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Discendo Vox posted:The entire point of the electoralism argument, the entire reason it works to destroy discussion, is that it rejects all other discussion. Elephant Ambush hosed up only by making explicit the statement which was implicit when selec decided to sabotage discussion of gun control policy by deploying it - the claim that all discussion and all outcomes other than the ones that selec demands, in this case a euphemistic call to violence, are worthless. This is always the argument. It has always been the argument. It has always been a counterfactual that dismisses and sabotages all discussion of specific facts, demanding that everyone who cares about anything else reassert their value. It has always, always, carried with it the belief that the people killed by these differences in outcome are worthless. I haven’t made a euphemistic call for violence, and I believe insisting that I’ve got a secret troll playbook, rather than some opinions on what the best way to move forward to a more responsive and capable political system, is a paranoid fantasy that fails Occam’s razor at several points. I post for fun, and I post honestly. I’m someone who was a neck-deep Talking Points Memo process liberal just like you about fifteen years ago. But the last fifteen years have been quite a journey for everyone, and not everyone came out the other side in the same place, no matter how similar the place they started from. I think you’d do better responding to my posts if you had not constructed a weird image about my intentions and beliefs and lastly if you took yourself and your arguments a little less seriously. Your experiences are not universal, and your conclusions not unassailable, and the avenues you believe are “reasonable” to respond to your beliefs are not the only reasonable ones, despite how those responses from outside your worldview feel when you read them. This is a You problem, bud. Edit: And as for my masterful troll strategy of “speaking my piece” and then not posting for a while? I have a life and other interests besides the forum, and sometimes other threads are also interesting. You are attributing way, way too much planning and forethought, maybe I’m just an old stoner who saw the discussion continuing, saw points I agreed with or would’ve made had other users not made them, and was able to carry on not posting a reply because I don’t need to be the person having the specific discussion? There’s a wild amount of theorycrafting going on to explain “shared my opinion, then got stoned and decided to do other things.” Somebody fucked around with this message at 19:48 on Nov 5, 2023 |
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Nov 5, 2023 16:01
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Discendo Vox posted:The violent content issue and the use of poo poo like electoralism arguments to derail discussion are both recent problems that have been recurring periodically. DnD has calmed down only in the sense that a lot of the effortposters and people who were creating new threads or providing effortful content gave up and left. I object to the idea that discussions of electoralism vs parapolitical organizing is intended to do anything besides discuss those issues. You being unhappy that discussion is happening isn’t the same thing as someone twirling their moustache and saying “now I’ll derail this conversation!” It’s silly and unbecoming of you to insist there’s an overarching goal to that kind posting beyond “I’d like to discuss this outside of the bounds of traditional electoral methods” Until you can read minds, it’s in extremely poor taste and just unflattering to people’s perceptions of you as a smart dude to insist you can visit and accurately ascertain the secret motivations of other posters. I don’t think you have a secret agenda to bore me to loving death posting for the thousandth time about nutritional supplement labeling. I think that’s just your hobby horse, and like any reasonable person, I just gloss over it and read until a topic that is interesting to me comes up. The fact that you seem constitutionally unable to do this seems like the root issue here, to me.
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Nov 5, 2023 21:28
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Discendo Vox posted:No. If the "old drama has died down", it's because the trolls have more control; the people who were the most beneficial participants have been driven off of DnD or SA overall. The subforum continues to be harvested and targeted by trolls, actively facilitated by the current pattern of rationalizing not enforcing the rules. This thread is a great example, like its multiple predecessors; users who participate in the forum give feedback; it is either ignored or new actions are actively refused. Trolls poo poo the place up, and it serves to entertain them. “Harvested and targeted” this is just Qanon about the forums. I am entertained by reading good posts, and sometimes making posts and responding to posts. That you have theorycrafted a whole metanarrative around people posting, by and large for fun, is wild poo poo. Would you say you’re having fun posting? Is it a good time? Because if not, why are you here, instead of someplace that fits your idea of seriousness that this of all places obviously doesn’t, and causes this constant struggle posting from you to make it something that it’s not? I do think there’s a good purpose served by having DND and CSPAM, but I think that deciding we’re going to lock DND down the way you want to doesn’t serve a meaningful audience. Like, if I ever get as worked up about the forums as you seem to be rn, that’s a sign I need to take a break, rather than post harder. I don’t mean to get personal but if you’re not having fun, it’s not a requirement to be here. You can take a break and come back when it’s fun again. Lord knows I’ve had times when I was posting too hard and getting too mad—my rap sheet is testament. Since I made the conscious decision that if I’m getting so angry I end up probed behind it, that’s me using the site wrong, and that I need to check in with myself and ask “am I having fun?” it’s been a much more fun and rewarding experience.
