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This thread has come too early for me to provide my own complete thoughts on the subject, because this issue is complicated and laughably weird to even want to deal with in the first place. I can still type out a poo poo ton of words about the subject on the spot, so I'll do the best with what I've thought out so far. I really want anyone attempting to reform or stabilize D&D to remember two things above all else — and even if you already totally know these things, it's probably a good idea to keep it up in front in your mind to help with pushing through the decisions that require the most effort or long-term consistency. _ 1. The metadebate about D&D and what to do with it is never going to have a crowdpleaser answer, and you will have incredibly livid detractors even if you are making the best available choices at the time, and 2. Pursuant to (1), your goal is ultimately to displease and drive away the correct people, and their adamant displeasure will be incidental evidence that what you are doing is working. _ There's going to be work in consistently identifying what kinds of "contributions" (and all related pseudoadvocacy invented to insist and/or gloat that you're ruining D&D by not letting their toxicity run rampant) genuinely make the forum a worse terrible super crazier place and ensure continued years of the subforum's deserved infamy. And here I'm not even really talking about the people who are obviously unwell enough like msdos or ymb or caps lock broken that they forced the expansion of stronger ban methodology, ramps, and conclusive exclusion and an effective mitigation of their direct influence on the forums through full forumbans — but in hindsight and with observation of how they responded to their forumbans, you can say it did go a long way towards capping most of the most toxic, most insanely pathological, most pervasively negative elements. And this shouldn't have even been the case; like threadbans, they were, according to the oral lore of the forums, mostly started or initially engaged upon as a tortured stopgap implementation related to a larger issue involving admin noninvolvement or incomplete investment and understanding of the condition here. Anyway, so. The first half of the equation was that it was ultimately important to do that, but the second and much harder question is what you do to keep that from having to be necessary most of the time — what process to use for maintaining the rest of the userbase so that you don't stricture and ossify the forum or create some actually powerfully lame fairweather 'decorum' incentivization What I tend to do just as a regular poster is identify other posters who, whether I disagree with them or not, trend away from obsessive or genuinely toxic presence — and, however they choose to contribute and however often, generally make the place either more interesting and funny, or more informative, or both! Then I guess I tend to track if they're posting more, or posting less, and if they're posting less or they have stopped posting, try to understand why. One particular poster who I ended up using as sort of a bellweather for the current state of the forum for a long time was Deteriorata (sp?) because on whatever subjects he wanted to contribute to, he would be able to consistently participate both in contribution and pushback, and was also entertaining. It's not that I had to be coming from the same political standpoint as him or thinking he's the flawless poster boy of politics posting, it's just that he represents a good example of worthwhile contribution and also being, you know, pithy or not exhausting rather than being a wall-of-words guy, just to explain where I'm coming from with isolating him as a direct example. If Deteriorata and similar posters were posting more, things were looking good. If they were posting less because the forum environment was just too hilariously broken and stupid, I couldn't disagree with that decision, but it spoke to the level of how much a problem the forum was having. And in that analysis you'll have the story about what's making the forum better or worse at any given time. The more the beneficial posters post, the more I'm likely to come away from binging a politics thread with either new actually useful information, or at least something that actively made me laugh or feel better about the state of the world, or have some generally good commiseration about that other people tend to care and have cool new information or takes. Either form of positive contribution is a way to have a politics-based community (which is effectively what this place has to be, even if the phrase 'politics-based community' is hives inducing) not be terrible. Which is hard, because politics is essentially the act of looking at and seeking info about the present global or national condition of dehumanizing neoliberalism, deranged nationalism, factional polarization fueled by the worst possible entities, and related existential threats that have such an impact on people's mental health that most qualified psychological trades still don't know what to even do about it. How are you even supposed to moderate that without wanting to rip your eyes out? Anyway, politics as the central draw or purpose of a forum? It produces an environment prone to doomposting, negative contribution feedback loops, toxic and obsessive contributions by unwell people who have pathological attachments to certain ideological or axiomatic points and positions that will bombard any unregulated environment with unwell tenacity. And then you either have to deal with it or it just gets worse. This is why there have been so many conspicuous missteps, like the "democrat party" thing, or the fanatically unwinnable issue of how to deal with