thread format for D&D and U.S Politics can be successful. To say the quiet part loud, Polliwonks isn't successful because of the topic, it's successful because it's the lib oubliette. And even there, fool of sound came in to clamp down on the other day even though the thread had been on topic, there hadn't been any fighting, and people had been enjoying the thread and engaging in it in a positive way, to ensure that people weren't developing a broader, productive community atmosphere there. USPOL can go ten pages of rules-breaking whining about topics that are barely USPOL-adjacent (like what a Whole Foods CEO said in 2009, when he has never had or sought office) and yet in less than an hour fool of sound is on the job in Polliwonks to clarify that effort posts about presidential pets (even in the context of how they represent cheap popularity points for a politician) are not allowed. It's all theatrics; there's no desire to "fix USPOL" or D&D. It's just enough apparent effort to prolong the longstanding brain drain of any presumed "wrongthinkers", which is the point. Pick fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Jan 5, 2021 |
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Jan 5, 2021 20:28
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Revelation 2-13 posted:not to mention the ever popular "obama was just as bad on climate change as trump has been". Each of these so utterly ridiculous that it is either bad faith right-wing trolling, someone with a really tenuous connection to reality, or a posted by morons of such magnitude that they really should have their own thread to post in. Imo it's also a problem that moderators/IKs leans toward allowing a bunch of poo poo from certain preferred posters, while probing others. This is a great example of what I see as the issue. There is genuine good faith disagreement whether/how much the difference between Obama and Trump on climate change MATTERS, not because they are exactly the same but because either way the result is megadeaths and we need much more drastic action than Obama was willing to take. But you seem to think that it must be bad faith
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Jan 5, 2021 20:38
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One specific thing I wish was harshly moderated is interrogating the background of someone's parents, i.e. there was a huge, multi-page discussion about the jobs held by Gina Haspel's parents to somehow prove... something, that was totally beside the point because you can just criticize her on her own merits (and should) without parsing how much having a parent who holds a white collar job makes one inherently bad. Sometime the discussion USPol hews far too close to a parody of actual leftist political discussion for my taste which focuses entirely on meaningless purity tests instead of substantive discussion. Also I think what a lot of people are saying is that it'd be better if people posted more news and less opinion, especially when we're talking about tweets. Post your own opinion or let people draw their own conclusions, don't just empty post what someone on Twitter has said. Owlspiracy fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Jan 5, 2021 |
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Jan 5, 2021 20:38
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Aruan posted:One specific thing I wish was harshly moderated is interrogating the background of someone's parents, i.e. there was a huge, multi-page discussion about the jobs held by Gina Haspel's parents to somehow prove... something, that was totally beside the point because you can just criticize her on her own merits (and should) without parsing how much having a parent who holds a white collar job makes one inherently bad. Sometime the discussion USPol hews far too close to a parody of actual leftist political discussion for my taste which focuses entirely on meaningless purity tests instead of substantive discussion. I was so sure you were going to cite the Mayorkas "can a baby be born anti-communist" episode.
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Jan 5, 2021 20:41
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USPol is fantastic. It's the closest thing we have to the old D&D, which is nice. The slapfights are tolerable, and help establish consensus. The fast news is phenomenal. The occasional derails about food/culture/etc are fun and informative. Please leave USPol exactly the way it is.
