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SA politics discussion is now just an extension of Twitter. Barely anyone considers "knowing what you're talking about" or "having evidence for your claims" to be important anymore. They just let the social media algorithms feed them tweets that make them feel either good or angry, and then the ones that make them feel the most emotions get cross-posted to SA so they can share those emotions. They don't care whether or not the tweets are true, from reliable sources, or even accurate descriptions of the thing the tweet links to. They just skim those 140 characters, let the rage well up inside them, and copy-paste the link to SA without even the slightest attempt to verify that it's actually true. Nobody needs sources or evidence anymore, and there's been more and more cases of people posting well-sourced arguments linking to polling and contemporary coverage, only to be responded to by snarky insulting one-liners without even the slightest attempt to find evidence refuting those sources. And that's not even the worst of it. There's been increasing numbers of literal conspiracy theorists who openly oppose the very concept of evidence, decrying it as nothing more than a liberal scheme to make us think jet fuel can melt steel beams. A good chunk of political discussion across the political spectrum is increasingly post-fact, and that's seeped into SA as well since - again - it's increasingly just an extension of social media. People come here when Twitter loads them up with too many feels, or when they get so pissed off that they can't fit their rage into 140 characters anymore. But that's enough about the whys and the hows. The important part is that the mods are not capable of forcing people to go back to posting evidence or checking their sources or doing any kind of due diligence at all. Dumping contextless tweets or posting nihilistic fanfiction is just too popular. The posters have changed and they're not going to change back, 2016 inflicted severe politics brain on too many people, so there's no choice but for D&D to change. Well, that's completely separate from the people who not only think that most of the USNews posters are literally actual Nazis, but believe it enough to say that to Jeffrey with a straight face. Those people are just community poison and it's no wonder why most of them have been forumbanned already. CommieGIR posted:At the end of this whole thing, lemme be clear: The community owns D&D. Not the mods. There is no singular D&D community. Or at the very least, there isn't any kind of community consensus. There's several separate US politics communities, all of which loathe each other and don't agree on anything, and then there's the posters who don't give a poo poo about US politics or anything outside their own regional threads and are just baffled by all the hate and bile flying around. There's a lot of will to see D&D changed, but there is no way there's ever going to be a clear community consensus on how D&D should be changed. Someone is going to have to decide which communities will be listened to, and which ones will be told to deal with it or leave. You're right that a mod shouldn't be making that call. It should be higher than that, someone who's going to be around for a while and overall responsible for things. Ideally, it would be the owner of the site. Like Jeffrey or hate him, he gets to make these kinds of calls and absolutely no one can overrule him or oust him. I think imposing all these hefty rules on the thread is a bit much, though. It's not like Ath's thread was super successful for its intended purpose or anything else. Just throw the gates open and let everyone show off exactly how much of an rear end in a top hat they are.
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Oct 24, 2021 06:01
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GreyjoyBastard posted:
Reopen the grudge thread but make each post in it cost $10, it'd fund the forums for months
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Oct 26, 2021 00:37
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Rules change based on proposal from That Other Thread:
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Forumbans were something the admins were actively pushing as a replacement for long probes and bans. The idea was that it was better to deprive a single thread or forum of someone's posting indefinitely than to deprive the entire site of their posting for a couple weeks. GreyjoyBastard posted:
GreyjoyBastard posted:Basically, the underlying concept is that I/we don't want people yelling at other posters for their opinions or otherwise sidelining actual, you know, mod feedback. I understand what you're trying to do here, GJB, but I don't understand why you think it has literally any chance whatsoever of working. "People yelling at other posters for their opinions" or otherwise sidelining thought-out effortful posts is one of the most popular pastimes in D&D and a major subject of these threads. If it were so easy to one-weird-trick your way into getting a discussion where everyone's nice to each other, we wouldn't need to do it here, because all of D&D would be nice and peaceful already. And changing the rules repeatedly like this just makes it even more laughable.
