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Made in gb
Calculating Commissar




Frostgrave

Leaving it up to the people runs the risk of people being voted out based on their stance and not the quality of the arguments.

Another forum I am on (and has since closed the politics forum) was rife with one group reporting literally anything that disagreed with them.

Something like the slashdot up/down vote could work, where you can filter for posts above a threshold and rely on the user-moderation to be fair enough. The actual mods would potentially only need to step in to remove anything offensive or deal with people making malicious votes to silence others.
   
Made in us
[MOD]
Solahma






RVA

I estimate about a quarter of user alerts here can be summarized as people reporting something they disagree with, and just declaring it to be off topic or political or rude. And that is already taking the politics ban into account. It was far, far worse before.

I think the key is related to the slow down concept. Somehow, those contributors who voluntarily take a measured response to posting should have the ability to slow down others who are getting too caught up in the heat of the moment.

   
Made in se
Ferocious Black Templar Castellan






Sweden

Slow-posting will not solve the issue of posters that repeatedly (as in, over a longer period of time) post things that they (self-admittedly!) have not read. I really do not understand this resistance to holding people to the standard of "at least read your own links before you post", especially when you're at the same time arguing for slow-posting so that people can post in a "measured" manner.

This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2020/12/15 13:45:37


For thirteen years I had a dog with fur the darkest black. For thirteen years he was my friend, oh how I want him back. 
   
Made in us
Stormblade



SpaceCoast

People are still looking for a way to win an argument, instead of just having a discussion.

This isn't the digital equivalent of all of us on a debate stage but I think more the digital equivalent of all of us sitting around a firepit in Tides backyard shooting the breeze. Yeah occasionally crazy uncle bob says something completely out there but after he's done everyone just kind of rolls their eyes and steers the discussion back in a way they want to. As long as Uncle Bob isnt hogging all the air time /shrug, everything will be all right.
   
Made in us
[MOD]
Solahma






RVA

Walrus, Ignoring someone with a well-established history of posting crude, un- or misinformed, uninsightful, self-contradictory garbage is an entirely appropriate, reasonable, and sufficient response. Getting validated by an intervening third party is not necessary or helpful.

The slow down piece is just one aspect of what is necessary to build an overall tone or mood of self-restraint, thoughtfulness, and most importantly friendly/fraternal communication. The slow down piece of that puzzle can be fostered “externally” by structure. Other facets of it will necessarily have to come from “within” the contributors themselves.

Jerram, Luckily on a discussion forum no one can hog all the airtime because it’s just text, which everyone is totally free to read and respond to or just ignore. This is especially true when a posting rate can be slowed down.

This message was edited 4 times. Last update was at 2020/12/15 14:04:12


   
Made in ca
Stubborn Hammerer





This thread has been cathartic for me personally.

Thanks RiTides for being the kind of person who could continue to post and act and listen as you have to all this.

Shoutouts to greatbigtree and manch as well.

The internet is a crummy place right now and y'all made it less so for me at least.
   
Made in gb
Calculating Commissar




Frostgrave

 Manchu wrote:
I estimate about a quarter of user alerts here can be summarized as people reporting something they disagree with, and just declaring it to be off topic or political or rude. And that is already taking the politics ban into account. It was far, far worse before.


Do you have any mechanism to inhibit the "reporting because I don't like it" posts? Like preventing serial reporters from making reports?

I think the key is related to the slow down concept. Somehow, those contributors who voluntarily take a measured response to posting should have the ability to slow down others who are getting too caught up in the heat of the moment.


I can't help but think the slow down concept will produce the save level of arguing but over a longer timescale. It may be possible though. I do no know the threads tended to move pretty quickly.
   
Made in us
Lord of the Fleet





Seneca Nation of Indians

You know, one thing I found works fairly well is having a hard limit on how many reports per day a single poster can make.