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Nov 6, 2023 18:25
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socialsecurity posted:Why this weird constant pretending that succ doesn't exist? You post in it, you know what it does, why pretend otherwise? I see those SYQ posts and I don’t see them as harvesting—more like when you see some cool herbs and take them home to make tea. To me, harvesting would be deliberately posting bait, then SYQ’ing the responses. I’m not an SYQ poster, so my reading might be naive, but I don’t see it as fundamentally different from posting stuff in other threads where we mock people making stupid tweets. It feels more personal because it’s another user on the same site, but it’s a behavior we see on all social media: can you believe this rear end in a top hat? Look at this rear end in a top hat! It’s not a particular thing to SA, it’s just the smaller community of users makes it more likely to be taken as a personal affront. The behavior itself is as old as the internet itself. If we make SYQ against the rules, that’s fine, but it should be undertaken knowing it’s us being weird about the internet as it exists for most users, and not like, something we know has succeeded for other sites, unless there’s examples out there of it working meaningfully. I think the real solution is to tell people getting SYQ’d to chill the gently caress out, posting isn’t praxis and people are allowed to make fun of your opinions. It’s just pure aesthetics, “I don’t want this happening to me, so please make it happen somewhere I can’t see it.” Which feels very antithetical to the idea of responding to bad speech with good speech. Ironically, the only way I knew DV was posting wild conspiracy theories calling me out by name is due to a SYQ in the succ thread. selec fucked around with this message at 18:56 on Nov 6, 2023 |
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Nov 6, 2023 18:53
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socialsecurity posted:FYAD does the same but they typically don't touch the poop which works out fine, it's the combination of the mock threads and then posting with them to rile them up intentionally that ruins any attempts at taking a person at face value. How do you divine the difference between “sharing my honest opinion” and “rile them up intentionally”? How would you account for some users having higher/lower tolerance for seeing arguments they disagree with on some topics? It’s one thing if it’s “vaccines are fake and don’t work,” because that’s a falsifiable opinion. My believing that electoral remedies aren’t sufficient to provide the kind of dignified existence people deserve isn’t really falsifiable, but imo that doesn’t mean it’s not worth discussing, considering there’s a wealth of history of people taking the same view and doing something about it, to mixed success. If we’re only allowed to talk about electoralism in context of voting, you’re not really a politics thread anymore, you’re a voters thread. I can be interested in politics and discuss them while participating in politics in both voting and other ways, and it seems like that there is so much friction around the topic means (to me) there’s a lot of interest in the idea worth discussing. If we decide you’re not allowed to talk about politics in the context of non-electoral goals or methods, or why people who don’t vote don’t vote, what’s really been won besides a narrower range of conversation? If the feeling is that voting doesn’t get it done, are you just not allowed to have serious political opinions?
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Nov 6, 2023 19:34
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Kalit posted:You know what, you've convinced me that SYQ is fine. 💯 to this idea.