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Oct 26, 2021 03:06
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CommieGIR posted:This is a loving hot take: USNews is a single threaded discussion that generally strays off topic. Some topics are strong enough to be moved to their own threads, and many of those threads are very successful. The idea that it makes "Mods uncomfortable" a loving stupid take. Shut down USNews so people have to either make new threads for everything or drive each other nuts with derails The attempt to put an end to USPol has obviously failed by now anyway, just like every other attempt. No matter what kind of new rules the thread is theoretically created with, the mods don't actually treat the new reformed thread any different from the old one, so it falls right back into the old USPol habits and behaviors. UCS Hellmaker posted:thatfatkid is dedicated to justify that china is not infact doing it but doesnt provide anything but feelings and denial, we ran off R. Guyovich for the same poo poo. Side note Bathtubcheese being pro bomb a loving country because they are traitors to china is just as loving ghoulish. Its funny as hell to me that Guyovich got run off the forums for posting "Bernie Sanders sucks because he's not left enough" and "China isn't committing genocide", both of which are now commonplace politics opinions here on SA Truly he was ahead of his time CommieGIR posted:Is anybody not in agreement that the mass incarceration of black Americans is basically genocide? I mean given that the US Justice system in general is steeped in White Supremacy oriented towards doing oppressive, genocide like things? you need to stop having political arguments with people in feedback threads it's dumb enough when everyone else does it, but it really elevates it to a whole new level when a mod does it if you wanna argue the definition of genocide, or whatever the hell is going on here, make a discussion thread for it. if you're just trying to convince people and are not going to believe that the Xinjiang stuff isn't genocide, then just make a rule for it there is actually no point in getting this deep in the political weeds with people in a metadiscussion
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Oct 26, 2021 15:57
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lobster shirt posted:Maybe a good way to improve the whole "working the refs to win arguments" thing is... well, it has been said in the past that there are people who max out their number of daily reports here in D&D (and also in CSPAM but this is a thread for D&D moderation so please let's stick to the topic at hand). Maybe those people should be punished for it? Or in general, if a mod spots an instance of "ref working", or people reporting posts while actively engaged in an argument with those post(er)s, maybe punish that as well? The staff are generally extremely worried about even the slightest risk of anything that might discourage people from reporting. Probating someone for reporting is permitted only with admin permission. It's not all about the number of reports, though, because there's tons of reports in C-SPAM too. Not as many as in D&D, generally, but the number was closer than you'd think. How Are U got reported quite heavily, for example.
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Oct 26, 2021 17:43
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30.5 Days posted:twice as many people are in cspam at any given time almost as many as in Games, which gets a lot fewer reports
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Oct 26, 2021 17:51
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:My problem with the constant screeching of GENOCIDE DENIAL! is that it's a transparent attempt at doing the thing USPOL regulars perceive CSPAM regulars do with regards to Biden and rape. Far-right nutjob Adrian Zenz was essentially taken as gospel here because it was consistent with the same "China bad!" narrative that was and is politically useful for the American Democratic Party. Posting someone like Zenz would get you (probably rightly) punished here for regurgitating far-right propaganda, if he was "reporting" on a different topic. Even now, after the AP/DoD have said it doesn't constitute a genocide, the subforum's dumbest posters are still swinging it around to Own their Posting Enemies.  Pentecoastal Elites posted:In a practical matter, though, I have no loving clue why I, a dumbass American, should feel the need to become a China hawk because of it. There is no -- absolutely zero -- "corrective action" America could possibly take that wouldn't make it profoundly worse. Moreover the thing I think being loudly and publicly "critical of China" is actually doing is contributing to the sinophobia that has been ramping up to insane levels since the start of Covid. Something I think a lot about whenever I hear about increasing anti-Asian violence and hate crimes here in America. Nobody's asking you to become a China hawk or support war on China. It's perfectly fine to say "China is probably committing ethnic cleansing but I think it would be incredibly loving hypocritical bullshit for the US to go to war over it". Instead, folks have gotta do this weird posturing bullshit where they couch it in more weasel-words than your average Wikipedia article, and if pressed on it, they claim it's because they're afraid posting on an internet forum might single-handedly start World War 3 or purges of Chinese-Americans or some poo poo. Rest loving assured that neither anti-Asian violence in the US nor American war plans are going to be impacted even slightly by the exact word choices we use in a political discussion thread on a dying website. loquacius posted:The idea that it doesn't really matter what you say as long as you're polite about it is a big problem with American politics btw I can guarantee you that it doesn't really matter what you say here, on Something Awful Dot Com. The most impact SA has ever had on real-life American politics was when Vilerat died and his mom paraded him around as a martyr for the Republicans, and it's pretty fuckin clear the content of his posts had jack poo poo to do with that. Can we dispense with this ridiculous concept that anything we post here Matters in any larger sense beyond whether or not we feel like being a dick to each other on a site that hasn't been relevant since before Trump was elected?