rhetorical flooding of certain points of (even genuine) advocacy, like what has to be done with the subject of accusations of Biden being a rapist, or the general everything that happened with previous mods who flamed out in tremendously embarrassing fashion because they turned out to be really super stupid in one or more unforgivable ways, resulting in genuinely amazing moments like nazi covert D&D mod counterintel drama. But the less spent on these details the better, because I think this is more about what to do going forward. This is why I am leery about calls to improve the forum through incentivizing or mandating "effortposting" or to curtail "drive by" posting because I don't think that necessarily makes a forum about politics better. Relief valve posting can be positive and constrained, and sometimes you just want to shoot the poo poo or just slam down some onion byline observation about current issues. I'm pedantic enough on my own, I don't think the forum needs to emulate me further in that regard. Anyway. Without any particular support or condemnation for the following posters quoted, I want to offer a cross section of parts of the Athanos thread for moderator feedback that I feel are pertinent enough to continued discussion and feedback here, and nominally worthwhile enough in at least analyzing why they were present as assessments or advice, that I want them to be present and be fresh in everyone's minds as we go through another (hopefully more visibly productive) revisitation of feedback that will hopefully Do Something, Possibly Just Anything. Koos Group posted:The reason for enforcing rules of good argumentation here isn't like in a debate club, where they give judges some criteria of finding out who won. The point of D&D is explicitly not to be the winner of a debate. Rather, the rules are in place here to make the discussion more likely to be in good faith, more likely to arrive at the truth, and more interesting to the people reading it. Herstory Begins Now posted:DnD needs admins who regularly read and/or participate in the politics forums far more than it needs new mods (which it also needs) Fritz the Horse posted:There was a really interesting research article published just a week ago I'd like to bring up. It uses data from eight studies from in the US and Denmark to look at political hostility online. The authors started out with the hypothesis that the format and environment of online discussion causes politics to get hostile online. Nope! Instead, ... Sodomy Hussein posted:I would like to see D&D modding dispense with ineffectual things like human word filters and posters getting several years of useless sixers before they are *gasp* threadbanned into harassing yet more threads. Until then, being appointed mod of D&D is more a punishment than anything. Discendo Vox posted:It's going to be really important to go over the rapsheets of everyone in this thread before you trust people about mod nominations, or their descriptions of what's gone wrong. I'm being literal here. Read people's rapsheets and ask yourself if what they're saying now, the face they're trying to present, matches what they've gotten probated or banned for in the past. Users with a bunch of probations for trolling D&D, or various racisms, or straight up thread or forumbans, should not just be taken at face value. Otherwise, you're giving the users with the biggest propensity for abuse the largest amount of leverage. SKULL.GIF posted:[T]he incessant siloing off of actual conversations and discussions is a big problem. Because you're immediately quarantining these conversations the people who actually bother to go participate in the free speech zones develop grudges against each other, and the rest of the community here is increasingly babied and coddled that they're accustomed to whining to a moderator demanding a spinoff when they see opinions that they disagree with. VikingofRock posted:My biggest complaint about D&D at the moment is the level of stressposting and doomposting, which I understand -- we live in a stressful time and the future is bleak, and venting is necessary. But there are a lot of posts whose only purpose seems to be to raise the temperature of the room instead of adding any new information or discussion. The net effect is that some threads don't really seem to discuss problems nor solutions -- they just seem like stress amplification chambers. Unfortunately I don't have a concrete idea of what to do to fix this, since I really do think venting is a psychological necessity, so I don't necessarily think we should ban it. But I wish we could keep the quantity under control a little better. Jarmak posted:there appears to be no effort (or insufficient effort, lately) to stop people who are very obviously posting the most inflammatory take they can think of with the intent of riling up their posting enemies. Pushing back against those takes inevitably spawns a "so basically what you're saying is <not what was said>" or "imagine thinking <not what was said>" Mellow Seas posted:Seriously, admins, please, please, please, just read the forum. ... Fister Roboto posted:-Drop or rethink the "meet effort with effort" rule. Word count doesn't always mean effort, you can write a million words with zero substance, or a short concise sentence that cuts to the heart of the issue. Too often I see people just blast their opponent with logorrhea and it effectively shuts down the discussion. Professor Beetus posted:if you don't know I'm currently IKing in the DND covid thread. My golden rule is don't be an rear end in a top hat to each other, and I have reinstated the pet tax as covid news continues to be depressing as gently caress. I don't have many probes to my name and none since returning to IK that thread, and I hope to keep it that