About Moderation (old original thread)

[cassette]

@jmakin

what evidence do you have this is true? any admins care to verify?

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.

[goreo]

Here are the Usage stats for the past year

They never actually load anymore beyond the past month

[CaffeineNeeded]

Things were pretty good when the people stirring up shit now all left

[jmakin]

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.

[goreo]

I wasn’t aware of about half of them ever leaving

[cassette]

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.

[jmakin]

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.

[AngryQueer]

So far 20% of you are not taking my pole seriously.

[jmakin]

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.

[hokie]

@jmakin

I would agree with that but think the reasons for that are a bit more complex than users falling off.

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.

[hokie]

@jmakin

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.

I don’t really want to re-re-re-litigate this issue, but surely you remember breaking into a private message between “captains” and posting it to the public for all the world to see. Perhaps that contributed just a tiny bit to you being lumped in with the “other” side.

[hokie]

@goofyballer

This is mostly an invented justification used by, uh, members of the other forum for their attacks here: telling a bunch of Bernie voters they’re “liberals”, so they deserve it for not being pure, holy lefties like them (all while being plenty chummy with centrists)

Possibly. My opinion might be colored by the Korean War discussion we were just having, which does seem to fit that mold. It might be oversimplifying things.

[jmakin]

to which I explained my motivations and reasoning and why/how it happened, none of which was believed (and probably still isn’t by many). Doesn’t matter, I don’t and never had a side, and I’m pretty sure if a lot of people are truly truly honest with themselves here, they don’t really either.

even before that happened I was getting lumped in with them by simply trying to support the mod team. even down to me being called a centrist, deplorable, etc despite like, not agreeing with barely anything the people in that group post about. however, unlike a lot of you, I dont need to agree lockstep with someones views to be friends with them, because at the end of the day none of what we believe about anything can possibly matter in the scheme of things.

[Trolly]

In this Perry Mason novel I’m reading they keep calling Della a “girl” and I can tell if she’s supposed to be younger in the books than on the TV show or if it’s just old-timey sexism.

[AngryQueer]

@goofyballer

they deserve it for not being pure, holy lefties like them (all while being plenty chummy with centrists)

I’ll never know if you’re incapable of understanding any alternative to this strawman or if you’re just that dedicated to pretending.

[hokie]

@goofyballer

This is borne out by bbb posting “actually calling them orcs is good” and getting zero pushback. You’d think, if you were naively reading only the content of the discussion, that such a post would be immediately controversial; but it’s actually extremely boring because the only thing that matters is who posted it.

This surprised me because I didn’t remember it. I guess you’re referring to this post from an hour ago?

@bbb7979

I mean it’s not necessary for me to call them orcs in my posts but it is to some degree necessary for Ukrainian army and citizens to think of the Russian soldiers as orcs terms rather than as “people who probably wouldn’t agree with this war if they were not force fed propaganda and who probably don’t want to be here and whose experience and emotions in this moment are just as validly human as my own”

I don’t think it is a bad thing for those on Internet message boards to use and reinforce the language adopted by Ukrainian army for this purpose

It seems a little different than making a blanket statement that “calling them orcs is good” but that’s fine, yea, I see your point. BBB’s post earlier in the thread was also the one that brought up the Korean War, which prompted a discussion, though, so I disagree that all that matters is who posted it.

Edit: putting the full bbb quote in for context

[AngryQueer]

@goofyballer

This is borne out by bbb posting “actually calling them orcs is good”

It can’t possibly be that people saw no point in trying to converse with someone who would say such a thing, and that the post’s existence itself said all that needed to be said, given the context of the discussion that led up to it

Edit: @goofyballer I thought you were talking about an entirely different post by an entirely different user. My bad. I did remember a lack of response to “actually it’s good” posts and thought you were talking about any of those.

[Jalfrezi]

@CaffeineNeeded

Things were pretty good when the people stirring up shit now all left

“Pretty good” = no one opposed your Conservatism.

[AngryQueer]

Oh, I thought bbb had to be a nickname for one of a couple different posters who made posts that fit gfy’s description and lack of response. I didn’t realize there was someone actually named bbb and I hadn’t seen that post.

[jmakin]

I also think this name is hilarious even though I largely disagree