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Oct 26, 2021 19:02
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if you just really enjoy being an insufferable pedant about poo poo, just loving admit it like i do, instead of making up some bullshit about how you being mega-anal about every other word is actually saving the global poor from war and genocide
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Oct 26, 2021 19:09
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fool of sound posted:Since none of you fuckwits can apparently abide by the "don't debate each other in this thread" rules, I'm putting down the red hammer: you will be probated for a week if you quote/subtweet a non-mod in this thread, or if you try to cutely circumvent this rule. This rule will go into effect 5 minutes after this is posted. If you're in this thread to wage ideological war with other posters, leave and don't return. If you're here because you love to join every bit of drama that appears on this entire website, autoban yourself and don't return. if you're gonna go this far, just close the thread and post a link to some kind of private feedback form instead it'd be a far more effective way of accomplishing this goal, with far less mod effort, and probably less humiliating like at this point what is the actual purpose of holding the feedback specifically in a thread
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Oct 26, 2021 20:44
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fool of sound posted:Because I'm stupid enough to keep believing that people can discuss changes like reasonable adults instead of overgrown children screaming and throwing fruit in the produce isle and challenging the shift manager to a fight. At this point, though, you're setting limits that go way beyond that. You're basically saying that people are only allowed to directly address the mods in one-on-one conversations in front of everyone. fool of sound posted:The problem is that USNews isn't an organic conversation. There are too many people pursuing too many lines of discussion at once, in a manner that doesn't encourage or require them to actually participate in a dialogue. It's a high school locker room, where there's a bunch of individual conversations happening until someone throws down, and then there's no room for nuance because everything is written for the benefit of the audience. the problem has always been when some motherfuckers get tilted or see some low-hanging fruit and start talking ten times louder and more frequently than everyone else it sucks all the oxygen out of every other discussion, because in the time it takes for someone to make one decent effortful post, the folks slinging poop have made twenty posts, so every other subject gets crowded out by sheer numbers because no one wants to hunt through pages of angry dogpile to find the 1-2 posts per page that are actually about other things
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Oct 26, 2021 21:24
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fool of sound posted:Roughly half, like I said a couple posts ago. Honestly I only was a USPol poster because I got asked to IK it specifically (and to a lesser extent the PoliToons thread because I was a regular poster there) after posting in the 2020 primary thread and the feedback thread at the time. Once I was made a full mod I stopped reading it regularly, since it's extremely difficult to keep up with. In general, a lot of mods ended up being USpol regulars because they were selected to be USpol IKs, since that what we needed the most of. I'll second that I didn't read USPol at all until I became a mod. I mostly only went in there to cover for when FOS and GJB were unavailable. I've always been much more interested in the subject-specific threads, which tended to have more interesting discussion and less peanut gallery bullshit. But over the past few years, most of them have either died off or driven out everyone who had any loving idea what they were talking about. A lot of subjects just don't get discussed outside USPol anymore. And of course it doesn't help that people now actively reject subject-specific threads on many subjects, and declare that the subject must be discussed solely in USPol and nowhere else.
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Oct 26, 2021 22:30
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the real problem in USPol isn't the momentary derails like vapes or whatever. nobody really cares all that much about that poo poo, and they'll quickly drop it if something more interesting comes in it's certain endless circular arguments that people are addicted to enough that they will continue going back and forth all loving day, drowning out any of the day's happenings because those circular arguments are controversial, get people pissed off, and therefore draw way more posting. so even if something new comes in, it'll be ignored because everyone's still angrily banging out near-meltdowns about Hillary Clinton or whatever
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Oct 26, 2021 23:15
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CommieGIR posted:Also not a bad idea at all. If I recall, doesn't UK and a couple other regional threads do seasonal/monthly threads? USPol used to have seasonal threads too, but unlike the other regional threads, for some reason the mods could never create the next thread on time and eventually they just stopped bothering altogether and edited the season out of the title
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Oct 26, 2021 23:54
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Improving the mod tools is an extremely low priority for the tech team, because only a small handful of users actually interact with them in any way. Given the choice between a new feature that 5000 users would see or a new mod tool that 50 mods would see, they'll usually go with the new feature. I'm not so sure the math is really that simple, but 
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Oct 27, 2021 00:55
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fart simpson posted:made some charts. all of these are limited to the calendar year 2021, and only scraping data from public forums because i didnt log in to scrape the data the clear takeaway from this chart is to ban discussion of politics, GPUs, and australia
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Oct 27, 2021 04:59
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exmarx posted:bro you have a gang tag celebrating a genocide perpetrator lol. shut the gently caress up. ah, an old classic people pretending to be actually mad about the Sherman gangtags is still probably the most pathetic gangtag-related poo poo I have ever seen
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Oct 27, 2021 13:39
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Fister Roboto posted:Telling people that they're not actually upset about something is a great way to handle criticism! if i see anyone praising his genocide of Native Americans, i'll be sure to let you know, buddy!
