I bear Cowicide no ill will, but he did descend to pure ad hominem pretty quickly. Which is, frankly, boring.
I hope he’ll come back when his ban expires.
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I miss you.
Trautman: It’s good to hear your voice Johnny, it’s been a long time. Look John, you’ve done some damage here, they don’t want anymore trouble. That’s why I’ve come. I want to come in there and fly you the hell out. Just you and me. We’ll work this thing out together. Is that fair enough?
Rambo: Where did you come from Sir?
Trautman: Bragg.
Rambo: I tried to get in touch with you, but the guys in Bragg never knew where to find you.
Trautman: You know I haven’t been spending much time there lately, they’ve got me down in D.C. I’m shining a seat with my ass.
Rambo: I wish I was back in Bragg now.
Trautman: We’ll talk about that when you come in.
Rambo: I can’t do that Sir.
Trautman: Look John, we can’t have you running around out there killing friendly civilians.
Rambo: There are no friendly civilians!
Trautman: But I’m your friend Johnny! I was there with you knee-deep in all that blood and guts. I covered your ass more than once. Seems like baling you out of trouble’s got to be a life-time achievement for me.
Rambo: There wouldn’t be no trouble except for that king-shit cop! All I wanted was something to eat. But the man kept pushing Sir.
Trautman: Well you did some pushing on your own John.
Rambo: They drew first blood, not me.
Trautman: Look Johnny, let me come in and get you the hell out of there!
Rambo: They drew first blood…
Trautman: Rambo, are you still reading me? Covey leader to Raven! Rambo! Acknowledge!
Thank you.
Not really, no. But thanks for clearing up what’s going on.
Sometimes though in the jailyard watching the jailer shiv the inmates was … tantalisingly funny.
My bad, i thought this was a place for happy mutants.
I’ll go put on my adult pants, in response to someone posing as a luck dragon.
–mdh
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You say lax, I say shitty. Let’s meet in the middle.
(The moderation, not the mods. It’s not personal, it’s a job not being done the way it was before, and now being done in a way I can find lots of other places, making BB more palatable and pedestrian, and commonplace. Was the goal to be as normal (read: advertiser friendly) as any other venue?)
Aye, me too. I have been a BB commenter in one name or another as long if not longer than Cow, and he never used to be that angry. Like I said, I think a lot of it is the fact that he was clearly very involved in progressive politics, and that’s hard. I still maintain it’s clearly coloured his responses on here. As the good Mr Adams opined, being nice to folks gets you nailed to a tree, though…
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I liked Cowicide. But s/he did cross the line, and when s/he did, I noticed I wasn’t as interested in what Cow had to say. I think a little timeout isn’t going to kill anyone. I’m coming up on my tenth year as a semi-regular commenter, and I have to say that I don’t really notice BB going overboard with moderation. If anything, I think that keeping threads on track has helped people have more sophisticated discussions instead of having to start at square one every time an issue is discussed.
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The goal is to be a reasonably comfortable place for people to discuss sometimes difficult topics. It is more than possible to remain polite and moderately rational and still disagree strongly; it is desirable to do so, since otherwise you risk folks writing off anything you have to say on the topic.
In any system, there will be lines beyond which thou shalt not go. The bounds here really are pretty darned loose, but by definition they’re going to annoy someone. If you’re that someone, your choices are to try to work with the local conventions, or to go elsewhere, or to offer a coherent reason to change the rules.
So far, I haven’t heard much reason beyond “I don’t like rules” and “Cowicide was sometimes worth reading.” The latter is self-correcting when the time-out period is over, assuming he’s willing to work with rather than against the moderators. The former… well, there’s a whole big Internet out there.
(Yes, I’m assuming Cowicide is male, based on remembered text and subtext styles. I may be wrong; if so my apologies.)
I have nothing against rules. I have no opinion on the ban being discussed. I am complaining a bit about the free ice cream. I expect double my money back.
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Well, after sleeping on it I feel I wasted an opportunity going down the wrong road with my argument. I have more than a touch of the EGO and it leads me astray, often.
