For one, I like the atmosphere here, especially when it’s geared to producing the immunity vectors I mentioned. Seeing the community generating logic is fascinating, and I obviously don’t mind a bit of disruption and snark (or destruction!).
Hopefully we can keep all that good stuff whilst also ensuring that people who really, really want to participate can still have 3 days to give it a go whilst sharpening their arguments over the suggested 2 day waiting period.
They’re also welcome to take part in the community and create their own thread if they want to debate such things… rather than just attack a specific author, the author’s ideas or (and I realise this is particularly pukesome but it often appears to be the trolls viewpoint), we who they see as the author’s defenders (rather than people who also happen to have been infected by the same meme). Not to say I don’t learn good stuff here, just that the hate for some of the authors seems to spill out over to any other commenters who share their ideas…
Perhaps there’s a clue in there…and instead we can all learn to be more responsible in our argument/debate tactics and either reel them in (force them to explain their argument concisely) or else completely shut them down with a full fledged logical-fallacy-explaining assault?
The mechanical elements are useful, but perhaps the real key is in raising the community’s bar a bit when a topic gets hot?
Heck, maybe THAT could be our first mod alert: Time to take the debate more seriously. I’d be amenable.
I see a lot of wisdom in not having a cooling off period.
The current regime where TL3 level users flags count a little extra, which i believe to be true, seems to work pretty well. Contentious threads are good, destructive trolls that are only around to drop ‘turds in the punchbowl’ are not.
But really,I think there is a lot to be learned from some of the takedowns of the earnest fools who stop by to defend the Aamon Bundys and the Killer Cops. How much forward progress is there to even make in an online forume. So we have a perfectly civilized discussion, and then what? Why is that an important goal, on contentions topics? I just don’t expect other peole to not do emotional thinking and personalization on such topics, and I don’t think there is a UI solution to it.
And more work for the mods is great, if we’re paying for it. I can suggest a lot of ideas for other peoples workflows, but my own wetware is, at the end of the day, the best solution to every problem I have ever had on the internet.
Mmm. It is an inhibiting idea concerning new posters, especially those you would want to attract, which probably far outweigh the bad uns.
Even without the cooling off idea, I do think there’s an opportunity to turn the tagging system into some kind of measurement metric. What it could be applied to, well, shucks… who knows? *Hangs it on peg
Anyway, the verification thing is also probably a messy idea but it might be helpful for people to have some kind of an idea that the subject or expert or other reffered-to entity is who they say they are. Don’t know how much value that would add though…
I guess I have also noticed a lack of total and utter fuckwits polluting the bbs recently, but I’m not sure if that’s because of an increase in the amount of flagging or a downtick in the number of monsters coming over the hill.
Well, other than “guns guns guns” (which seems to be the hill regulars die on for both sides), we haven’t had anything that controversial recently, have we? I don’t know.
Queue the publishing of an article concerning hordes of self-organising, victimising, transphobic, white privileged, not-racist-buts pushing some god awful agenda en masse tomorrow.
there do seem to be fewer massive triggery topics, but also I can’t throw @codinghorror and @falcor enough bones. The tone is better generally than in the past. Still gets nasty occasionally, people still go off - but the official responses are less disruptive.
Wow, I first feel like I should apologize I reignited this old thread, so much screaming going on…
The general sentiment seemed to be this:
That is why I proposed to lock only certain topics to people that have new accounts, that would solve both problems (at least I hope the trollies would not be horrible enough to take their driving trollies into other threads, they might though…).
And only after reading a bit further I see this would also block the person the post was about from responding in his/her own artikel… So that is not a fix either…
I gather there is code in place for recognizing a thread that is “Hot” with a lot of new visitors and a lot of posts in a short time, maybe when such a thread comes along the flagging function can be turned into a “3 flags and your (post is) muted” button. Obviously you would only count flags from people that have been active on the forum for a while. And then when I read even further I see this is already sort-of in place?
Then I guess all I can say is keep tweaking this system and all will be fine
For a “trigger” topic (as measured by how? number of posts by new users, number of posts in given time interval, etc? all are possibly viable) what you’d be proposing is an even lower threshold, like
two flags by known users and your post is muted
Not a bad idea, but there are so few flags here in general that it would not move the needle appreciably, IMO.
Forcing new users to ensure that they read x% of the topic, or rate other new users posts on civility before they can post anything might, though. See related Civil Comments effort.
Ohhh!!! Thanks for posting that! I had heard about a previous discussion in the same vein as this topic a while back but I couldn’t find it, thanks for linking it here
I owe you a cup of tea and some very strong gin for coming by and making those two sit in timeout on opposite sides of the classro… forum. Seriously though, thanks for cleaning this place up before it got too nasty, oh and here is your modicum of gin and dab of tea! Cheers!
Oh right, you’re busy moderating… well just have some gin then
Since the problem users that come here usually create accounts and only post in one thread, what about “ghosting” all new users’ posts in their first thread, and then make them visible when the user posts in their second thread?
The two flags = mute,
Not a bad idea, but there are so few flags here in general
Actually I used to feel guilty when I flagged, especially if it’s someone I engage with regularly who’s just having a douchebag moment. But I’m over it now.