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Oct 27, 2021 16:13
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WampaLord posted:Stop probing people for having a position that is left of the US News thread's group think. They're not all automatically trolling you or trying to trick you, they're not all "doomers" and "tankies." Debate them, this is supposed to be the debate forum. lol never thought I'd hear "stop probing people" from you I guess folks really do change
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Oct 27, 2021 17:49
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WampaLord posted:Seriously just imagine how happy you and the various other regulars will be when no one can disagree with you. Anyone who dissents about anything, instant forum ban. Zero reports filed. Imagine the bliss. just because that's your personal dream forum doesn't mean everyone else feels that way
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Oct 27, 2021 18:31
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Probably Magic posted:You really aren't the ex-mod to try to make this quip. Like, the one person after the guy who had the excessive resignation from CSPAM modding, and it's the guy who had the excessive resignation from D&D modding. lmao I completely forgot he was a C-SPAM mod too for a bit i was more thinking about how he's usually constantly begging mods both publicly and privately to probate everyone who disagrees with him. plus the big pile of BNR drama that got imported here Skyl3lazer posted:Ah yes the "silent majority" of people that don't have an SA account, whose opinions should matter over people who are saying they want to post but feel unfairly treated so don't. previous feedback threads usually had some old D&D posters say that they were sick of the endless hostility and assholery here and didn't want to put up with it anymore, and that's why they've largely given up on D&D they didn't show up this time, but why would they? it's been years of feedback threads and D&D's still full of hostile assholes who are, incidentally, the only people who'll spend several straight years screaming at a forum they claim to hate at every opportunity. everyone else just leaves eventually in search of a place that actually makes them happy, and never go back to the place that makes them mad
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Oct 27, 2021 18:51
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30.5 Days posted:Because ultimately serious debate has to get to the bottom of why people believe what they do. There is a difference in belief between two posters and even if we accept beforehand that their views are both alike in dignity, the difference comes from various assumptions and short cuts in reasoning and being misinformed or just confused or just miscommunication. You can't have a serious debate where these things aren't on the table to be discussed. So you have to be okay with either friction or homogeny. Or you could just not dig too deep into things and keep discussion light. If you refuse to accept any of these options then the thread will whip back and forth between them. There are a lot of people here who, if you made them choose, they'd choose homogeny and I think that's just fine. The moderators insist on not deciding that they're going to have a space with none of the above, despite the fact that they have never been able to accomplish this, ever. The non-uspol threads get by because they are willing to make a loving decision, even if only subconsciously. Ultimately, serious debate would require people to acknowledge the possibility of the existence of verifiable facts and evidence that contradict their stance. If two people have differing stances on what's true, then they should be able to point to solid evidence supporting their claim, and people can discuss the quality of the evidence. As long as there are people in the forum that literally don't believe in evidence that contradicts their gut feeling, getting anywhere with debate is kind of pointless. The core problem isn't the existence of differing beliefs, the core problem is that there are too many people who are straight-up post-fact. If polls, past events, studies, or investigations don't line up with an assertion someone made based on their gut feeling and broad ideological stance, then as far as they're concerned, it's the gut feeling that's right and all of the hard evidence that's wrong. Hell, sometimes someone will make a claim that they themselves know isn't true - but they want it to be true, and they don't personally care about the ways in which it's verifiably not true, and according to them that's good enough. People will post links to sources that say the exact opposite of what they're arguing, and no one even realizes it half the time because most of D&D just relies on the clickbait tweet and doesn't actually click through to see what the original source said. I agree that most of D&D's population don't want to debate anymore. This is because people dislike confronting the idea that anything could be more real than the little reality that exists in their head. These days, if someone's presented with evidence contradicting their claim, then they don't read the opposing evidence to find points to debunk, and they don't go find their own evidence to counter it either. Instead, they just accuse the person of being biased and start hurling insults. Epic High Five posted:We gotta be less aggro tho, Online doesn't matter, it's boomerville, we're drain flies in the pipes of the real recognized inhabitants of this worldwide network, the people who listen to the Qanon shaman guy and pose with that guy pretending to be RFK Jr at something called like Patriot Freedom Mega Con sponsored by the pillow guy. You wanna wage a war, chud spaces are basically unmoderated (admins there caught the roni), or maybe go hassle some red guards. Click on all the ads you see so your opinions start mattering more to The Algorithm. We don't. Politics discourse as a whole has been too thoroughly Twitter-poisoned. And that's not just a matter of Twitter embeds being common, it's the general fact that people are browsing Twitter all day because that's where politics news and discussion comes from these days. The most politics-addicted among us are spending their day submerged in the magic algorithm that's literally designed to find out what makes them maddest and only show them that stuff. And then they curate that for only the most clickbaity and infuriating stuff, which they repost over to SA for people who use this site as their primary politics news source. Even if we banned direct Twitter embeds, the general impact of social media on political discourse still has quite the effect all on its own. Chuds aren't the only people being convinced by social media that their posting is a crucial front in the war for the future of America.
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Oct 27, 2021 21:31
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Epic High Five posted:We don't what, gotta be less aggro? That's sort of against one of the deeper currents of this thread so far. I agree with you that Twitter is a pit and social media is killing us. It ain't just chuds, it ain't just libs, it's everybody. I hope I had come across that I'm firmly anti-Twitter and what it's done to people's Brains. It's turned us all into journalists, a most terrible fate. The only solution is to disengage. Yeah, sorry, I was referring to "how do we go back to the days of Just Posting". I think that social media, and its intentional policy of amplifying the worst clickbait and the most infuriating posts, has fundamentally changed American political discourse and the way people approach politics, all across the political spectrum. It's influenced the old news media, too. Between that and the rise of beloved political idols like Hillary Clinton  , aggro is now king. People are far more emotionally invested than before, because so much of popular politics is now being provided by more openly-biased outlets and concentrated by a few passes through through the Twitter rage tube.