way. Buttons are a last resort or reserved for especially heinous behavior, specific examples being threats of violence or doxxing, but there definitely has to be some flex in there. The point is you're welcome to disagree but I will step in and ask people to behave if you start tearing into each other like animals for no apparent reason. Complaints about tone policing can go in the round file; this is a shared space and if you want to stay here you can try to be less of an rear end in a top hat to the other people in this place. I think it's funny and fine to roast people for wildly lovely viewpoints though, (Hi TDD, always nice to see you pop up in feedback threads). I was obviously trying to have a laugh with the last comment, but honestly there's something to be said for the lack of actually opposing views leading to people getting more and more worked up over minor differences of opinion. Agents are GO! posted:Effortposting doesn't mean you have to write a five-paragraph essay on the subject, one or two well written lines can suffice. I've always liked the calmer, more deliberative discussions which used to be the norm in dnd. It's like dressing up in business attire to go to work, it puts you in a different state of mind, and I think that's something worth preserving or restoring in dnd. Thorn Wishes Talon posted:
Kith posted:In essence, people who do dumb or malicious poo poo are given endless second chances because the appropriate level of punishment is either never meted out or never enforced. James Garfield posted:Adding mods doesn't hurt but I don't think it fixes the underlying problem. Moderation is very inconsistent and there are almost infinite second chances even for users that abuse them. sexpig by night spent the first five months of 2021 being probed more than half the time before finally being forum banned in May. In there is a 6 hour IK probation with no follow up for the second thread ban violation, after the first got a week. Same thing for (forum banned in 2020) Yeowch!!! My Balls. and last but certainly not least: Valor posted:I've been reading D&D for 15 years and at this point have entirely written off the forum because right now the atmosphere is worse than probably any other time in SA, mostly due to how worthless the admin staff is. _ Anyway, thank you for your time. I do hope to see actual measurable change for D&D in the future; this represents probably the last time I will make a conspicuous effort and put myself out there with any reasonable expectation that something could be done about it, if nothing really visibly changes. I'm not saying this with any hostility or derision, but it's just that ... well, at this point, after this length of time, I think that it's only reasonable to have a cutoff moment where you acknowledge, based on further floundering or inaction or even just the opacity of decisionmaking about what to do with the forum, it's just ... not reasonable to expect things are going to turn out. Or, at very least, it's prudent to not take on the visibility or effort and conclude a low probability of productive change. D&D can certainly power by on mere inertia; it's not in any sort of substantively untenable condition, nor is it the subforum getting in the literal irl news because of ultimately very bad, very obvious issues. It can just chug along.
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Oct 23, 2021 21:35
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TheDisreputableDog posted:But it wasn’t a suggestion, it was a statement from Jeffrey that conservative viewpoints as a whole aren’t welcome here. That's good that you feel this way, and here's why. First, it's really hard to support most online attempts at advocating "breaking right on any position" because the "breaking right" is usually completely completely completely disingenuous — nine out of ten times it's just a conservative talking about a completely conservative position ... but they're rhetorically blowing chaff by claiming some form of "but this isn't/i'm not really conservative" status, an act which has become monumentally tiresome and consumed all manner of supposed identifications and contortionist labels, from moderate to centrist to 'i'm socially liberal and financially conservative'. So you're already working against that when you're upset about how people respond to even supposedly civil introduction of things that ever so gently 'break just right of center' — supposedly. And conservatism in the US and in most other republics has degenerated to reactionary nativist anti-intellectualism and the glorification of autocratic solutions, always that come paired with intentional sabotage of democratic systems to secure power by any means available to them. Conservative majorities have intense comorbidity to projects of clear but graduated steps to secure minority rule, spread out carefully enough to try to avoid acute and potentially effective reprisal. In some places this has already succeeded and given us the first test cases of using modern supremacist-nationalist conservative grievances to overthrow a functioning democratic process and replace it with a first stage complete autocracy. Because of that being the reality of conservatism as a movement today, it's impossible to afford it equal space and standing in an environment that is striving for inclusiveness. It's simply not going to happen. There is no advocacy for conservatism at present that won't ultimately come to benefit these ends. No other division among the remaining political spectrum is even close even if you include extremely fringe cases like weird revolutionary groups and keyboard regime apologetics for brutally authoritarian countries. This isn't new knowledge or even a truly post-2016 revelation. It existed beforehand and has no root cause