I agree, which is why flagging shouldn’t be weighted based on number of responses. I think Falcor does a masterful job of telling people to go stand in their corners and for the most part the listen. That’s probably because they’ve seen outright bans or thread closings without hesitation.
I mean, let’s take the recent closing of the chess thread as an example.
cifyt drops this little note at the end, an obvious joke at the expense of men:
That said, I kinda do think women are hardwired not to be better chess players. Mostly because it is a rare exception to find women engaged in pointless pursuits that do nothing to promote humanity, that focus on made up rules, to solve a problem that didn’t need to be solved, and could be better done by computers.
The obvious comedic intent here is that it starts to lean one way and then ends on the exact opposite tack. Amusing, but going after males who spend a lot of time playing chess. Fair play when the thread starts from a sexist comment in the first place, but an obvious joke and a one-off at that.
Two days later someone picks the thread back up and takes him to task for it. He then comes back and defends himself with a more personal pointed joke that borders on attack, a third person joins, followed quickly by a fourth and it’s suddenly blown out of proportion when it wasn’t that worrisome to start with and had been winding down anyway.
My point is that everyone here throws out barbs or quips, I know you and I have exchanged them at times, but we don’t make them personal attacks. I don’t intentionally try to go after subjects I know are sensitive and try to self-censor. I’m sure you do the same. But if we attach weight to say “this response got three flags and that one only got one” it seems unbalanced when both parties are wrong. Making one disappear because it was downvoted more than the other seems unfair when the solution as now involves a disinterested third party who says “you’re both being dumb, I’m deleting this and that and this is now closed, end of discussion.”
