|
Heck Yes! Loam! posted:I've stopped participating in D&D because the moderation has become increasingly difficult to understand, and it is not clear what will catch a probe and what won't. Nelson Mandingo posted:I came here to basically post this. I enjoy having a space to be more serious and really think about my and others posts and when I disagree can generally expect a response more than "ur dumb turn off your monitor". As much as I like to white noise poo poo post in other forums. I too came here to make almost these exact posts. I disagree with most of the rest of Loam's post (threadbans are good and should be used more often, and brigade participants should be annihilated from orbit) but I've resigned myself to no longer posting in a number of D&D threads because I genuinely cannot tell what will set Cinci Zoo Sniper off. I've been around here a long time, and I can't remember the last time we had such an aggressive mod, both with the buttons and in tone toward the people subject to those buttons. The ChatGPT thread was a mess as every thread about these technologies tends to be, but also a good example of the tone. Apparently Cinci works in that field and has Strong Opinions About It - opinions I agree with, mind you. But expressing his irritation at the thread being badly informed about how the technology works, then declining invitations to share his expertise in about the most condescending way possible, then hanging the Sword of Damocles over the thread because it's "a failure of an educational thread" is behavior that would get another poster probed. You can't tell me this post could be made by a non-mod without drawing a probation. Cinci's impending crackdown on videos and walls of texts when his own major contribution to educating the thread was a link to a Wolfram article that a non-specialist would take hours to read and possibly hours more of adjunct research to actually comprehend is just hypocritical, but that's another topic altogether. The Ukraine thread feels like a minefield, no humor intended. Something Cinci wrote in the ChatGPT thread comes to mind here: cinci zoo sniper posted:it would certainly be counterproductive to present yourself as an expert on something you're not feeling particularly confident with. The optimal middle ground would to simply make your point and then specifically say that you're not an expert in it Right now, the Ukraine thread feels like it's at the mercy of someone who presents themselves as an expert. Being from Latvia and researching the war extensively does not make someone an expert, but we see no humility here. I'm guilty of the same posting style, anyone who frequents TradGames will know that, so I recognize it - but that's also why I've never so much as attempted to get into moderation after 22 years on the forums. I'm running out of time to write this and I expect other folks will chime in if it matters enough to them, so I'll just make the observation that VFW manages to have educational, humane, empathetic, brigade-proof discussion about the unjustifiable, genocidal invasion of Ukraine without feeling like you're constantly tiptoeing around an angry mod. Since the days when it was called Current Events, D&D's moderation philosophy has shifted up down a gradient of "moderation according to a strictly enumerated set of rules, beyond which we are helpless and subject to trolls who know how to abuse edge cases until we make more rules" to "just vibes, maaaaaan." There's no point in my arguing for one or the other, because moderation style is a product of the constantly-rotating mod staff, and has nothing to do with the opinions of users - which is probably as it should be. People who want it to change badly enough will put on the hair shirt of becoming a mod themselves, and then the style will change again until they burn out and a new crop rotates in. And after reflecting on it for a while, I think that's where I'm at with D&D: withdrawing to lurker mode even more than usual, and waiting for the moderation style to feel less hostile. Nobody in the mod staff should particularly care about whether I post here or not, I'm hardly a significant contributor, but if you're trying to take the temperature of the forum, there's my two cents. Cinci, you'll take this as a callout post, and it kind of is. But I hope you'll take it in the spirit it's intended, which is this: you are going to burn out hard if you keep this up, and the aggression is not making the forum better, it's just having a chilling effect on discussion and making people resent you. I suspect you'll describe the chilling effect as removing white noise, and we could go back and forth on this, but I'd rather not because I genuinely can't tell at what point criticism will be taken as probe-worthy in a feedback thread. Take that for what you will.
|
#
¿
Mar 26, 2023 04:59
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 22, 2024 01:52 |
|