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Koos Group posted:Greetings. It's time for this quarter's feedback thread. Here you can tell us your thoughts on how D&D is going, including answers to questions such as:
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Apr 23, 2022 19:43
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 02:37 |
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Koos Group posted:Lowering the threshold for bad faith is something I've thought about a lot, but it seems very difficult to do fairly because of how it involves intent and specific positions. I would welcome more discussion in this thread about this topic. I think one thing that would help a lot is more emphasis on citeable facts and evidence. If someone declares something to be a concrete fact (and not just their personal opinion), then it ought to be expected that they should be able to back up that fact with proof. That tends to help clear up misunderstandings much faster. Just look at the COVID thread, where people misunderstand or misinterpret data a lot, and the issue tends to clear up a lot quicker when someone includes a link to the data they misinterpreted. More relevant to the subject of bad faith posting, it might help rein in the tendency for people to state their own personal opinions as concrete facts. Sometimes it seems like people forget that questions like "is this legal?" have real answers that you can just Google, and we don't have to guess at the answers or rely on our gut feelings or try to backwards-logic them from something we saw on Twitter. We can just look up the answers, even if we aren't actual lawyers! But so so often, there's a tendency to just pull an answer out of their rear end and defend it to the death - even against people who are citing the actual text of the actual laws! Ideally, that feels like it would run afoul of "moderate arguments, not positions" after a little while, but it feels like mod intervention doesn't come until someone loses their temper and starts snapping.
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Apr 24, 2022 00:00
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some plague rats posted:Okay if the issue was that saying "I hope for a resolution where the least amount of people die" is met with "oh, so you love genocide then?" that's absolutely a moderation failure I agree with the general principle of this Instead of seeing a view that disagrees with theirs and jumping straight to the worst and most uncharitable assumption possible, I think it would be cool if people attempted to have a conversation and come to a mutual understanding, and part of that is at least trying to assume that you're dealing with reasonable people who are maybe just being a little unclear about their views or aren't working from the same preconceptions as you If all someone really wants is to just wanna seek out the worst opinions possible and dash out one-liner owns on them, there's already a whole website designed just for that. It even limits posts to 140 characters, to help make sure people don't accidentally type something thoughtful or substantial
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Apr 24, 2022 01:15
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One thing I haven't seen brought up yet, even by the mods, was the "working the refs" problem previous iterations of D&D had. How do people feel that's going right now? As I recall, that was one of the stated rationales for moving to "moderate discussions, not positions": banned positions became a crutch people relied on as a thought-terminating cliche. If someone disagreed with an argument on an ideological level, then instead of engaging with that argument on its merits, they'd try to get that argument declared as a banned position - even if they had to make some pretty absurd leaps of logic to do so! Instead of debating and discussing the argument directly with the poster who posted it, they'd debate and discuss with the mods to try to convince them it should be a ban-on-sight position, exerting their debate chops in PMs (or in a public tantrum) by stretching the description of the banned position well beyond any reasonable limits. To (anonymously) quote a post from one of the previous feedback threads: quote:every time anyone suggests that maybe d&d should be about debate and discussion and not working the refs to get your forums enemies threadbanned because they don't like the political figures you do all you guys lose your poo poo. it'll be fine and I very much doubt koos is ignorant to how any of this poo poo works and how places get infiltrated by the far right. I think when somebody posts something that's wrong, there's four main reasons they might do so:
--- I sympathize with Koos here, because there's still plenty of people out there who are genuinely incorrect on trans issues not because they're hateful, malicious bigots, but just because they don't know any better! Knowledge doesn't materialize fully-formed out of the ether. People don't just wake up one day with a complete understanding of what it's like to be trans. They have to be taught by someone! They have to be told why the preconceptions and misconceptions they were taught growing up were wrong, they have to be told why the concerns they've heard from bigots aren't true. Should Something Awful be a place where they learn that kind of stuff? It's entirely possible that maybe it isn't. But it used to be! A lot of longtime posters here used to be liberals or even libertarians, with lovely positions on both economic and social issues. But through the efforts of politics teaching threads in D&D and LF, we were shown where we were wrong and dragged toward more progressive stances. We learned anti-racism, we learned queer issues, we learned socialism, and we learned how hosed the system already is. We certainly didn't learn that poo poo from our parents or our teachers, we had to find sources outside the traditional bigoted power structures to learn that stuff - and for a fair number of us, that outside place was a dying internet forum. Feels like the whole "teaching" aspect of that has been on the decline ever since the Trumpification, though; at some point it seems like we collectively decided that everyone has to already agree with us on these issues and that there's no longer any room to convert those who don't know. "Here's why you're wrong" has been replaced by "gently caress off transphobe" or "moooooooooooooods". If there's anywhere on SA where it should still be acceptable to teach people why trans sports restrictions are silly, then D&D should obviously be the place for that. It's certainly not something the other forums' dedicated trans threads should have to put up with. It might very well be the case that it's no longer acceptable to have that kind of teaching here, though. At the very least, only a small minority of the community seems to be interested in allowing that kinda stuff anymore. The SA politics community, and what it expects and wants, has shifted over the years. The days of LF embassy threads to GBS are long, long ago.