in recent open radicalizations. And people maintaining online spaces have figured out that you have to make a choice between what you think is important. You can only choose efforts to artificially sustain an environment being 'welcoming' to conservative viewpoints, or you can choose efforts to keep an environment being actually inclusive. You can't do both. You also can't not choose; inaction forces an outcome one way or the other. As an example for how long ago this decision has been one you have to make, you can go back in time towards proposition 8, where forum moderators started discovering that letting people advocate conservative positions in their culture war meant they would openly and vehemently argue against allowing gay people to marry. And if they were given official cover to do so as equally officially supported viewpoints at the table of the 'marketplace of ideas' (or whatever) the inevitable consequence is that gay people would fight back but become quickly tired of places where people were given a safe podium to openly advocate against their humanity and inclusion and attempt to intentionally consign and constrain them to second class citizen status. You had to decide which was important to your environment: was it important to allow taking the fully standard, fully nationally endorsed conservative position on non-heterosexuals, immigrants and people of color, and trans identified people? Or was it important to you to make sure that your environment was not one where people of these identities would be forced to argue against and endure constant invalidations and advocacy for their active marginalization? If the people with the power to make these changes took the former option, everyone of an identity forced to endure these invalidations would largely drift away if not burn out wholesale, and the people left would radicalize in their homogeneity and cyclically drive out anyone not enthusiastic about these invalidations. If the people with the power to make these changes took the latter option, conservatives would complain that the environment was hostile to conservatives. You'll just have to deal with it. I cannot afford any sympathy otherwise, and it will always be this way for you as long as you do not personally abandon conservatism as a guiding ethos. The division between conservative political advocacy and anything else standing against it has cavernous gaps mostly created by the part where you cannot inclusively provide benefit and advocacy to conservatism without empowering an organized effort to dismantle anything about government and society which I essentially have to rely upon to live. I don't get great or complete protections the way things are, but I'll certainly take it over what would happen if modern american conservatism succeeded and brought the country to the inevitable endpoint of any nativist mob movements. It doesn't matter to me whether you think you are doing so harmlessly; witlessness even with a sincere lack of knowledge about what it would do to people like me is irrelevant to the issue of whether or not we should ignore the paradox of tolerance for the sake of making sure such views are supposedly to be allowed equal inclusive permission. Jeffrey is stating it as an observation, but I would add that this is why you're never going to have a situation here where what he is saying is not the sincere truth of the matter. And, more importantly, why I advocate that it never be. Nobody needs to posture or strive for an ideal of supposedly equal footing for opinions between rightist spectrum arguments and the 'everything else' category. If this place is hostile to conservatives, it is better than any other nonimaginary outcome you can actually get. If you feel this place is hostile to conservative viewpoints, that's basically just shorthand for this being a place that hasn't automatically failed at intersectional inclusiveness for those of us who have identities that nationalists and nativists paint very clear targets on.
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Oct 28, 2021 21:54
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Raenir Salazar posted:I don't really quite think there is a "hostile thread consensus" problem in USPol or D&D as a whole; most of the time if someone repeats something that other posters disagree with, they just disagree; usually politely; there tends to be more friction if its a talking point; I'm not quite sure what is expected but if someone obviously untrue or something that is more widely by the thread believed to be untrue but wrapped in some fig leaf of leftist theory like "The earth is flat and to believe otherwise is a lie told by capitalistic airliner companies" you are probably going to get more pushback in proportion to how obviously incredulous the claim is but anyone who is abusive about it is usually quickly slapped by the mods. If a lot of people disagree with you, a lot of people are going to voice their disagreement, with a more exasperated tone when its more of a talking point and less merely a misinformed opinion. I'm sorry, what? This doesn't really sound true about D&D at all, nor would I even really want it to be Polite Disagreement Land catering to inexhaustible repetition of controversial points by completely unswayable, fixated weirdos. "They just disagree, usually politely" sounds completely unlike how D&D is. I don't know how you could come to that description of D&D. Though, genuinely, I'm not really sure I even got it correctly that that's how you're describing this place. 90% of this paragraph is one sentence with four semicolons. It's really very hard to know what you mean without clarification?
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Oct 30, 2021 18:33
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