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Jan 5, 2021 20:41
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Harold Fjord posted:This is a great example of what I see as the issue. There is genuine good faith disagreement whether/how much the difference between Obama and Trump on climate change MATTERS, not because they are exactly the same but because either way the result is megadeaths and we need much more drastic action than Obama was willing to take. But you seem to think that it must be bad faith When argued from a position that ignores intentionality and structural barriers or conditions, it absolutely appears to be in bad faith (generally). Actual thread content: If the choice is between no posting, or slapfights between posters, I'd rather have the later. No the people in question are unlikely to be convinced by any arguments, but there are tons of people reading but not posting. What bothers me in particular is the "no posting about posters" rule that ensures that bad faith arguments must somehow be given the benefit of the doubt as long as that argument lines up with a viewpoint that the mods share, which just encourages it. marxismftw fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Jan 5, 2021 |
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Jan 5, 2021 20:42
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marxismftw posted:When argued from a position that ignores intentionality and structural barriers or conditions, it absolutely appears to be in bad faith (generally). If it's engaging with the point at hand in a fair way and being made by someone who genuinely believes what they're saying, even if you disagree with it it's not bad faith. If they're ignoring points made that address flaws in their argument or what they're saying in favor of nitpicking or sniping, then yeah I agree. I think a large source of issues is people think to themselves "nobody could genuinely think this, therefore they must be trolling, so I should be able to get away with posting shittily towards them or their argument" and then that leads to bad posts. But I also think that a lot of very, very clearly bad faith posts that avoid responding to the substance of what people are saying to continue to stir poo poo are given a pass because they don't really make any argument in particular, but don't have angry words in them
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Jan 5, 2021 20:49
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I come to USPol after breaking news but I can't follow it for more than a few pages because it always distingrates into Dems Bad. I don't mind some derails but if I wanted to see people bring up the same old poo poo about how terrible LIBERALS are there's
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Jan 5, 2021 20:53
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I think focusing on posting tweets is a mistake because it's rooted in the same problematic behavior of not engaging with things fairly and reasonably, but isn't the only way of doing that, and it gives cover to people making superficially benign posts that if you actually read and pay attention to them are effectively doing the exact same thing. The root cause should be addressed, not just one manifestation of it.
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Jan 5, 2021 20:56
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Harold Fjord posted:This is a great example of what I see as the issue. There is genuine good faith disagreement whether/how much the difference between Obama and Trump on climate change MATTERS, not because they are exactly the same but because either way the result is megadeaths and we need much more drastic action than Obama was willing to take. But you seem to think that it must be bad faith Debating whether in fact "nothing matters" or not is not a good topic for USPOL, and that's essentially what this arguement is. You're arguing that there's no functional difference between dropping Obama's 500lb bomb on a house versus Trumps 2000lb bomb because either way everyone is dead and the house is destroyed. There's absolutely no way this arguement can be made in good faith without asserting the foundation it's built on: we're already terminally hosed and nothing matters.
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Jan 5, 2021 21:00
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Frankly USPol stopped being actually informative a while ago. For every breaking news discussion, there's five pages of slapfighting about some Twitter nobody's hot take. Since that seems to be what USPol posters seem to want most, I don't see a reason to change it. Also as far as I can tell the IK's seem to contribute as much chaos to the thread as they reduce it, but if the mods think they're helpful then that's all to the good.
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Jan 5, 2021 21:07
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I think it needs to be said again that we cannot effectively moderate USpol. In every other thread, when we get reports, we can go read the last page of the thread and usually get the full context and make an informed decision. In the handful of threads where that's not true, like auspol or ukmt, we have a single IK who keeps up with the thread who can do so instead. In USpol, arguments stretch back for pages and are frequently interwoven with a dozen other lines of conversation, and trying to get proper context for USpol reports is a lengthy and incredibly tedious affair. Even with five IKs helping provide coverage so much just falls between the cracks because nobody is routinely keeping up with the thread, and given my own experiences as a USpol specific IK, it's not really reasonable to ask someone to do so. This is a volunteer position, not a job; we're not around at all hours and have limited time and energy to spend on the forums. Asking for new rules or more stringent rule enforcement in USpol without other changes isn't viable.
