No. Say it.
It was withdrawn by jman. I canât see it.
Some are suggesting that the fighting and bad posting might make this site wither away as people get sick of it and are driven off, butâŚthe drama tends to come up when there isnât enough interest in talking about Trump. The biggest threat to this forum is not enough to talk about.
Also, I think I have two sources of people to invite here, but dunno. The young communists are just going to call us all Chads and Karens. I am may be making a connection with a group of Sociocracists. Iâm a little wary of that too for different reasons.
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I personally donât have an issue with one-off arguments or even the occasional isolated âfuck off.â @Victoar and I have argued before but I have no hard feelings and we still like each othersâ quality posts. The issue is when arguments turn into personal grudges and then span across the entire forum. Some people are unwilling to let things go, and we need some strategies for teaching them to do so.
For a rough proposal, I think we need a âbickering containment thread.â Organic arguments (within reason) remain allowed, but anything that spreads across threads (e.g., poster A attacking poster B based on a pre-existing grudge rather than an in-thread trigger) gets moved to the containment thread. Having a post moved serves as a warning, and then any immediate recurrence warrants a temp-ban.
Anyway I hope we can figure something out. This community has been an incredible resource both for useful information as well as for quasi-social connection during unusual times. Iâll be honest in saying that Iâm not interested in sticking around if we maintain current levels of vitriol, but I have faith we can do better.
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Not that itâs a bad idea but thats basically what weâve been doing.
Youâre young. Iâm sure you know. I would expect they would roll their eyes at me talking about Chads or Karens and have something new that Iâve never heard of.
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I understand your sentiment, but the main risk is that without specific rules about when a particular instance of bickering should end, it figures to fester and break contain. Itâs not like grievances cannot be aired, but at a certain point, having an open sewer on the forum ends up stinking the whole place up no matter the intent.
There is a different energy in the room and among the mods. I donât want to speak to soon but I really did take this all as a call to action. I think a lot of us did.
We made it through a tough year together. Thank you to everyone, even those of you I do not like so much.
Thank you to everyone for your contributions today. You helped reveal where we are and where we would like to go. Every day is a new day to take ourselves a little more in that direction. I believe we are doing so, even when it feels like we arenât.
We will get through this.
Happy holidays to all of you. I hope something good happens for you this week. We all deserve it.
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Would you consider being a mod? It doesnât have to be now. Your service and insight would be very much valued if you ever find yourself open to it. Come be co-mod of A&E if you just want your feet wet. All we post about is movies and TV.
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I understand. There is no pressure, and you are free to change your mind or stick to your guns. The concerns about how it would affect you are valid and youâre not wrong. It would affect you, though not necessarily for the worse.
I cannot object to worrying over what others would think of your nomination. I worry about such things too (what others think me, I mean; I have no worries over your nomination but relate to you having your own is all).
As far as the ignore list, mods are not forbidden from having an ignore list. I donât believe Iâm the only mod to use one, though I will familiarize myself with all posts of a situation warrants my assessment. I believe Iâve been called a coward once or twice for having an ignore list, but I am human too and need those limits with certain posters.
I donât really see moderators in this community as moderators. More as facilitators. But I am old and yet young with politics. Perhaps that distinction matters little to anyone but me.
Anyway, explaining things for all interested parties even if youâre not and never end up being interested, so please donât take this as any pressure on you 
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When posters start getting into it with one another, would one option be to put them on mutual ignore so they donât see each otherâs posts? This is somewhat paternalistic because itâs something that they could have done themselves. But I think forced mutual ignoring would be preferable to some of the things that have been going on here lately.
Speaking for myself, Iâve only put a few people on ignore, but I find that it makes the forum much easier to read once it gets to that point.
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The problem is thatâs not what happens. What happens is that some posters constantly reference the other posters in off-topic posts (not directed at them specifically) in a derogatory way, repeat those references over and over until it becomes assumed by everyone that they are true. Then if the poster being referenced does not respond to it, over months, everyone just assumes it is true. One example from this very thread were things that were posted about me, for the past year which I declined to respond to, because I didnât really care, about my career. Many just assumed it was true because I ânever denied it!1!!1!!!â So just putting the posters on mutual ignore wonât actually solve that, and that is the biggest source of the blowups between CW and the others. Itâs not direct replies between them.
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Thatâs a good point. But it seems like that concern could be solved by a rule like poster X canât post about poster Y and vice versa for a certain amount of time, similar to what micro started doing yesterday.
I prefer empowering and encouraging mods to tell posters to cite or (temp) ban when they make such claims. One, it exposes lies. Two, if itâs not a lie, then it forces a poster into a cooling off period while they do the necessary research.
If we want social media such as Twitter to take action when Republicans lie, should we want action to be taken when posters lie about each other? At the same time, the onus should not be on moderators to be fact-checkers and they shouldnât be required to know the details about stupid feuds. Still, when people post their proof, itâs not always as clear-cut as they imagine it to be.
econophile,
Canât you click through to see what ignored users post anyway?
I have raised two children who arenât that far apart in age. Of course they fought. Of course youâre not always figuring out whatever caused the fights. I would sometimes tell them âyou canât talk to or about each other for Xâ (X often being the rest of the car ride) Then pick some hopefully appropriate punishment (no ipad or whatever they are into for x time) and stick with it.
NotBruce,
After doing this for a minute, like you said in the second paragraph only moreso, itâs just way too much to expect mods to sort out what is true or who started what in all but the most obvious cases unless a mod just happened to be following it as it started.
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You keep saying utopian but who claimed this place would be utopian because of little modding? People donât want there to be modding for other reasons not because of some idea that things will be âutopianâ
Great post.
I think the particular point that I quoted is somewhat invalidated because the examples you listed are all examples where youâre physically seeing and dealing with people. Itâs a lot harder to be a dick to someone in real life than it is to anonymously be a dick to a bunch of pixels. We all, myself included, need to be more cognizant of the fact that there are real people behind those pixels who are throwing their opinions and personal info into the ether to be judged. Until either that happens or we start posting using our real names and pictures (Iâm not actually suggesting that), moderators will always be a necessity.
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Youâre describing IRL social circles, where there is far greater social pressure to be amicable, as well as an innate tendency to, as you can read the expressions and emotions of the person youâre in conflict with, rather than them just being a picture and letters on a screen.
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Yeah, Witchita has mentioned how just being on the discord chat changed his feelings and behavior here.
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Was literally just going to post that. I could never get the mic to work on my end, but I participated in some of the discord chats and just hearing the actual human voices of some posters made me like them more immediately.
Same with watching jmakinâs twitch stream. Once you attach human characteristics to an online presence, you start to see them as a real human instead of just a name.
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