The D&D Partition Plan for USPol

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > The D&D Partition Plan for USPol

Epinephrine: Nov 7, 2008

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

# ¿ Jan 5, 2021 22:07

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# ¿ May 19, 2024 11:51

Epinephrine: Nov 7, 2008

A few thoughts below, in no particular order.

FIRST, A lot of the points I wanted to make in this post have already been made by posters such as Discendo Vox, Revelation 2-13, and Hieronymous Alloy. Actually it would be more time efficient to name the posters with bad takes (looking at you, people who are posting about TR the same day armed MAGA hats invaded the Capitol Building to try and stop Joe Biden from becoming president) then posters with takes I agree with at this point.

SECOND, I have been a vocal proponent of slow-mode for USPOL and the events of January 6th only reinforced that opinion. If we are to split up discussion, adding a TVIV thread for current events might be the way to go. Clearly it is important that US politics posters have a fast-paced TVIV mode for things like what happened on Jan 6; USPOL currently serves that role. However, 95% of the time USPOL serves as the home for longer-term general discussions that last for days or weeks. This is possible only because USPOL usually moves just slowly enough for posters to be able to go back 3 pages and catch up with the current discussion. Slow-mode, while inconvenient for posting sometimes, makes the thread more readable. While I disagree that USPOL normally moves too fast to be moddable (but I'm not a mod so what do I know), slow mode might just be enough to satisfy fos's concern in the OP. Put in place a rule about editing your posts to quote replies to it and we're set.

On the other hand, TVIV mode makes the thread unmanageable and kills any long-running discussion. Just to give a sense of scale, I went back and used page counts to estimate posting on Jan 4, 5, and 6. On Jan 4, a typical day news-wise, approximately 600 posts were made. On Jan 5, GA election day, approximately 1300 posts were made. On Jan 6, when MAGA hats with guns assaulted Congress to try and stop Joe Biden from becoming president, approximately 5100 posts were made. Any long-running discussion that was taking place on Monday, or even Tuesday is dead. There's no way anyone could be expected to go back over a hundred pages and pick up whatever was going on. And, though I disagree that normal USPOL is too fast to be moddable, there is no way anyone can sort through over a thousand posts per day. That is, has been, and will continue to be the case every time some major event happens under the current system.

Adding a TVIV thread isn't too far off from the status quo. We already have event threads for things we see coming, e.g. the GA thread, November election night thread, the debate threads. If we go in this direction, I have two suggestions. First, we need to more aggressively enforce moving TVIV discussions to the TVIV threads. GA election night spilled over into both USPOL and Polliwonks and it didn't have to. Second, create a standing TVIV hub thread whose sole purpose is to link to individual TVIV threads. Each time we get a new TVIV thread, make a new post in the hub thread with a link to it. We can bookmark the hub thread and if we see a new post there we know there's a new TVIV thread.

fool of sound posted:

Posts like this, and there have been quite a few of them, keep suggesting to me that a what most people want out of a USPOL thread is a place to share and discuss ongoing news. Are there people who really earnestly enjoy the stuff that happens on slow news days, or do most people just skip over that anyway?

As you might tell from the above, I fall into this category. I read USPOL on the slow days.

THIRD, Why is Polliwonks a successful thread, and what can we learn from that? Polliwonks has avoided being a hellscape by coincidence of being an empirical thread. The purpose is to analyze the state of US politics through the lens of data. Arguments are therefore expected to have a basis in data, and this naturally keeps discussion productive. In my previous post here I brought up a cycle where good discussion can descend to bad discussion because of hot takes. By and large, this descent is avoided in Polliwonks because if someone brings in a hot take it is immediately challenged. For example, if you want to argue that Hispanic voters like Trump more than Biden, or argue from that premise, you better bring the polling data to back that up.

Polliwonks's success has nothing to do with the ideology of the thread, and people who characterize it as a libs-only Democrat-lovezone clearly don't read it and demonstrably don't post in it. It is also incorrect to suggest its success has anything to do with the ideological agreement of thread posters. Two of the most prominent posters in that thread are Pick and Majorian. Those two are not aligned on ideological grounds. The thread thrives because there is a structure that allows for bad takes to be challenged and dismissed without devolving into a slap fight. USPOL has no such structure outside of modding.

Without going into how to make USPOL better (in part because this is a point of active discussion itt and the thread is moving faster than I can edit), I think any solution for USPOL will need to involve building ways to stop hot, inflammatory takes, from either happening or from letting them make the thread bad.