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Jan 5, 2021 21:08
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fool of sound posted:I think it needs to be said again that we cannot effectively moderate USpol. In every other thread, when we get reports, we can go read the last page of the thread and usually get the full context and make an informed decision. In the handful of threads where that's not true, like auspol or ukmt, we have a single IK who keeps up with the thread who can do so instead. In USpol, arguments stretch back for pages and are frequently interwoven with a dozen other lines of conversation, and trying to get proper context for USpol reports is a lengthy and incredibly tedious affair. Even with five IKs helping provide coverage so much just falls between the cracks because nobody is routinely keeping up with the thread, and given my own experiences as a USpol specific IK, it's not really reasonable to ask someone to do so. This is a volunteer position, not a job; we're not around at all hours and have limited time and energy to spend on the forums. Maybe you can't moderate the thread on a post-by-post basis, but you sure as hell can see which posters are constantly involved in the "slapfights", and you could (and have claimed that you would) take measures to ramp those posters and threadban them. MPF banned uninterrupted - not just from USPol or D&D, but a full-rear end forum ban - for behavior that is virtually identical to a bunch of posters who still get sixers, sometimes, when they post badly. If you can't moderate on a post-by-post basis, and want a good thread, removing bad posters (or posters who are a "bad fit" for the type of discussion there) is even more important to do. And yet, with the exception of Yeowch My Balls! a couple of months ago, and uninterrupted, you guys basically never tell anyone to get out of USPol for good.
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Jan 5, 2021 21:11
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Lemming posted:If it's engaging with the point at hand in a fair way and being made by someone who genuinely believes what they're saying, even if you disagree with it it's not bad faith. If they're ignoring points made that address flaws in their argument or what they're saying in favor of nitpicking or sniping, then yeah I agree. I think a large source of issues is people think to themselves "nobody could genuinely think this, therefore they must be trolling, so I should be able to get away with posting shittily towards them or their argument" and then that leads to bad posts. But I also think that a lot of very, very clearly bad faith posts that avoid responding to the substance of what people are saying to continue to stir poo poo are given a pass because they don't really make any argument in particular, but don't have angry words in them Fair enough. I'm certainly guilty of assuming many posts are being made in bad faith or are largely performative and either responding by mocking/trolling back, or (much more often) writing half a post and then trashing it because it doesn't add anything to the discussion. I also recognize that modding is a challenging, thankless, and time consuming job. I just wish it didn't feel quite so uneven.
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Jan 5, 2021 21:16
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fool of sound posted:I think it needs to be said again that we cannot effectively moderate USpol. In every other thread, when we get reports, we can go read the last page of the thread and usually get the full context and make an informed decision. In the handful of threads where that's not true, like auspol or ukmt, we have a single IK who keeps up with the thread who can do so instead. In USpol, arguments stretch back for pages and are frequently interwoven with a dozen other lines of conversation, and trying to get proper context for USpol reports is a lengthy and incredibly tedious affair. Even with five IKs helping provide coverage so much just falls between the cracks because nobody is routinely keeping up with the thread, and given my own experiences as a USpol specific IK, it's not really reasonable to ask someone to do so. This is a volunteer position, not a job; we're not around at all hours and have limited time and energy to spend on the forums. I recognize this has improved somewhat (and so has the thread), but this problem is a direct and predictable outcome of having posters that catch sixers on a daily basis without any escalation of punishment, because they come right back the next day and do the same things.
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Jan 5, 2021 21:16
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The biggest problem I’ve seen in USPOL is people dogpiling and using reports to eliminate people they disagree with. It’s a bit like high schools with zero tolerance policies where victims get suspended for fighting. Someone can say something completely factual, honest, polite and not motivated by any kind of malice, and because the facts are not acceptable to a group of posters they’ll make sure that it turns into a slap fight and get the person probated rather than arguing out the ideas/facts of the matter. I support the idea of a less moderated thread for people to have it out. Don’t make it so that if A says something and B, C and D wrongly disagrees that A then has to worry about when to stop defending their thoughts in case they get probated for being on the wrong end of a dogpile.
