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I've pretty much dropped out of USCE, but it's not really the moderation's fault. I've just accepted that US politics threads are going to be filled with extremely angry losers venting their anxiety all day in the most vitriolic manner possible with no real interest in whether the things they say are true, that no amount of moderation is going to change that, and that I'd rather shave my asscheeks with a woodchipper than continue to read what's essentially just a vent thread. IMO, everyone would be a lot happier with the fresh arguments rule if we just admitted that it's a conflict two groups of people in the general US threads: the people who want to talk about different things every day, and the people who have one or two specific issues/subjects that they want to endlessly debate. Those two groups constantly fight in the general US politics threads and it annoys basically everyone. The mods have (correctly, imo) decided that the general threads should be for the former group, and that the latter group can make dedicated threads for whatever they want to discuss instead of trying to constantly drag the general thread back to their one pet issue. But the mods won't say it because  , so instead they have to go on a roundabout story about subjectivity vs objectivity and the educational purpose of the forums and poo poo.To my knowledge (someone correct me if I'm wrong), the mods haven't been discouraging people from creating threads. It's just that people don't want to create threads, for reasons that really have nothing at all to do with the mods. Personally, I think it's time to drop the whole image push toward emphasizing the appearance that moderation is absolutely objective with clear and specific rules for every little thing. The mods have put a lot of work into it, and it hasn't changed a drat thing. The people who used to complain that the rules were too vague and the enforcement too inconsistent are still complaining about those exact same things, the people who used to get sixers all the time are still getting sixers all the time, and most of the people who used to be threadbanned from various threads have been re-threadbanned from those threads. The rules thread is one of the best jokes in D&D and people are still asking for it to be even more specific. All in all, the only real impact of the ultra-decorumed rules rewrite is that the Leper's Colony is now much more boring. The same people who hated the rules before still hated them, and the same people who broke the rules all the time before still break them. The whole push for optics doesn't appear to have made any impact, now that the new mod honeymoon period is over and everyone's back to their usual attitudes. Make Probe Messages Great Again!  some plague rats posted:It seems like there's a pretty fundamental conflict about what the mods here are trying to accomplish- is the idea to try and create quality debate, or just to punish every rule breach for it's own sake? Because you've now got a guy, the most active mod here, who from the outside seems to treat moderating like he's got a quota. Not "do these posts really interfere with the discussion" but "okay, that's a 2a, that's a 2.1.c, that can be a 1.1.1, that looks like a 3.1," the kind of broken windows approach to moderating that just makes it miserable to post here because any time you're discussing something there's a solid chance that you or the other person is going to get yanked out of the discussion with a big vaudeville hook for some ticky tacky rear end reason. LT 2012 is actually doing a good job because he seems to be leaning heavily towards not probating instead of "okay which rule should I probate this for". VitalSigns posted:Yeah I think putting the onus on posters to report all these rule violations is the wrong answer, especially when people disagree with the rule and don't want to get people probated for it just to make a point (sorry Leviathan Feels like these two posts answer each others' questions, honestly.
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Jul 31, 2022 18:21
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Koos Group posted:Anyway, yes, making new threads for particular topics is encouraged. Although it's not really meant as a containment area, but more so the topic can be discussed in-depth and people can more easily see the sum of what's already been said about it. What do you mean by "containment area" here? I've always felt that it was a bit of an odd thing to bring up as a general argument against having issue-specific or event-specific threads.
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Jul 31, 2022 19:48
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Discussing a topic in a dedicated thread for that topic is most likely going to be quieter and slower-paced than discussing that same topic in a general chat thread. But that's not a bad thing at all. Letting the people who're actually interested in a topic be the ones to hash it out would presumably lead to a higher quality of discussion, make it easier to see when arguments are becoming repetitive, and attract subject experts who've done more research and are bringing more knowledge and data to the table. It may get less engagement from those who are less engaged in the topic, whether because they don't want to single it out or because they'd prefer to lurk and learn from the higher-quality discussion. The Israel/Palestine thread's dead 90% of the time, but everyone there knows what they're talking about, and people aren't routinely fumbling basic details of the Israeli governmental system. After all, if you're having trouble figuring out how to use the bow in Hades and want to find out more about it, are you going to go ask in the Games Chat thread, the Steam thread, or the Hades thread? If you want to make a data-driven case for D&D 4th Edition being the best D&D flavor ever, with a heavily-sourced comparative evaluation of each edition, are you going to post that in the Trad Games Chat thread or in the Dungeons and Dragons thread? If you want to convince people that white pizza is a sin against food, would you do it in the GWS Chat thread or in the Pizza thread? It's obvious that you'd want to bring the most of the topic-specific discussion to the dedicated thread for exactly that topic, and only occasionally mention it in the chat thread. Doing so isn't burying or containing the subject, but rather the exact opposite: creating a dedicated space where people can give the full attention it deserves. It's only in Debate and Discussion that I've ever seen people raise such an objection to bringing things out of the general chat thread (which the general US politics thread will always be, no matter how many generations of mods try to change that).