FOURTH, ideological sorting. I will admit to days when I am so exhausted with the rigid "if you disagree with me you are a capitalist pig / shitlib / fascist enabler" attitude of certain posters that I'd be willing to give them their own thread just to make it stop. However, I am strongly opposed to ideological sorting. Not only does it seem anathema to the spirit of D&D, we've already been ideologically sorting since well before the general election and it hasn't helped. First it was the General Election (GE) thread, and now it's the Marxism thread (pinned up until very recently) which was explicitly made to be a continuation of the GE thread. Beyond that, you have CSPAM's SuccZone which essentially serves the same purpose the GE thread did; in fact many of the USPOL and GE posters are also SuccZone posters. Point being, ideological sorting is not effective. All it has done is allowed a certain group of posters to wind each other up until it spills over to USPOL.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2021 20:16

Epinephrine: Nov 7, 2008

This is the post in question:

Cpt_Obvious posted:

I mean, this literally happened today:

https://twitter.com/Lexi_Caly/status/1345716483024949248

We live in a racist society, sure. But cops are a special kind of racist.

The inaccuracy of the tweet was called out by multiple posters. Among which:

Shitshow posted:

It was rainy, lovely, and cold in DC today. That pic is not from today.

IK Majorian stepped in to ask people to stop calling out the post:

Majorian posted:

Please address the meat of what's being argued, instead of this pedantic poo poo, TIA. Also Kalit, don't backseat mod.

Which was enforced in the very next post by IK the_steve:

Kalit posted:

Sorry, I won't offer advice on how people can stop posting lies in the future.

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

I think it's fair to say that the IKs active at the time thought posting misleading information in D&D wasn't as big of an issue as posters being too aggressive in calling out said misinformation.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2021 22:47

Epinephrine: Nov 7, 2008

Ither posted:

I had no idea that the Marxism thread was meant to replace it. Did anyone else know?

It was started by a GE regular as the election ended and everyone that knew the GE thread (and the first Polliwonks thread) was set to expire when the November election concluded. IK Majorian signal boosted the thread as a place to continue the conversation just as GE closed [emphasis mine]:

Majorian posted:

With this in mind, I'd like to say that I genuinely think this has been a great thread. I know that's a weird thing to say, particularly given how much of a bad reputation it has, but I think that reputation is unfair. This thread brought together an incredibly diverse group of people who were fiercely passionate about left-wing politics, yet willing to be vulnerable and talk about why it matters so much to them personally. I genuinely believe the regulars here are the most brilliant people on Something Awful, and while that sounds like I'm damning with faint praise, I mean it as a compliment. I've learned so much from you folks, and I'm delighted that Cpt. Obvious and the rest of you are keeping the high-level intellectual discussion going in LeftPol. I look forward to posting in it now that the election is nearing its conclusion and I'm not so busy putting out fires.

Thanks for making this thread rule, everyone!

[EDIT: I can't blame you for not knowing about it. Polliwonks also suffered some attrition when it was closed and remade.]

# ¿ Jan 8, 2021 01:27

Epinephrine: Nov 7, 2008

I have thoughts on the twitter/sourcing question but it's been established we should expect that thread in the future. How far in the future and, given that this is a topic being discussed now, might I suggest the timeline be moved up and have that one run concurrently to this one?

# ¿ Jan 11, 2021 05:01

Epinephrine: Nov 7, 2008

Neurolimal posted:

Even with just sixers, you get a lot of catty cross-forum invasions and commentary. I've eaten some sixers for not calling The Democratic Party by its trademarked name (which is whatever, I dont really care about rap sheet size, I like that I have double digit fishmech probations), and I'd start reading Succ Zone and see posters commentating on the probation being bad, and then shortly afterwards an argument in USPOL over proper terminology for an hour, and that's just with a sixer.

In this paragraph is a problem that needs some work. SuccZone has a rule about not posting about D&D; it exists because posting about D&D there usually starts a forum invasion and at some point we all agreed that we are tired of those. That rule is not being enforced completely, and we're still on the receiving end of these forum invasions. Admins/Mods/IKs, would it be possible to enforce the don't-invade-D&D rule in D&D as well?

# ¿ Jan 11, 2021 22:00

Epinephrine: Nov 7, 2008

Harold Fjord posted:

Yikes.

If a bunch of new people start posting, that's good. If they don't follow the rules, take appropriate action. Calling it an invasion and demanding special enforcement sounds like you want a special hugbox for your ideology.

This isn't ideological. By conceit, they're not following the rules, but it's the rules of another thread in another forum. The repercussions of that rule-breaking are felt both here and there.

# ¿ Jan 11, 2021 22:11

Epinephrine: Nov 7, 2008

Harold Fjord posted:

The rule you described was essentially posting about other forums/threads leading to bad posts made in those other forums threads. It's a good rule. But we already have rules in D&D to enforce against bad posts.