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Jan 5, 2021 21:22
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I'm pretty sure I could've avoided about half of the mental panic I've had over the last four years if I had never stepped foot in USPol or other related threads. The lack of constructive discourse has been so blaring that my only sanity checks (over the past year in D&D) have come from either mods or PM conversations with trusted colleagues. I can't discourse when the slightest bad news has goons going "well gently caress my trust in democracy everything's doomed". Too many gimmicks, too much spite and bile, too many doomposts and  There aren't many long-term solutions here besides "Shut the whole subforum down" and "zero tolerance policies", which defeats the whole point of discourse anyways. Grouchio fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Jan 5, 2021 |
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Jan 5, 2021 21:26
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One thing I'd like to mention since I feel like others have spoken to the general problems of USPol better than I could, is that I don't think I've gotten a response to a single PM I've sent inquiry about some wrongly decided USPol/D&D probes I've seen handed out starting back in late November. I even sometimes sent to different mods if I felt it was more urgent and so far no response to about 6 different PM's I've sent in the past month.
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Jan 5, 2021 21:31
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quote:So, we want to hear for you: I am 99% lurker, 1% poster in USPol. I actively dislike the USPol thread for many of the reasons listed, but specifically because of banal derails like someone's favorite food or every single poster's first time doing X activity or whether or not someone's DUI deserves condemnation or not. Especially slap fights between posters, holy poo poo. It may be unpopular, but I love empty tweet posts. It's like a conversation starter and I then look for quote posts for discussion on that specific topic. I'm against breaking-up USPol because, as stated, it has been attempted time and time again to no/limited success. The post throttling is an interesting idea, but I think it's execution could be different. Instead of a time-limit on posts, how about a post budget allowed in the thread? You get three (or whatever) posts in the thread per 24 hours. Wanna really share the best falafel you had in Philly 9 years ago? DM someone who gives a poo poo and don't put it in USPol. It might make people reconsider what they are going to use that budget for. Wanna empty tweet post? Well if you have anything to say about said topic, you may wanna bulk out your post with some actual content. Not sure how code heavy this idea would be, but i think hacking the current time-limited functionality could be easily repurposed to only allow someone to post so many times per time period.
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Jan 5, 2021 21:32
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As a lurker, I think USPOL would benefit from more moderators and fewer IKs. An IK for a thread like UKMT that is outside of the mod team's coverage area makes a lot of sense. Six (!) IKs for USPOL has just resulted in six different moderation styles for one thread, which makes the application of rules feel inconsistent depending on who's awake. Mods have their own forums where they can discuss new rules, ramps, whatever - I assume the IKs are not doing the same because they get into rule slapfights inside the drat thread! This is not to knock any of the IKs, modding D&D in any fashion is a horrible fate to wish upon anyone. But more eyes on reports and what not would probably be better for the thread/forum than another half a dozen bodies to throw around capricious 6ers.
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Jan 5, 2021 21:37
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There are several catchphrases that have taken on a life of their own in USPol, and they are often used as thought-terminating cliches. If a post can be interpreted as "dems bad" or "nothing matters" or one of a half-dozen other terms, then it can be discarded out of hand. This is obviously inimical to discussion. Edit to include an example from this thread: Jarmak posted:
Grouchio posted:I'm pretty sure I could've avoided about half of the mental panic I've had over the last four years if I had never stepped foot in USPol or other related threads. The lack of constructive discourse has been so blaring that my only sanity checks (over the past year in D&D) have come from either mods or PM conversations with trusted colleagues. I can't discourse when the slightest bad news has goons going "well gently caress my trust in democracy everything's doomed". Too many gimmicks, too much spite and bile, too many doomposts and T. Bombastus fucked around with this message at 21:46 on Jan 5, 2021 |
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Jan 5, 2021 21:41