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Oct 27, 2021 21:46
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Epic High Five posted:Oh that yeah, I mean crossing the same river twice tho ya know? There's no going back to pre-Trump but that's not the goal, we've gotta figure something out now, shaped by our present material circumstances. Some German guy talked about it I think. I think there's enough here to the effect of "oh but this isn't a problem in CSPAM or GBS or wherever else" is something. They aren't any more inoculated from the poisonous brew that is the wider internet after all, but there's something there that is happening. What is it, how do we make it happen here. I mean hell the UK threads seem to do just fine and their press and internet is even dumber and more psychotic than it is in the US (just my opinion) the UK thread is small enough and communal enough that all their idiots and assholes either got run out or somehow got obsessed with US politics instead as bad as Americans are in USPol/USNews, the Europeans who sit there posting about US politics all day are somehow even worse other than that, fart simpson's helpful charts suggest that there is a fair bit of political assholery going on in GBS and C-SPAM From GBS, the top two threads for mod button usage in 2021 are the Cursed images thread and the Trump thread, regardless of whether you're ranking by total probe hours or total number of probes/bans given. And the next highest GBS thread by probe hours given is their China thread. From C-SPAM, it's pretty wild to see the Trump threads showing up in the probe rankings at all given that they're rebooted every month or two. When you see that TRUMP 1460 has only one-third of the probes that USNews does, you've gotta remember that TRUMP 1460 was closed twenty days into 2021. That's 155 probes in just under three weeks, so clearly something is going on. Meanwhile, the D&D COVID thread has only slightly more mod action than the C-SPAM COVID thread, in both number of actions and total probe hours given. GBS and C-SPAM politics discussion may have different problems and different reactions to those problems, but they're both generating massive amounts of probations in their political threads specifically, and I suspect the mods aren't pressing those buttons just for the fun of it.
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Oct 27, 2021 23:41
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UCS Hellmaker posted:Issue is everything with lepers colony and the probation system is all radium code, like it's literally a system he handcoded for the forums that physically should not be possible and somehow works. chooch or Jeff had said before that any real edits with that code is very iffy, because if something doesn't work well it tends to take the forums down as Donny goes nuts trying to write a report message. there's a dedicated thread in A/T that shows off what the mod tools look like the report queue is literally a forum. a bot posts a new thread for every report. the OP of this new thread contains a link to the post, the reporter's name, the report reason, and an iframe (that doesn't work in any of the mobile apps) containing a preview of just the one post that was reported mods clear the report by posting in the thread that it's been dealt with or doesn't need to be dealt with every day or two, an admin comes around and manually looks at each of those threads to see if they've had a mod decision posted, and then moves them to archival forums the whole thing probably hasn't been touched by a coder in ten years, and probably won't ever be. the system works fine for small numbers of reports and only a few forums get more than a half-dozen reports a day it's possible to do reports and other mod stuff on the phone if you use the regular browser instead of the app, but it's more difficult to check and compare related reports that way, so i didn't like doing it for anything anyone gave a crap about the closest thing to filtering options is that mods could use regular forums search on the reports forum to see how often someone makes reports or gets reported (the report text itself wasn't picked up by search, tho)
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Oct 28, 2021 02:16
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Epic High Five posted:Doin something you've been ramped for already is a dangerous game anywhere on these boards. imo it's fine to be pessimistic it crosses into Doomposting when either: a) someone has adopted a position where they just constantly post totally unsupported one-liners with zero backing and nothing to discuss, and largely refuses to engage with any evidence to the contrary, conspiracy theorist-style b) they do it all the loving time so that people have to talk their little freakout down to some degree of calmness basically every time they post there is definitely an issue with people submerging themselves in poo poo that makes them miserable, on purpose, and then complaining to the forums about how miserable they are take this recent example quote:Right wing media hit me hard today, gonna take a break from listening to it for a while. Woke up to hear Fox News excited that Youngkin has tied McAuliffe in the polls (well, one poll) and I'm pretty worried he's going to win. Even if it's one poll and they chose it purely because it's favorable to him, the fact that they're able to pull even a single poll now that shows Youngkin tied worries the hell out of me. Everyone always said that the CRT scare wouldn't last, that it would fade away like every other right wing talking point, but I feel like this is proof that it had staying power and worst of all that it worked. "help, I'm watching Hannity every day, and now I'm starting to feel like the far right is victorious and unbeatable" people rightfully told them to log off from politics for a while, and that's a piece of advice that people should heed more frequently in general here
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Oct 28, 2021 18:35
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Ytlaya posted:If you want to argue about US politics in D&D, there aren't many options other than USNews. But USNews (like its predecessors) has far more people who will get mad at you for trying to argue stuff, and "having a bunch of people get mad at me (and possibly probate me)" isn't my idea of a good time. I wanna highlight this, because it's a pretty strong example of the cliquishness that's gone wild in D&D. The polls thread wasn't "the election thread for USPol regulars", it was a place where people could discuss actual day-to-day election news without getting bogged down in constant circular arguments about whether voting was a moral choice, endless relitigation of the 2016 primaries, breathless predictions of what 2024 would look like, and so on. The constant conflicts between supporters of various candidates made the election thread a pretty poor place for following the day-to-day news, and therefore the polling thread was created to hone in specifically on the progress and prognosis of the election itself without being drowned out by the larger ideological conflicts. Handwaving it away as nothing more than a chat thread or a group hangout isn't accurate, it's just being pointlessly dismissive toward a thread that you personally disliked. And sure, you're allowed to not like a thread - after all, the polls thread was created precisely because talking about the actual state of the 2020 election was less popular than debating the larger ideological and moral issues. But treating it as nothing more than a chat thread just because you didn't like the subject matter is just being dismissive to the point of denial, and a pretty good example of why I say there's no such thing as a D&D community. People can't even like talking about different things in this forum, they have to blame the existence of threads they're not interested in on forum cliques and make snide comments about it.
