Maybe there’s trouble in their little utopia.
@goofyballer, carrying a response to your post over here because it seems like more of a Friday discussion now.
I agree that it’s relatively boring, but the entire purpose of his posting style is to shut discussion down. He admits it himself in this post, that what microbet was doing was wrong, implying that he had to come correct it.
I don’t know if this is an issue that can be solved via moderation, so maybe this isn’t the right place, idk, but it would be pretty cool if this was the kind of place where a “pros and cons of US interventionalism” conversation could last more than a couple hours before turning into a proxy fight.
what evidence do you have this is true? any admins care to verify?
Purely anecdotal with the exception of noticing an obvious trend in poll participation, but I find it hard to imagine that most would disagree.
I post with a USB steering wheel
1 Like
Yea I agree, and that was actually part of what prompted me to write this post too:
UP traffic is
- Higher
- Lower
- About the same
- Bastard
0 voters
I don’t mean to single you out, but I don’t think continued use of the terms “Captains” to refer to a group of current and former posters is helpful. Just like I don’t think rehashing complaints about moderation by Wookie or other former mods is productive.
Sure there could be some special cases where this type of discussion could actually prove useful, but I think a good rule of thumb would be just not to make these types of posts.
1 Like
I also don’t think JMan should be dredging up Wookie’s mistakes and insulting him for losing his rightful throne to a bunch of deplorables
I just don’t think bans and hiding posts are very effective tools in most cases for improving forum discourse
1 Like
Compared to when? Compared to the peak it seems weird to even ask. We must have 10% of the posts that we did in the first 6 months of UP.
6 Likes
Things were pretty good when the people stirring up shit now all left
1 Like
I don’t know anything about that. The claim I am disputing is that we’ve gone from multiple hundred daily users down to 25. This is blatantly false and I haven’t had access to the data in a long time but every time someone starts claiming this I looked and it would be remarkably steady. Lots of people lurk, lots of people posting other places other than political forums, and there are many sub communities within this place that are pretty valuable and some of the discussion takes place outside of this forum.
I remember off the top of my head we were sitting at ~180 DAU and it’d occasionally dip to 150 but rarely ever less than that. I’d be shocked if it were much less now.
I wasn’t aware of about half of them ever leaving
1 Like
Oh, OK. I thought the claim was about activity on the site, meaning posts, not daily log ins. Activity on the site has clearly fallen off a cliff.
1 Like
I would agree with that but think the reasons for that are a bit more complex than users falling off. I’d be interested to see the actual data but it doesn’t matter much, I guess.
So far 20% of you are not taking my pole seriously.
my final shitpost of all this
I agree with this strongly but not for the reasons people might think. I think this “othering” into teams/sides is absolutely RIDICULOUS and has been from day zero. I never remembered signing up to be a horseman, or whatever they’re called, and I remember being lumped in politically with the “horsemen” (for lack of a better term here, I’m gonna keep using the nicknames) which I took great offense to because I’m pretty sure ideologically I am not even close to aligned with many of the positions that group is perceived to have.
Likewise, I think a lot of the characterizations of captains are a bit stupid - many of those who I’d consider “captains” or captain-adjacent or captain-curious have posted fairly peacefully in this forum for months now, even with people on the other “side.” What this really is is a half dozen personal feuds between various people who for whatever reason lump all their opponents on to one team, whether it makes sense or not, and then seem to use this to get people on their team riled up and join them.
FWIW I think both captains/horsemen do this to varying degrees and I have privately chided people (not my business, I know) that they were just fueling a stupid feud by responding to it.
I assume the departure of Trump has something to do with posting volume falling.
Also, as has been pointed out many times before, Trump’s presidency was probably a unifying factor that reduced disagreements because it was easy to laugh at him or point out the ridiculousness of his presidency. Now it feels like there’s more of a left/liberal divide in a lot of these arguments, and a lot more contentiousness. Not surprising that some people would be turned off by that and would reduce their posting or lurking.