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Jul 31, 2022 22:10
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500 good dogs posted:Hi, I'm a long-time reader, but infrequent poster in D&D these days, as this has always been my shitposting-focused account (which I found necessary to create as a result of sharing too many personal details on my older accounts). In my view, the problem with the "stale argument" rule is that it is antithetical to the Marxist approach to analyzing current events, especially in a setting with as much "posting history" as has grown out of American politics in a forum like D&D. As we all know, in order to think critically about a particular story in the news, Marxism teaches us that we must first identify the underlying material conditions that relate to (or led to) that event's occurrence. Furthermore, the tenets of fruitful discussion require finding a common ground among participants in the conversation in order to build a productive set of concepts; Marxists often will (and should!) find themselves starting from those aforementioned material conditions when forming their arguments, and (unfortunately for most of us) we all can agree that the class divide is the most impactful, if broad, set of conditions that underlies the behavior of our ruling class (and those downstream of their decisions). Given that our elected officials are the most signficant piece of our political superstructure, it's only natural that conversations about recent newsworthy events will converge back onto the topic of the behavior of those elected officials. Shutting down discussion of a broad topic such as their behavior under the pretense of being chock-full of "stale arguments" is therefore responsible (perhaps paradoxically) for the continued degradation of the discussion at hand, as it pushes conversation further away from a materialist view of the underlying sources of conflict that led to the event in question, which results (as we've seen) in clearly-frustrated, emotionally-driven posting that leads to ad hominem attacks and straw person arguments. Given the unpredictable application of punishments for the "stale argument" rule, I don't believe that it has had a true chilling effect, per se, on the broader class of American politics conversations, but I do believe the inability of the current suite of moderators to otherwise guide posters toward a more fruitful resolution of conflicting views is just as damaging to the longevity of a specific discussion. I've seen Koos attempt what I believe to be a steering in the vein I describe, but it often comes across as being adversarial to posters instead of something that more plainly aims to find consensus among participants about points of low-level material reality. So it's no surprise to me that when that fails, posters end up spinning in circles until the conversation dies or a big batch of probations needs to be given. Furthermore, these events just serve to breed more negative relationships between posters as attacks become more personal and folks are talking past each other or misinterpreting each others' words. So, in short, I believe that moderators should approach their role as posters (when not clearly engaged in the material as a typical "normal poster") as more of a committee chairperson steering a group toward productive ends, and less of a police officer looking for tickets to write or posters to threaten. Thanks for your time reading this, and the only other point I'll add is that while I think that Leon is a "bad poster", if his planned moderation philosophy (which has high-level points clearly in line with what I've just written) is truly given a shot, I predict he'll quickly become a more efficacious contributer to the overall positive health of D&D than any recent moderation style changes have produced. So I hope that he's given enough latitude and support to implement the sorts of policies he's shared in other threads as being in line with his goals. Sounds like we're ripe for a thread about analyzing current political issues from a Marxist perspective! This is more than enough words for an OP. I know it probably sounds like I'm being sarcastic here, given the context, but I'm not.
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Jul 31, 2022 23:49
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MSDOS KAPITAL posted:You're both conflating two very different things: posting in a thread about whether the Dems are bad, and posting in the current events thread while thinking the Dems are bad. ("Dems are bad" is just an example of course.) This is a good example of why it's more important than ever to keep things grounded in facts and sources in D&D. As social media and irresponsible journalism have encouraged the growth of conspiracy theories across the ideological spectrum all over the internet, US political discussion has been more eager than ever to line up a few factual and verifiable pieces, build a trampoline out of them, and then bounce their conclusion way out into a totally unfalsifiable stratosphere where the argument floats around on conjecture and speculation rather than being supported by unambiguous direct evidence. It's frankly an enormous pain in the rear end to argue with that kind of stuff. yeah, the analogy is halfassed, bite me  Arivia posted:You’d do it in the trad games chat thread as it’s a settled topic in three of the FOUR D&D edition specific threads and banned as a topic in the last (the 5e thread). Bad example Sounds to me like you could do it in the D&D threads, but that a mod or IK would likely probate you for dragging up arguments that most of the thread is sick of.  Maybe it's not such a bad example after all.
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Aug 1, 2022 02:07
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MSDOS KAPITAL posted:I'm not really "building a trampoline" here and if you don't like my example you're free to choose another one - I went with "what are the Democrats for?" because it's easily the most contentious issue that comes up, but it's not the only one. I think it's important to keep the conclusion-drawing part of it reined in, because drawing conclusions can easily become wild conjecture if you go too far. Even the most bizarre conspiracy theories usually start from facts and evidence, and then take giant leaps when drawing conclusions which ultimately bring their claims well beyond what the evidence actually supports. For example, Bush's intel agencies failed to detect the activities of the 9/11 hijackers, and Bush used 9/11 as an excuse to invade Iraq. Put those two together and add in a couple of logical leaps, and you get "Bush allowed 9/11 to happen" or even "Bush did 9/11". But even though adherents of those theories will claim they're just drawing conclusions from facts and evidence, a major aspect of their theories is completely unsupported. They're jumping well beyond what there's actually evidence for, filling in the holes with their own imagination - and often so effectively that they don't even realize they're doing it. It's not a matter of labels or social consensus. It's a matter of how far the conclusions get from the evidence, and how much conjecture has to be jammed into the holes in the theory to shore up the unsupported pieces.
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Aug 1, 2022 04:02
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