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Nov 6, 2023 20:07
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rules and have a rotating thread IK who's not a CSPAM poster. Then we can make fun of CSPAM posters who's bloodlusting for the genocide of Ukranians or whatever and then chain probe anyone who wants to 
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Srice posted:wrt the declining users in USCE over the past few years, wouldn't a more likely explanation be a combination of Trump no longer being president (ie - no more watercooler effect of having a president that tweets insane stuff everyday and people wanting to post about that) + the fact that lots of SA posters in general have drifted off to discord over the years? Just wanted to throw it out there, that it doesn't necessarily have to be a decline caused by malicious reasons. I personally don't feel it's inherently a problem unless you're only measuring the value of a thread in sheer number of posts and/or posters. I think it’s this, and the ongoing splintering of Americans who are left of center. If CE isn’t a place you can talk about politics without swearing fealty to VBNMW, a lot of leftists (not my dumb rear end) are just gonna go to cspam for their politics chat, because they have (rightly, IMO) realized posting isn’t praxis, it’s something you do for fun. You’re just chatting and commiserating, and they’ve made the realization that CE is that but there’s also this rules structure in place that created all these guardrails for reasons that don’t seem meaningful or useful beyond protecting a worldview, which makes it less fun. Ultimately the first and most important question for moderating, to me, is “are we having fun here?” and if not, why not? If there are certain users who cannot meaningfully have fun posting about certain topics, that’s a them problem to me. But all this depends on the shared understanding that our posts don’t actually change anything in the world, and thus having fun (and learning stuff) should be our primary goal. If you disagree on that basic point, what are we even doing here?
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Nov 6, 2023 20:30
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Fister Roboto posted:Yeah I'd really like to know how many of these supposed subject matter experts have actually been driven off by the vile CSPAM trolls as opposed to just losing interest or any other explanation. I imagine a lot of people left when the lowtax domestic abuse poo poo came out. Yes! We have a great external example of a place where people post as though their lives depend on it, people who it’s quite apparent are not having fun on the internet, and it’s called Twitter/X. The belief that your posts capital-m Matter is very popular among a huge portion of that userbase. And just look at them! A miserable turd of a site! Is that what we want to emulate?
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Nov 6, 2023 20:33
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WarpedLichen posted:I think hidden within the question is "what is fun" is "who is it fun for." I personally think the CSPAM forum war stuff is dumb, but I don't read CSPAM personally because it's not a very fun environment to be in for me. And I think it's fine that CSPAM enjoyers have their space. I would think the question about how DnD is would need a deeper examination on what you're enjoying about it and whether the other members of the community are also having fun with it. I can see that. When the succ thread over there gets too doomerish for my tastes, I just yank it out of my bookmarks for a month. I think that’s the healthy response, rather than fighting the tide. There’s a lot of posts I reconsider making in CE for the same reasons. Since my “post for fun, not for any other reason, just the fun of sharing and reading other perspectives” epiphany my enjoyment of the forums has gone way up. Even DV’s walls of text about supplement labeling no longer piss me off. I just see them and my eyes drip right off, because I’m able to say “huh, guess that’s fun for them” and just keep on trucking. I wish more folks could do that, honestly, because ultimately it’s made the forums a much more positive experience for me, and I think it would help other people. It would also make moderation a lot easier, I suspect, and allow us all to be a little more chill. I think the impulse to impute deeper motives or look for radicalization happening is indicative of not realizing posts aren’t praxis, but also just unhealthy, giving people you don’t know and cannot have that level of insight into their motives cognitive space doesn’t seem healthy, because it’s unresolvable, besides just being silly conspiracy theorycrafting.
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Nov 6, 2023 20:45
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Maera Sior posted:Koos, you seem to be replying to most suggestions with "No," "Not my area," or "We totally do that." If you're not going to accept anything people are saying, why ask for feedback? What actionable feedback have you accepted from past posts? I can’t reconcile “trolling” and “posting in good faith” here, I kinda thought definitionally those two things are mutually exclusive. What does “good faith trolling” look like to you, what’s the heuristic for identifying that?
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Nov 7, 2023 01:45
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Bar Ran Dun posted:The thing is, specific positions are going to be inconsistent, bad faith, and incoherent as an essential characteristic of the specific position. This doesn’t do much to separate romanticism from learning from history. I don’t want to live in Maoist China, but that doesn’t mean we have nothing to learn from Mao. They wrote a ton of material we might find relevant and useful today, regardless of differing goals. It’s not romanticism to read those works and say “here’s why this tactic works, how it’s worked in the past, and how it might be applicable today.”
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Nov 8, 2023 20:49
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