Fate is in heaven, armor is on the chest, accomplishment is in the feet. - Nagao Kagetora
 
   
Made in us
[MOD]
Solahma






RVA

Scrabb, I must admit when I first read about RiTides’s plan, I thought it would be a waste of time. But the more I thought about it, the more I understood that it’s a very noble project. We used to be able to talk to each other about serious issues. The time has come to recover that basic level of interaction.

Herzlos, No we (moderators) cannot limit who post alerts or how many alerts a poster reports makes — nor do we necessarily want to, because we’d generally prefer someone hit the user alert button than lash out at the person they disagree with. Better they take their frustration out on us! The only time we have really disciplined someone for abusing the user alert function is in the case where a poster hits many dozens (or even hundreds) of posts out of spite because they have been recently warned about one of their own posts. But even this is something we rarely punish. Maybe twice in the last ten years?

About the slow down, I find that it is pretty difficult to stay mad enough to insult a stranger on the internet over the course of a few hours. Now, this is obviously impacted by whether there is an established pattern of animosity between given posters, which certainly can happen.

This message was edited 3 times. Last update was at 2020/12/15 15:36:12


   
Made in us
Ollanius Pius - Savior of the Emperor






Gathering the Informations.

 Manchu wrote:
Walrus, Ignoring someone with a well-established history of posting crude, un- or misinformed, uninsightful, self-contradictory garbage is an entirely appropriate, reasonable, and sufficient response. Getting validated by an intervening third party is not necessary or helpful.

Nor is ignoring someone and then having others get sucked into their pattern of trashposting/misdirection.

The slow down piece is just one aspect of what is necessary to build an overall tone or mood of self-restraint, thoughtfulness, and most importantly friendly/fraternal communication. The slow down piece of that puzzle can be fostered “externally” by structure. Other facets of it will necessarily have to come from “within” the contributors themselves.

Jerram, Luckily on a discussion forum no one can hog all the airtime because it’s just text, which everyone is totally free to read and respond to or just ignore. This is especially true when a posting rate can be slowed down.

This is not true and you should be exceedingly aware of this. If someone wants to suck the oxygen out of a thread, they can do it. We continually have threads that have specific posts resurrected later because someone going through them from the start to end replies before seeing moderator warnings to drop it or things like that.
   
Made in us
[MOD]
Solahma






RVA

It’s up to every single contributor to restrain themselves from rewarding garbage posts by engaging with them. In my experience, the problem is almost never naive posters getting hoodwinked but rather experienced users who just cannot seem to help themselves, and use all kinds of justifications (such as protecting other, more naive posters or people reading without posting), to “fight the bad guys.” The answer is to not fight. Less experienced posters will learn soon enough for themselves that this or that poster is not worth engaging; they don’t need other posters to step in on their behalf.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2020/12/15 14:58:20


   
Made in us
Ollanius Pius - Savior of the Emperor






Gathering the Informations.

Or the answer is for the moderators to actually do something about the post when it's flagged, rather than leaving it up, when they later post warnings or tell people to "not reply" to said posts.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2020/12/15 15:00:32


 
   
Made in se
Ferocious Black Templar Castellan






Sweden

Again, explain how it's reasonable to expect "I don't even read my own links" to not be sanctioned, and this time do so without just repeating your argument of "it isn't". Why is it reasonable to expect the entire rest of the forum to adapt their behaviour instead of just telling the person doing this to stop? Ignoring the poster doesn't mean that the poster can't disrupt the discussion. It works as a stopgap measure when those with authority to do something refuse to. Given the history of Dakka I'm curious as to why you'd think that people would stop poop'n'scoot posts just because the tempo of the thread is lowered.

We seem to be arguing about two different things. I agree completely that a lower posting tempo will at least somewhat mitigate the back-and-forth sniping matches, but it will do absolutely nothing to curb the drop-and-done BS that derails threads. To continue the crazy uncle analogy, the problem is that you're expecting the entire forum user base to be static, with long experience of the behaviour of posters. If I join an already existing forum I have no way of knowing that someone is a known gak-stirrer, but the forum as a collective sure as heck does. Similarly, while you might now that ol' Uncle Jeb is a KKK Grand Cyclops and to thus just filter out what he's saying, the random hikers you're sharing your fire with don't. Everyone who's been around the fire for long enough knows Jeb is a nuisance, but the people who don't have that experience will continue to engage with Jeb in the belief that there is a point in doing so.