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Oct 28, 2021 19:47
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Cease to Hope posted:I'm sympathetic, but it's a politics forum. It's a hazard adults should already be aware of. It should not be a unexpected trigger to have people being negative about the news in the political news thread. oh, they expect it and they come seek it out anyway because they're absolutely addicted when the doomposting rule was first put into place there were several people who would regularly come to D&D politics megathreads to post stuff along the lines of "I read ten politics forums and reddits every day and keep having panic attacks over political news, how do I stop the panic attacks" or "politics is so hopeless that I really don't see why life is worth living, please convince me to continue to exist". folks got pretty sick of talking them through their anxiety several times a month most of the worst of those types have been forumbanned by now, though
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Oct 28, 2021 21:35
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Cpt_Obvious posted:I don't know why one person claiming "everything will be fine" is much different from another saying "no it won't". Maybe there is some context I'm missing, but claiming that incremental change is too slow to address the realities of climate change feels like a coherent line of thinking. It doesn't seem to be claiming "everything will be fine", but rather "if X happens, everything will be fine". It doesn't take for granted that X will happen, it just refers to the possibility that X might happen and speculates on what it might lead to. It doesn't claim to be an absolutely certain telling of a future that's yet to happen. A lot of arguments in D&D spring from someone treating speculation as fact, and speaking with absolute certainty of what they think is going to happen for another three years or ten years or more.
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Oct 28, 2021 23:42
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Out of curiosity, where did my avatar go? Is someone handing out unrequested avatar blanks for avatars that are merely insulting? That's not really what the avatar blank functionality is for, is it? If you see an outright offensive avatar, sure, blank it without even asking. But a mild attempt at a weaksauce insult? Why bother blanking that? D&D doesn't need to be a no-redtexts zone. And personally, I think it's funny as hell if I manage to tilt someone so much with my boring-rear end posts that they actually reach for their wallet in an attempt to get back at me, only to waste their  on something as uninspired and boring as "#1 Hillary Fan".
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Oct 29, 2021 01:45
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Cpt_Obvious posted:The split between the polls thread and the election thread allowed two different cliques of posters to post about the same thing in different ways without making GBS threads in each other's pool. It was a great way to handle such an extremely contentious issue, just creating two different spaces for two different groups to hang out and chill and do their own thing. I think it's pretty obvious that there was an ideological divide between the "who is going to win the election" thread and the "are any of the candidates even morally worthy of being president, and should elections even exist" thread. That's not due to any explicit ideological enforcement by the mods, it's just the fact that people with different ideological positions tend to have an interest in different issues. Someone convinced that Joe Biden is just as bad as Donald Trump apparently isn't very interested in whether or not Joe Biden is forecasted to beat Donald Trump - either because they don't care who wins or because they don't believe in polls. It's not that the threads were intentionally divided by ideology, it's that the posters themselves tended to self-sort by ideology because people with different ideologies favored different subjects, had different posting styles, and approached posting with a different emotional outlook.
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Oct 29, 2021 15:40
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Personally, when people bring up supporting things Trump did in office, I mostly saw responses criticizing the other stuff Trump was doing in office, not stuff he did years before he ran for president. I don't remember "no matter how many good things Trump does in office, you can't support him because he's a rapist" being a super common take in D&D.