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Overall, I enjoy USPol as being a catch all thread for political news. Honestly, I don't think there would be a good way to break this up into multiple different threads without at least one re-forming back into what USPol currently is. I would be happy to see slowmode permanently enabled at ~2/3 minutes. 10 minutes is too long, especially when the thread is already moving slow. But ~2/3 minutes would allow the thread to still move but make it less unruly IMO. In addition to this, assuming it makes it easier to moderate, I would love to see posters get probated for posting misleading/incorrect tweets that are from unverified twitter accounts. Also, ramping would be great because there are some posters that seem to do this more often than others. Ideally, I wish posters would just post news links directly instead of tweets in general. But I'm assuming if that was a rule, it would be an extremely unpopular one. Kalit fucked around with this message at 21:51 on Jan 5, 2021 |
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Jan 5, 2021 21:42
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I like the 10 minute slowdown because it made it easier to disengage from a discussion that was tiresome, because likely the discussion will have moved on by the time you or the other person can post again. It makes it easier to enforce my own personal rule of not responding to or continuing a discussion from the previous page which has helped manage my USPol stress levels immensely.T. Bombastus posted:In this case, Harold Fjord specifically says "we need much more drastic action than Obama was willing to take." Their position is not nihilistic-- if anything, it is extremely optimistic to believe that drastic action is possible. But it is written off as "nothing matters" posting, and called out as unworthy of discussion. I think the issue there is when/if posters go, "ergo Biden/Obama isn't better than Trump on climate change" and variations thereof with all the implications that means given the context at the time.
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Jan 5, 2021 21:49
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So, my feedback: I'm ashamed to admit that I'm heavily abusing the USPol-thread as my personal freak show, to see demented people yell at each other and to get stories about crazy poo poo happening in the US to share with my colleagues. But, that's probably not healthy in the long run, and I think this kind of thing should be done better. Breaking up the USPol-thread in multiple, more focused and better moderated threads sounds like a good idea to me. And if people later try to slink back into one of the new threads to turn it into CessPol 2.0, just send down heavy-handed probations and bans like God smiting the sinners. No mercy.
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Jan 5, 2021 21:51
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USPol is a valuable news aggregator. Tweet dumps are a part of that. Twitter isn't a good medium for nuanced takes, but it is useful for reading summaries and bite-sized commentary, especially when corresponding real-life events are proceeding at a fast pace. However, I agree that posting tweets from total randos, especially for the purposes of inducing rage, is bad for the thread. I like Discendo Vox's idea of introducing a requirement to identify the Tweet author, to explain why their take is valuable, and also to try to understand any potential reframing or contextualization. What we don't need is a "less moderated thread". CSPAM exists. I myself post in both forums, and whenever I'm not in the mood for effort, I go read and post there, instead of here. fool of sound posted:I think it needs to be said again that we cannot effectively moderate USpol. In every other thread, when we get reports, we can go read the last page of the thread and usually get the full context and make an informed decision. In the handful of threads where that's not true, like auspol or ukmt, we have a single IK who keeps up with the thread who can do so instead. In USpol, arguments stretch back for pages and are frequently interwoven with a dozen other lines of conversation, and trying to get proper context for USpol reports is a lengthy and incredibly tedious affair. As multiple other posters have correctly and rightfully pointed out, the foremost reason you're having to do this is because of extreme lenience towards and reluctance to thread-ban repeat offenders, of which there are only a handful — and they are very easy to identify, because whenever they aren't around, the conversations revert back to being reasonable and informative. A good way of thinking about this is in terms of the Pareto Principle, i.e. a small minority of posters are probably responsible for being the subject of the (most likely vast) majority of the reports. Unless something is done about those posters, USPol will be much harder to moderate effectively than an otherwise equally fast-moving thread.
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Jan 5, 2021 21:56
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At the end of the day I think effective moderation is the only tool that actually works for steering conversation and discussion and I think any attempt to try to structure things so they're handled better naturally are doomed to fail. It's why this place is better than the rest of the cesspool that is the internet, and unfortunately topics like politics just straight up requires more moderation. I do agree with doing more things like threadbans for people who are poisonous to discussion, but I'm a little hesitant to push for that strongly because I don't have faith that the moderators currently understand which posters actually seem to be instigating a lot of the issues. If there could be like, timed thread probes that were more easily handed out for weeks or a month but didn't probate people entirely I think that could be a useful tool. I think that'd be really hard to keep track of without better moderation tools though.