To take an example from the Wasteland, I've repeatedly argued that whembly posts in bad faith. I don't think you can get more obvious proof than a poster admitting to not reading their own links before posting, which is why I've consistently used that as my example in this thread. Despite this, I've never stopped engaging with whembly in that thread because when he is not posting in bad faith there's things to learn, even if only from having to argue my own position. I've learnt a bunch about the process behind the ratification of the US 14th amendment that I otherwise wouldn't have, for example. Everyone would be better off, however, if there were a mod that was actually willing to put their foot down and tell whembly to stop posting bs posts or else. To clarify, a bad faith poster does not always post in bad faith. It is entirely possible to make some posts that are excellent while also making posts the only purpose of which is to talk gak (and, again, this is not me ascribing motive to whembly in this example, he admitted to not having read the links himself and posting them because "everyone else was doing it"). What we're trying to argue is that if the gak-stirring actually had consequences the non-gak posts would be left, substantially increasing the quality of discussion.


EDIT because you've mentioned part of this while I was making this post:

 Manchu wrote:
It’s up to every single contributor to restrain themselves from rewarding garbage posts by engaging with them. In my experience, the problem is almost never naive posters getting hoodwinked but rather experienced users who just cannot seem to help themselves, and use all kinds of justifications (such as protecting other, more naive posters or people reading without posting), to “fight the bad guys.” The answer is to not fight. Less experienced posters will learn soon enough for themselves that this or that poster is not worth engaging; they don’t need other posters to step in on their behalf.


It's not the posters needing to be defended, it's the flow of the thread. By the time the new hikers have learned that Uncle Jeb isn't worth engaging with there'll be new hikers at the fire, repeating the cycle ad nauseam. Further, even if this weren't the case your "solution" kinda fails to take into account that people clearly do not act the way you wish they did. Even if we accept, for the sake of argument, that the problem is other posters engaging, the fact that people do kinda makes your solution a non-solution. It's kinda like going "if there were no tax fraud, we could save millions on not having to audit people!" and then defunding the IRS based on an ideal-world scenario. If you assume that people largely will not change how they act without external input, how would you go about solving the problem?

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2020/12/15 15:13:18


For thirteen years I had a dog with fur the darkest black. For thirteen years he was my friend, oh how I want him back. 
   
Made in us
[MOD]
Solahma






RVA

Walrus, it sounds like you’re arguing that even what you consider to be bad faith posting has had a net positive effect on you by inspiring you to further inform yourself in order to respond.

   
Made in gb
Calculating Commissar




Frostgrave

 Manchu wrote:
It’s up to every single contributor to restrain themselves from rewarding garbage posts by engaging with them. In my experience, the problem is almost never naive posters getting hoodwinked but rather experienced users who just cannot seem to help themselves, and use all kinds of justifications (such as protecting other, more naive posters or people reading without posting), to “fight the bad guys.” The answer is to not fight. Less experienced posters will learn soon enough for themselves that this or that poster is not worth engaging; they don’t need other posters to step in on their behalf.


Absolutely, and I'll admit I'm terrible at just letting someone be wrong on the internet. The problem is as Walrus said - ignoring the bad faith posters only works if everyone knows to do it, and that requires a lot of assumed knowledge.
   
Made in us
[MOD]
Solahma






RVA

Every one of us gives in to it from time to time. It’s just a fact of life that we must accept to some extent, even while never ceasing to try to do better.

And based on Walrus’s post above, it seems there are positive, productive results from NOT ignoring bad faith posters all the time. This would be equally true of experienced and inexperienced posters.

   
Made in se
Ferocious Black Templar Castellan






Sweden

 Manchu wrote:
Walrus, it sounds like you’re arguing that even what you consider to be bad faith posting has had a net positive effect on you by inspiring you to further inform yourself in order to respond.