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Oct 29, 2021 18:27
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for most people, voting for a presidential candidate is more about what the candidate is going to do as a matter of policy if elected, rather than who they are or what they've already done yes, their past, their personality, and their values can be used as proxies for what they're likely to do in the future but even during the most heated times of the General Election Thread, the argument was never about "you can't vote for Biden because his segregationist stances in the past mean you'd be a segregation supporter". instead, the argument was "Biden's segregationist stances in the past mean he can't be trusted to stand up for minorities in the future"
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Oct 29, 2021 19:39
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out of curiosity, how zero-tolerance is the "believe accusers and don't cast aspersions on them" thing gonna be? because there was definitely a lot of disbelieving the accusers against Alex Morse, Keith Ellison, and Anthony Fauci. and two of those three were later clearly proven to be politically-motivated false accusations, so it's not like people were wrong to disbelieve the accusations at first sight but "believe accusers, unless you're absolutely positive that they're lying" doesn't really make much sense as a rule, so those should probably be treated with the same respect as the Tara Reade stuff until evidence comes out one way or the other
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Oct 29, 2021 21:11
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Jaxyon posted:Some do, some don't. It's not the mods' fault no one really cares about cop stuff except as a chat subject. there's a thread with tons of useful knowledge and resources and plenty of people who've read up a lot on the issue, and they have no one to talk to because everyone else would rather float along on the tides of generic politics chat letting the currents take them wherever they happen to go. Same thing happened in the Israel/Palestine thread, and that's not something that was broken off from USPol - it's been its own standalone thread forever. It just slowly died off over the last few years. Aside from three or four knowledgeable posters, no one really follows I/P anymore, except for briefly popping in when it happens to make the American news. All the racists who were openly pro-apartheid are gone, all the people who only showed up to yell at the racists are gone, and all the people who only read the thread because it gave them plenty of stuff to be mad at are quite satisfied with American politics these days. Now the only people left are the ones who genuinely had an enduring interest in what happens there...so the thread died, because very few people actually had more than a passing interest. GreyjoyBastard posted:I don't remember the exact details but we did speak to some people in the run-up to and after the start of the metoo thread, when we were having our first go at fixing our bad decision? yes. there were survivors who talked to us privately about it and advised us. I'm not going into details, because it's private and personal to them and that is that
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Oct 30, 2021 00:58
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silicone thrills posted:There's definitely a difference between feeling like you got punted off to a thread to have your conversations where other people aren't going to see them - A big thing about USPol is it is one of the highest traffic threads on SA. I wanted to have that conversation in public where other people could see it. every thread in D&D is viewable by everyone with a forums account. they're all equally visible. every registered user who isn't banned can see the MeToo thread anytime they want to, it's every bit as public as USPol/USNews is. if anyone wants to talk about rape culture, they can find the MeToo thread - even if they're not a USPol regular who reads politics talk all day long Cease to Hope posted:it is, in part, the fault of the mods that they have sheltered a thread that formed a consensus of "defund the police is a pipe dream" and people do not want to defend that view in a different thread where the consensus is "ACAB"  to my knowledge, the mods are not stopping anyone from going into that thread and having a respectful and polite discussion about different approaches and outlooks toward solving the problem of wildly racist, abusive, and murderous police officers honestly I'm struggling not to laugh when people claim that having a separate cop thread is somehow smothering the issue. the Cops On The Beat threads were an iconic part of old D&D, and along with HidingFromGoro's prison threads, they were a major factor in turning a lot of budding SA lefties against the boys in blue
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Oct 30, 2021 01:15
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astral posted:This somewhat ventures outside of D&D feedback, and I will remind people that I am more or less an outsider when it comes to D&D so feel free to take this feedback with a grain of salt, but personally I still think the best solution would be found outside of that D&D box. The USNews thread should be retired in favor of a Current Events forum. People from all over the site could come together to discuss the news, argue with each other about that news or their interpretations thereof, whatever, and you would no longer have to come up with weird rules to try to make the "entire forum worth of news crammed into a single thread" model work against all sense and all odds. For example, you wouldn't have to make sweeping rules about what topics can/cannot be discussed in that single news thread because each thread could be its own news topic. You wouldn't have to worry about losing posters or be accused of suppressing discussion by trying to split topics off since they're already separate. Discovery of new news would be handled by simply opening the forum (filter by newest thread); people could discuss each article for as long as it interests them without any concept of derailing discussions of unrelated news. the thing where all US politics chat happens in one thread was never really on purpose. it organically happened on its own basically because people wanted it I never used to read the general politics threads in D&D because there were plenty of issue-specific or event-specific threads, and the general thread would just be a catchall for whatever random crap didn't really fit into any issue thread and wasn't really worth making a thread about. it still moved at a breakneck pace, but I don't know what people talked about there because every significant issue had its own thread anyway at one point a dedicated thread about Trump was created, because the sheer amount of content and scandals he produced meant there really was enough content for it. but then he became president of the united states of america, and people started justifying posting stuff about pretty much everything there because Trump was president and his administration was involved in so much stuff the same factor that got the media and social media obsessed with Trump - he generated so much controversy and wild content - drew a ton of people into the Trump thread. and while it was later broken up, dumping everything into one general thread had become a habit for people and the new USPol followed that habit. the issue threads were left abandoned and died off as part of the Twitterification of politics by the time the mods started actively trying to encourage people to make new threads for everything and leave the general thread for the random leftovers, a bunch of weird factional conflicts had spread up and saw USPol to be a crucial battleground in the wars for the heart and soul of D&D, so people refused to do so. they didn't want a nice visible place for everyone on the forums who had interest in a specific topic, they wanted to challenge the USPol posters specifically anyhow, this is a really longwinded way of saying that the only reason there's a single thread for all of US politics is because people absolutely refuse to post outside that one thread