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Jan 5, 2021 22:01
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There are several points I'd want to highlight later on, but for now I want to offer a limited defense of food posting in USPOL. In the current meta, good discussion, terrible discussion, and food discussion form a kind of rock-paper-scissors and allow for the thread to self-sustain in a limited fashion in the absence of modding. Generally the flow goes like this: 1) Good discussion takes place 2) A random tweet comes up, or someone makes a hot take as an aside, or someone just has a hot take as their main point 3) A back and forth ensues on some really terrible topic as a result of this, e.g. "Is the US the worst country in all of history?" or "Should we just burn down the US and replace it with smaller countries?" or Bidenchat during the general 4) (Assuming the mods/IKs don't step in by this point) Because most posters would rather read and discuss anything else, others attempt to drown out that discussion with food chat. 5) This usually succeeds in drowning out the bad discussion. The thread rights itself, and we return to USPOL topics. In this way, food posting serves a valuable role as implicit moderation that has proven both necessary in the current state of things and effective. Obviously we'd be better off not getting to stage (3) in the first place, but until we deal with that we need curly fries and ice cream. Epinephrine fucked around with this message at 22:11 on Jan 5, 2021 |
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Jan 5, 2021 22:07
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T. Bombastus posted:In this case, Harold Fjord specifically says "we need much more drastic action than Obama was willing to take." Their position is not nihilistic-- if anything, it is extremely optimistic to believe that drastic action is possible. But it is written off as "nothing matters" posting, and called out as unworthy of discussion. Obama stopped being president 4 years ago, the statement is "we needed more drastic action than Obama was willing to take". If action is still possible than the difference between Trump and Obama almost definitionally matters because it changes where we are today. Note the arguement I quoted did not make a statement that there wasn't a difference (it actually explicitly says otherwise), but rather the difference "doesn't matter" because "either way the result is megadeaths". Again, Obama stopped being president four years ago, and Trump's term is effectively over. This is comparing things that already happened not arguing about what should happen.
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Jan 5, 2021 22:07
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It sounds like fool of sound is leaning toward splitting the threads which I don't personally agree or disagree strongly with. But if that's the route we choose to go, it seems like "news feed" is a high priority for folks, so we should definitely have a News thread that is limited to breaking news from reliable sources (not rando twitter hot takes) and directly relevant discussion. That should have a high signal-to-noise ratio. Then we might have breakoff threads for the Biden Admin, Trump Crime Time (inshallah prosecutions), Organizing and elections or whatever.
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Jan 5, 2021 22:08
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Fritz the Horse posted:It sounds like fool of sound is leaning toward splitting the threads which I don't personally agree or disagree strongly with. But if that's the route we choose to go, it seems like "news feed" is a high priority for folks, so we should definitely have a News thread that is limited to breaking news from reliable sources (not rando twitter hot takes) and directly relevant discussion. That should have a high signal-to-noise ratio. Or just lean into D&D's own partisanship and have like the "Nothing Matters" crew thread, the "Anxiety Problems Hot Zone" crew thread, the "Suspiciously Libertarian Takes and Interests with a Steady Stream of Libertarian News Sources (but Not Libertarians!)" crew thread, the "Anarcho-Bidenism" crew thread, the "Liberals Like You See on TV  " crew thread, whatever. And you're only allowed to post in one of those threads, like the Pokemon teams in Pokemon Go where each one has a representative magic bird and you've got to choose which bird you want to gently caress. Of course, to prevent pure political hotboxing, there should also be a permitted practice of "driveby fact-checking" where people from other teams can drop rebuttals in the form of direct quotes/links from reliable sources--but are not allowed to add their own commentary, like a Blastoise.
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Jan 5, 2021 22:18
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