Yes, by a huge margin. How else could I possibly surpass everyone but goofy’s total?
There are two components to participating in the forum. One is posting and the other is reading. You seem to want this forum to be modded to maximize the reading experience. Other posters may want this forum to be modded to maximize their posting experience.
I want posters to be able to be their authentic selves on the forum and to represent their points of view (within reason). This includes posting POVs that I disagree with and which I might think are outright dumb. Certainly, you can argue that a toxic environment makes some posters feel unsafe posting, but I also think some of the drama comes from some posters just not willing to tolerate people being wrong.
Again, PC is right.
Economist, the poster, is busy doing anarchism while we are doing bullshit. You just don’t understand it.
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There’s truth to this, but I’m really only talking about three posters none of whom add anything to anyone. I obviously disagree strongly with Micro, PC, and MC but still consider them valuable members of the forum whose posts I read and seriously think about.
I’m not prioritizing reading over posting, I’m prioritizing the creation and consumption of high quality content over shit posting and trolling. I’m even willing to tolerate trolling when it’s done in a clever way! Keed is a straight up Colbert style character designed for trolling and I think it’s hilarious most of the time. Trolly’s name is Trolly and he doesn’t disappoint. The problem is the mean spirited low quality trash posting that a few specific posters engage in here that isn’t fun to interact with through posting or read. I get that they are having fun, but I don’t think the experience of 3 people is more important than literally the rest of the forum.
We’ve spent hundreds of hours of our collective time arguing about whether we should allow obvious low content trolls to troll away. This compounds the problem even more as none of these discussions were at all productive.
EDIT: To be really clear the only people I would ban in the first 10 minutes if I were a mod are people who have already had plenty of rope who are causing real problems in the community. I’m not in favor of just banning people because they made a bad post one time or something, and I’m very much in favor of weighing the quality of their posting in making moderation decisions. I’m also in favor of looking at forum drama and trying to figure out what is causing it and rooting it out at the cause. The reason I’m going so hard at Micro is that I see his views on moderation and running a community as the root cause of this nonsense. None of this would be happening if we had just banned those three like almost any other moderately successful internet forum would have over a year ago in the cases of Jal and watevs.
I just don’t see why that will change. I would dutifully serve if drafted, but I would never volunteer to be a mod. Limited terms don’t make it more appealing because I can just choose to quit. I feel other posters have expressed similar sentiments. The volunteers to be mods will disproportionately be people who feel they were wrongly modded and want the job so they can use its powers to demonstrate how they were wrongly modded.
I’ve found the time spent arguing about this to be useful for forming my own opinions about politics.
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Bored,
You sabotaged your chance to be a mod and you’ve never made a poll to ban these bad posters.
Are you part of your problem?
That doesn’t describe the people who’ve volunteered so far, imo.
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Why would you think this? Literally no one who has offered to be a mod remotely fits this description. Potato, whosnext, pocketchads, or Keeed …or any of the past volunteers.
Right this second I don’t have a better metric than likes for judging value. It’s tangible proof that posters are enjoying your posting. I realize it’s flawed and encourages factionalism, so I’m open to other suggestions. Personally I like a post with substance and humor so some combination of those two things is what I’m looking for and who I give likes to reflects that.
On the subtracts side it’s mostly about the absence of positives mixed with having a lot of conflict with other posters. Churchill’s posting in the COVID thread is basically a clinic on bad posting as an example. Not only is he posting trash that we shouldn’t have to read but he’s getting high quality posters side tracked debunking it and arguing with him.
I was honest about what I thought needed doing. I wasn’t going to lie to get a big stack of unpaid labor. I was either going to get the mandate to fix things or I wasn’t going to get trapped in the same spot as wookie and skydiver.
I’m not a martyr lol. I won’t throw myself into anything vaguely resembling a lost cause.
This post and the several you made referring to my tongue and cheek use of stalin in my mod thread either aren’t in good faith or suggest that you’re really bad at nuance/sarcasm. Not sure which it is yet.
I don’t much care about Churchill’s posting. I don’t see it much. I might not even vote in whether or not to perma him. I have moderated him though.
I’ve said watevs is a problem.
I like jal’s posts on lots of subjects. He does troll as do other posters like you (and me too sometimes).
You just want to impose your preferences (though you were afraid to actually do it).
Hard to say what you even want other than some mod to follow your orders and perma who you tell them to.
I’m fine with someone having very few likes as long as they aren’t posting a ton. High volume with no likes is a really really bad sign IMO. So is being put in ignore by a large % of the forum.
No that’s way too draconian. There are exactly three major problem posters on this site at the moment. We’re talking about banning 1.5% of the forum assuming we have 200 active users.
If we set hard metrics like you’re trying to get me to endorse it’ll turn into some dystopian stack ranking nightmare where we’re punting people for not being good at posting instead of punting people for causing real problems. I would hope that temp bans would remain rare and perma’s would be very rare.
We’ve been at this site for a long time and many posts and there are like 5-6 posters total (I might be forgetting some people who got banned on their 5th post who I didn’t notice arrive or leave) who probably should have been perma’d in the history of the site. It’s not common at all.
This right here is why I don’t want to make a series of ironclad rules to solve this situation but instead rely on the discretion of mods who are moderating toward a goal. (and I think that goal should be to maximize the quality of content posted on this site… but people can disagree about that)
There are some situations where you can go with hard and fast rules, but trolling isn’t one of those… because trolls can read rules too and delight in finding ways to comply with the letter of the law while utterly ignoring the spirit of it to get their rocks off.
I guess this is for everyone else, as you’ve got me on ignore.
What I can tell you without fear of contradiction from you is that you know very little about what you call “human nature” because your opinions on it seem to be based on a very narrow range of people and situations, mostly based in advanced capitalist US.
There are many self-policing communities around the world that would astonish you with their civility and sense of community.
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A ton of people have less than one like per post.
On what subjects and where people post makes a big difference in this.
And ignores? No one on this site is ignored by more than like 5% of regular posters.
Bored,
What do you want?
Who do you want to perma who?
How many people agree with you?
Turns out my daughter likes Captain Beefheart. I had no idea. Who is she going to talk to about that if not Jalfrezi?
Maybe BS shouldn’t get to decide all by himself who provides value.
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Using likes as a metric for anything meaningful just encourages pandering.
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By voting on permas.
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