What do you think your proposed rule adds and how do you see it being applied if not "reported for having posts in uspol AND the succ zone"

Procedurally, this could be set up in multiple ways. E.g. increasing probe length for a bad post if they're also posting about D&D in C-SPAM. However I'm not a mod and don't know whether this could work, in principle, under the current mod structure and, if it could, the cleanest way to manage it. Hence the question.

Epinephrine fucked around with this message at 22:35 on Jan 11, 2021

# ¿ Jan 11, 2021 22:27

Epinephrine: Nov 7, 2008

KillHour posted:

Is it expected that D&D users only post in D&D? I post in a good number of forums here and I don't think of myself as a "D&D poster" or any specific subforum poster, for that matter. I assume most people are like that?

Oh of course not. In fact I agree; I imagine very few posters read/post in D&D exclusively. This is dealing with situations where, say, someone gets in a slapfight here and posts about it in the other politics forum to get their buddies to pile in.

# ¿ Jan 11, 2021 22:51

Epinephrine: Nov 7, 2008

Lib and let die posted:

Naaaats, semen yah, ama bee see ma dah

The actual line is not gibberish, but "Nants ingonyama bagithi baba"; this first line from Lion King's The Circle of Life is an easy google. The vocalist was most definitely not cheering for semen.

# ¿ Jan 12, 2021 18:24

Epinephrine: Nov 7, 2008

It seems like we're ignoring an option here: keep doing what we're doing. Mods have already said that ramping has started back up, and the rap sheets confirm this. Ramping is a slow process. To use a food analogy, the recipe for Grandma's Secret Ramp Stew says to put the stove on low heat and at that temperature it'll take X minutes to cook. "Ban the bad posters now" is just turning up the heat to max and clearly that'll leave a bad taste in some posters mouths. "Give up and try something else" is, likewise, complaining that because the food isn't cooked now, it'll never be cooked and we may as well throw something in the microwave. Right now most posters I've seen ramped are at the 1-day, 3-day, or 1-week phase. We just put the pot on the stove. If bad posters continue to be bad, continued enforcement of the rules and ramping will either force bad posters to post better, or they'll be ramped all the way out of D&D.

# ¿ Jan 12, 2021 20:10

Epinephrine: Nov 7, 2008

fool of sound posted:

OK, so with feedback, here's where I'm at right now:

---Rename USPol to USNews; thread is in permanent slow mode
---Make it clear that when big breaking news happens, anyone can feel free to make a fast thread for that topic with very loose OP standards. Generally encourage people to make more threads.
---We put a big directory of threads on US affiliated topics in the OP, and people are allowed to advertise new threads there.
---Mods and IKs will monitor USNews and push conversations and arguments that last over-long into appropriate threads.
---Add a rule to USNews that any posted article or tweet should have a minimums of a sentence of two summarizing the context and what they find interesting, funny, or informative about it.

Without commenting on the proposal itself . . . Under this new system, would posters threadbanned in USPOL or banned from USPOL threads be further banned from the spinoff threads? If so, what constitutes a spinoff thread?

# ¿ Jan 12, 2021 20:36

Epinephrine: Nov 7, 2008

Booourns posted:

Looking at USPOL today when there's supposed to be a separate thread for talking about the impeachment hearings and seeing people still TV/IV'ing there leaves me with little confidence that the mods will actually enforce the thread split proposed

Beyond telling people to go to those threads, we need to have a hub thread people can bookmark where OPs/mods can advertise these new threads. That way we can bookmark it and, if there is a new tviv thread, we know because the hub thread has a new post.

# ¿ Jan 14, 2021 00:00

Epinephrine: Nov 7, 2008

eke out posted:

no, i think they invented the "Post your New LP Threads in this New LP Thread Thread!" but for dnd threads

Oh yeah, yep. Reinventing the wheel, convergent evolution, etc.

# ¿ Jan 14, 2021 04:01

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# ¿ May 19, 2024 11:51

Epinephrine: Nov 7, 2008

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

Thread Polls show up on every page in a super prominent way.

It's a little doofy conceptually, but it'd be a way to put the rules on every single page with no additional coding. Just use the poll options to make a bulleted list of rules.

I know it's possible for mods to edit polls because I know they've done it for jokes, if it's something that is easy to do then mods could use that to update rules. Or the thread could just get remade regularly and have the rules update as needed on each new thread creation. (actually, can the OP edit polls? I've never made a poll)

Poll: "Which thread rule will be broken most often today?" [options = active temporary thread rules]

# ¿ Jan 15, 2021 16:47

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