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Apr 24, 2022 17:27
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OwlFancier posted:I'm sure it happens sometimes, but what I mean is that I don't think that the likelihood of anybody, personally, debating someone into not being a transphobe is very high. And especially I do not think it is as effective a conversion method as simply enforcing the desired position via whatever appratus you have and the enthusiastic participation of as many people you already have onside as possible. This doesn't really make any sense. After all, social pressure requires that a broad group consensus already exists in support of the idea. But originally, transphobia was the group consensus, and the social pressure was largely being used to push people toward transphobia. Supporting trans rights (or even believing in the existence of trans people at all) was the outlier minority view that was being crushed by social pressure. Trans people and trans advocates were the ones being ostracized and mocked without even having their arguments listened to. And the fact that they were able to shift the needle on that is proof that discussion can have more impact on people's opinions than social pressure can. If social pressure was more effective than discussion, then no one's views would ever change, because social pressure would prevent people from ever deviating from the majority mainstream viewpoint. I'm not saying that everyone can be convinced, of course. The tiny number of Americans who still oppose interracial marriage more than half a century after Loving v Virginia aren't gonna give into discussion or social pressure, they're probably gonna take that stance to their grave. On the other hand, transphobia was totally normal and accepted (even here on SA) just a few years ago. And while it's encouraging to see how quickly things have shifted in the past few years, our own knowledge about queer issues didn't arise fully formed out of nowhere - we learned it by listening to others and having our misconceptions torn down and debunked. A lot of the time, that happened right here on these forums. I still dimly remember LF's embassy threads to GBS, where they'd go educate the broader SA population on progressive stances to issues. Maybe we don't want that anymore, maybe D&D isn't the place for that anymore. But it just seems utterly ridiculous to write off everyone who disagrees with you as fundamentally un-convinceable...especially when there's still clearly a ton of people out there who disagree with us. Now, one important caveat on all this: these types of discussions should be short. If someone comes in and argues something clearly wrong, then I think it's a good thing to explain why they're wrong rather than jumping straight to probations. But if they don't accept that, things quickly go to arguing in circles or get nasty as the person making the wrong argument often gets stubborn, while the rest of D&D eagerly jumps on low-hanging fruit. Clearly and verifiably wrong positions don't actually take that long to debunk, so if it drags on more than a couple of days then it's probably a thread where a bunch of frustrated and miserable people are arguing in circles, so it might as well be closed. Main Paineframe fucked around with this message at 20:30 on Apr 24, 2022 |
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Apr 24, 2022 20:28
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some plague rats posted:I do not remember this. Where did this happen? It was one of the D&D feedback threads run by the admins, back when they were trying to get a sense for what the hell was going on in D&D. They're great reads, IMO, if only because it was really funny watching the admins be completely stunned and baffled at the poo poo that passes for normal posting here Oakland Martini posted:A couple of comments/reflections from an old-timer (I'm 37, been here since I was 16) who posts rarely but relies heavily on this forum for news: uninterrupted posted:I don’t think this can be laid at the feet of “bad posters” or whatever. Modern economics as taught at a academic level has been pretty thoroughly refuted in the last 30 year. Athanatos posted:What the gently caress? Way to immediately prove his point 6 minutes after he posted. Eminai posted:Tying economists to cops is not the right track, IMO, but I don't think D&D would be particularly enriched by being more welcoming to economists posting their professional opinion, much like how The Goon Doctor wouldn't be enriched by being more welcome to homeopaths posting their professional opinion. Athanatos posted:D&D is for discussion of opinions?
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Apr 24, 2022 23:27
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 02:37 |
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This isn't really a debate thread or anything, but this last page of people trading one-liners with Koos is a pretty good example of bad discussion. There isn't any clarity of communication, to the point where the two sides are repeatedly getting confused about what they're even responding to. People keep failing to be specific about what they're referring to, make little to no effort to back up what they're saying, and appear to be prioritizing pithy burns and insults over establishing mutual understanding. Rather than this endless back-and-forth of one-line posts, I feel like this whole thing could get covered a lot faster if people just took a couple minutes to write up something a little more clear. We're not running under Twitter rules here, there's no character limit. Spending half an hour back and forth trying to determine by argument who exactly gave probations and when is entirely pointless when, as Greyjoybastard pointed out, anyone could just go click the "Rap Sheet" button and answer the question in like five seconds. Socratic questioning is an argument style that isn't particularly well-suited to internet forums, and usually just amounts to pointlessly wasting everyone's time.
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Apr 25, 2022 00:51
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