Rob, I hope you understood my flagging your GIFs was a “friendly” poke. I would say “kidding,” but that’s so cowardly. I thought the eye-rolling one was absolutely on point. (cringe-worthy)
Let me say, that as someone going through a late life socialization overhaul this has been useful to me for a glimpse of how others see me. Which is not that easy to get.
I listen, consider, and, if appropriate, I change my mind.
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Antinous is gone? Shit. What happened to him?
Well, I for one hope Cowicide chooses to come back after the timeout period. I thought he had a lot of interesting and useful things to contribute, though he did not always choose a kind, respectful way to say those things.
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No. As you can see, there are no ads on BBS! If we did put ads in, it wouldn’t make a difference. But in the absence of ads, it can’t even hypothetically make one.
Touché. I wasn’t intentionally implying a selling out thing, but that’s a fair read despite not being my intended point. I think of BBS as the comments section for BB.
What I was driving at is prior moderation regmes regarded lazy arguments, fallacious flame baiting comments, and outright trolling as being disruptive, and usually acted to intervene in a way that moved the conversation forward more quickly. It was prickly at times, but obtuse treatment of obtuse arguments has its place. This still happens here but less so. What I would like to see is moderation that’s more interested in the mechanics of earnest conversation.
And thank you for the free ice cream
Glad to hear it! We need the community’s help to make that happen, you can be a part of the solution by flagging posts which go over the line: FAQ - Boing Boing BBS
The only thing that scales with the community is the community.
Wait. WHAT?
I thought boingboing was immune to that sort of ‘you disagree with mod so therefor you are banned’ drama… epsecially given he’d been a boing boinger for years and had always been articulate and had well thought out arguments, counters, and at least would consider your position before calling you an idiot.
Just… what the hell?
Edit: OK read a little bit of the rest of the thread but I know precicely Nothing of what happened… but this is the sort of garbage I’ve seen nuke ohter communities. I don’t want it happening here. Please?
None o fthis ‘it’s not going to be talked about’ business either since that’s the best way to get drama going… I guess you could argue that it also stops it but you have to be iron fisted in enforcing the ‘no talking’ rule.
Either or. I don’t know what’s going on. I just saw ‘cowicide’ and ‘banned’ on the same line and associated with eachother. So… yea.
I enjoy his posts and value his contributions greatly, especially because he fights the progressive fight that I think many other BB regulars agree with but don’t get involved in arguing about (I certainly don’t contribute anything to political discussions here, I mostly just read them).
I have also noticed him getting nasty and overbearing of late, in a way he wasn’t (as much) pre-BBS - or, perhaps, it’s simply that Antinous kept him more in check then than the generally-more-lax moderation we see now. I still value his comments, but I sometimes also find myself rolling my eyes and skipping over them.
Despite that, I am writing to say that I think the choice to ban him (temporary as it may be) feels odd. In the case of a long-time contributor valued by many getting out of hand, the solution is not the same as with a fly-by-night troll who can be banned without a second thought.
I’m more than willing to provide the benefit of the doubt to whoever made the decision because I’m pretty sure there isn’t a better solution available to the mods in this system as of yet… other than a private stern-talking-to, which is not a venture I’d envy or consider likely to succeed.
So I’d like to see more fine-grained, and transparent, moderation options so that silently banning people isn’t the only option (though I like the idea that bans are always temporary), without requiring the intense hands-on removing of posts and so on like Antinous did.
Though it has inherent issues, down-voting like on Slashdot and Reddit seems effective. It’s different from flagging because it reflects how the community feels in a finer-grained way, instead of only the most out-of-line things being flagged. Someone with bad karma from a lot of down-votes has automatic restrictions put in place - post limits, severe if necessary, being particularly effective. They can still contribute, but must do so in a positive manner in order to redeem themselves - if they use all of their restrictive allotment of posts in a day to continue being nasty, it leads to worse restrictions or an outright ban. Make down-voting available only to consistent users, to avoid the sock-puppet-army problem. I think this idea is present in StackOverflow and StackExchange already, in a far more nuanced way than I can come up with, I’m sure.
There have been loads of harshly critical comments about BBS and BB policy lately. It’s because we care about the community here and incidents like this damage it, and our trust. It gets amazingly nasty at times in here, and I like and want moderation to include shaping the conversation into something positive. Let’s not throw out the cowicide with the cow patties, though.
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