You mean they just want to dominate the conversation and have only their opinion deemed as ‘valid?’
Ah, that must be that infamous “echo chamber” we constantly hear about… usually from people who can’t abide by the minimal community standards.
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That and, more pedantically, a conversation requires each participant to do two things; speak and listen. People only doing one of those things are not having a conversation.
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I concur.
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I know you are a long-time regular on the BBS, and so you have more than 30 seconds of interaction with the internet. Given that, I am amazed that you haven’t long since realized that pleas for “civility” are the immediate and instinctive reaction of bad actors being called out by the people they are trying to upset.
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I figured you meant the 2008 election. I think I deliberately quit looking at newspaper comments by 2012, in any case.
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Good point, events in 2008 also led some folks to come out of the woodwork and spread their vitriolic views online.
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The idea I’m striving for here is the opposite of “immediate and instinctive”.
It is not the responsibility of the listener or reader to be clear. If you are unable to get your point across, you are failing to communicate, full stop.
There is no other environment in life where you can go to people and say “Don’t listen to what I say, hear what I mean” and find satisfaction, and that’s with the sorts of social cues and familiarity meatspace provides. Text removes all of that, which means it a writer needs to be even more explicit with their meaning, and expect a much greater chance of misinterpretation as well.
If you are not prepared or cannot adapt to this reality, then forums may not be for you.
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That’s because there are quite a few trollies that delight in appearing to be the civil ones while their conversational partners get angrier and angrier with them. Often they are concern trollies (i.e. they pretend to be on the side of the people they are arguing with, only with a few small quibbles that turn out to be the thinly disguised talking points of the opposition (e.g. the infamous “I voted Remain, but…”). But there are also normal trollies that use that technique. They tend to be “just asking questions”, i.e. sealioning
I don’t know whether it’s just mods that see the difference, though. It certainly helps to have seen this sort of behaviour a lot. Usually they tend to slip up at some point by using terminology or concepts that nobody on one side of the debate would actually use. (e.g. saying they support Biden because he’s a socialist like themselves)
In a past life I was a moderator of a very large subreddit that was famous for its strict moderation. I don’t know whether that helps with recognising this sort of behaviour more easily than others do but it has certainly taught me to trust my gut when it comes to whether someone is arguing in bad faith or not.
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The bad actors don’t want freeze peach, they want an audience to offend, and that’s not a right.
eta: If they wanted a private clubhouse, a RPi and a free DDNS would get the job done.
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One of the nice things about this BBS is that you can edit past posts. I do not mean this as in papering over or erasing what you have said, but adding a “For Clarification:” at the bottom so that people who subsequently see the post will not take it the wrong way. That said, it is impossible to ascertain intent with perfect accuracy in an online forum and, if something smells fishy, people will respond to that.
If you have a single post early in a thread that is consistently being misinterpreted (in your perception), it might be better to just take that post down on your own. In an open forum like this, every post, and every response to that post, and every response to every response is there for all to see.
I myself don’t always live up to that standard, but it feels like if all of the replies to my post are subtracting from what I said, rather than adding to it, then I have not ultimately said something productive. It should of course be okay to post controversial opinions, but not when tangential to or distracting from the topic at hand. A lot of the topics simply do not lend themselves to debate; save your energies for the ones that do or make your own topic specifically for that purpose.
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One particular thing BB “benefited” from is experiencing very early – from the early 2000s! – a specific social dynamic: attracting an audience of hostile reactionary nerdy men who geeky folks have a lot of problem excluding, for the well-established reasons.
Comments were shut down in 2004 or so literally to ditch that audience, and managed aggressively when they were restored in 2007 or so.
Moderation always meant living with constant complaining about censorship. The people who complained about it 10+ years ago are often to be found now online demanding it, for the same reasons we did it then. There’s a section in our wikipedia artible about censoring comments. When it was added, it seemed (to nerds) like a progressive complaint. It’s now baldly contiguous with the contemporary right-wing complaints. And in fact was always an opinion steered by a particular set of trollies adept at manipulating geek audiences.
Some of the arguments now prevalent on the political right (such as “moderation means you lose section 230/ safe-harbor protections”) were to be found in BB comments more than a decade ago.
All this is a specific thread of problems related to our general popularity with libertarians. And I’ll leave it at that for today 
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this is quite true, if a comment is ambiguous or in some sense convoluted there are some who are going to assume the worst interpretation. clarification, either with a reply to the post or with an appended “eta” can improve the signal to noise ratio. on the other hand if the plain meaning of one’s words are offensive through either intention or inadvertence, then removal is generally the best course. i put up a “throwaway” comment earlier today which was immediately condemned as being ableist. in retrospect, especially in the context of the original post, i had to agree and took the comment down. what i didn’t do was to double down on it and make the thread all about me.
as a 26 year veteran teacher i’ve learned to never say “how hard can it be . . .” but this doesn’t seem like rocket surgery so i don’t know.
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i would love to know who it was who so misinformed the ridiculous right about the meaning of section 230. if it was a lawyer they should be disbarred.
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The logic seems to be:
A: “Section 230 protects platforms from liability for failure to moderate (i.e. platforms do not have to moderate).”
B: “Have to” is synonymous with “must.”
C: “Don’t have to” is synonymous with “mustn’t.”
D: Therefore, “Platforms must not moderate.”
Ipso Facto QED
Or some such.
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i’m not saying you’re wrong just that that faint tapping sound in the distance is my head bouncing repeatedly on my desk.
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It should also be noted that there is a limited window of time to edit posts before the option expires. Posts that are older (more than a few days, for instance) can NOT be edited.
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Somehow these self-styled paragons of rationality and decorum always end up asking us to be “civil” to fascists, bigots, misogynists, and to privilege-blind people who make offensive statements and then insist – ad nauseum – on claiming that they were “misunderstood”. I’m glad the moderators and management here grasp the concept of “Popper’s Paradox” and also have experience dealing with right-wing and Libertarian tr0lls’ shopworn and shoddy tactics (including sealioning).
The underlying re-boot of the comments section may explain why this community has a higher quality of (if you will) discourse: the geeky subject matter attracts Libertarians (in my 20+ years on on-line forums consistently the worst and most destructive tr0lls) but the system and moderation doesn’t let them hang for very long on the BBS.
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