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Oct 30, 2021 03:24
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fool of sound posted:Not to put you specifically on the spot, but this sort of argument, arguments about the exact definitions of politically charged terms, have a serious tendency to overwhelm actual productive discussion in D&D. Is-this-iberal-or-leftist is a common one, but is-this-genocide-or-force-assimilation is also a favorite, as is is-this-neocolonialism-or-imperialism or is-this-bad-reporting-or-propaganda. Often, arguments about these loaded terms come down to forums tribalism, and thus become both vicious and pointless. I really wish people were more willing to change their word choice in favor of actually discussing the facts of the matter. It's not as though there aren't a ton of different flavors of liberals and leftists, and a poster describing the positions they hold is way more productive than arguing about what they're allowed to call their beliefs. I think it's more interesting because of how the wording shifted between posts - and how so many people, including you, missed that shift. After all, Raenir never said there was no difference between liberals and leftists. He said that D&D is overwhelmingly left, and that it's a myth that there's a bunch of liberals here. Pepsi responded by accusing Raenir of saying that the conflict between leftists and liberals is a myth, which is something Raenir never said. He then went on to accuse Raenir of "denying the 150-year history of conflict between leftism and liberalism". It's a pretty wild thing to just throw into a post to begin with, but it's a forceful response to something no one even said in the first place. And that's something that happens a lot, where someone's so convinced that their opponent holds a position that they argue against poo poo their opponent never even said.
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Oct 30, 2021 20:14
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Thorn Wishes Talon posted:Yeah, and this is part of the "shared reality" that I mentioned in the QCS thread: if two people aren't even able to agree on which sources are trustworthy vs. which ones require enormous scrutiny, any other conversation between them, regardless of topic, is extremely unlikely to get anywhere. Honestly, that entire disagreement is just petty word bullshit. Yes, many intelligence agencies all over the world have, at various times, engaged in straight-up criminal conduct, including funding or facilitating overseas crimes or working with organized crimes. And there's a lot to talk about there! There's the way that government oversight and accountability is apparently ineffective over intel agencies, with an additional side discussion to be raised about whether or not that ineffectiveness is intentional. There's the way that intel agencies involve themselves in international crime as a way to evade what little oversight and accountability the state is able to enforce over them. And so on. Instead, it gets muddled by an argument over the definition of "intel agency", because the person who wanted to talk about the CIA's crimes distracted everyone by hyperbolically trying to redefine words instead of just loving talking about the CIA's crimes.
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Oct 30, 2021 20:29
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Koos Group posted:The main problem I see with D&D is that the moderation doesn't always reinforce its primary purpose, which is to have the most interesting discussion possible. To do this, I strongly believe the positions posters take shouldn't be moderated, only the quality of the arguments they make in favor of those positions. Quality here can refer to many things, such as logical soundness and reliability of sources, but should also include novelty. For ideas to be interesting to an audience that talks and thinks about this stuff a lot, as we can assume is true of most D&Ders, there needs to be some element of originality, creativity, or at least obscurity. nobody tries to argue against the novel positions, though they just shout "shut the gently caress up, liberal" and various other petty one-liners and then when they get probed for not even trying to make arguments, they complain that they're being discriminated against because of their politics Gumball Gumption posted:I think that's a goofy argument to avoid engaging with the poster who doesn't like the CIA but it doesn't really matter because I think that exchange raises another D&D problem, why did people engage with that? Why did a mod engage with it instead of just bouncing it if it's agreed that it's pure idiocy? or the poster who doesn't like the CIA could have made their actual loving argument instead of making multiple posts about the definition of "intel agency" if you're gonna post wild hyperbolic poo poo instead of what you actually wanted to talk about, don't act shocked when people engage with the wild hyperbolic poo poo instead of the parts everyone already agrees with
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Oct 30, 2021 20:41
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the "assume good faith" rule was because D&D has historically had a problem with rules-lawyers who declare that if someone is a troll or posting in bad faith, the rules of D&D should not apply to them, and therefore it's fine for everyone to just start shitposting and hurling insults at them nonstop who decides whether someone counts as a troll or not? usually that same rules-lawyer, who hurls the accusation at anyone they're mad at, to give themselves cover for going nuts on them "assume good faith" was a message to the self-declared faith judges who took it upon themselves to decide whether or not the rules applied to any particular post Koos Group posted:Well, if this happens, the probation should be upheld and the appeal shouldn't be taken seriously. Simple as. Koos Group posted:Alright, but if you'll forgive my language, that's stupid as hell and not something to seriously consider when discussing the future of the forum. i completely agree. but there's a fair number of people who disagree and they often show up in feedback threads, so it usually has to be discussed at least a little bit
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Oct 30, 2021 21:22
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