That's on me for not being clear enough about bad faith posting. I've been using "posting in bad faith" in a way that makes it seem as though I'm accusing people of never posting in good faith, which is not what I've meant. The posters that have a history of making bad faith posts over time do not post exclusively bad faith posts. There is legitimate discourse to be had with even such posters, provided the bad faith gak-posting can be filtered away. That's why I'm so ardent that there be some sort of consequence for wasting everyone's time: even whembly, who I consider the paragon of bad faith posters in the Dakka context, has given me a bunch of legitimately interesting stuff to think about when he's not posting in bad faith. Just like you're hoping that slowing down posting will reduce the "in-the-heat-of-the-moment" type of posts (which I agree with), I'm arguing that taking a stance against low-effort bullgak will cause such posters to improve their noise-to-signal ratio, as it were. Cut out the posts with personal attacks by sanctioning such behaviour, cut out the back-and-forth sniping by slowing down the flow of posts, cut down on the low-effort bait by actively telling people to cut it out.

To be clear, I'm not claiming to be some paragon of post integrity. I'm probably guilty of this sort of post that I'm describing in the past myself. If I'm being an ass I want someone to step in and tell me so, because it gives me a chance to reflect and change my behaviour. Judging what is and is not appropriate behaviour is always going to be subjective in the first place, which is why we have mods with the capacity to put their foot down and unambiguously, finally say "no". Otherwise you just get people insisting that you can't judge them because you can't read their mind and thus can't know what their motives for making their posts are and then proceeding to act exactly like you'd expect them to.

EDIT:

 Manchu wrote:
And based on Walrus’s post above, it seems there are positive, productive results from NOT ignoring bad faith posters all the time. This would be equally true of experienced and inexperienced posters.


Agreed, which I'd argue is another reason that "just ignore them" is not optimal. I'd rather have the bad faith behaviour thrown out while keeping the rest than just giving up on it entirely and declaring it lost. I just checked, and over the course of my more than a decade on Dakka I've got a whopping one user on my ignore list, because that user just kept personally attacking me. In every other case I've been loath to simply discard a person's posts because there's points in there that do make sense. This doesn't mean I appreciate the fact that people post glorified spam.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2020/12/15 15:45:21


For thirteen years I had a dog with fur the darkest black. For thirteen years he was my friend, oh how I want him back. 
   
Made in us
[MOD]
Solahma






RVA

What has in fact been done about that issue here on Dakka Dakka is, such posters have eventually been banned, after repeated warnings and long back-and-forths via PM, for months or even permanently from the OT sub board.

   
Made in us
Legendary Master of the Chapter





SoCal

 Kanluwen wrote:
Or the answer is for the moderators to actually do something about the post when it's flagged, rather than leaving it up, when they later post warnings or tell people to "not reply" to said posts.


But what if the mod likes that the poster is just “telling it like it is”?


   
Made in ca
Stubborn Hammerer





Mods are just people.
   
Made in us
Ollanius Pius - Savior of the Emperor






Gathering the Informations.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
 Kanluwen wrote:
Or the answer is for the moderators to actually do something about the post when it's flagged, rather than leaving it up, when they later post warnings or tell people to "not reply" to said posts.


But what if the mod likes that the poster is just “telling it like it is”?


Then that mod either shouldn't be getting involved in the discussion or shouldn't be moderating it if they're involved. You can't be the person shutting it down when you're actively engaged in the crapstorm.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2020/12/15 19:26:36


 
   
Made in gb
Calculating Commissar




Frostgrave

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
 Kanluwen wrote:
Or the answer is for the moderators to actually do something about the post when it's flagged, rather than leaving it up, when they later post warnings or tell people to "not reply" to said posts.


But what if the mod likes that the poster is just “telling it like it is”?



Ideally, you'd have a wide enough range of mods that they wouldn't all share the same biases.
   
Made in au
Grizzled Space Wolves Great Wolf





 Manchu wrote:
I estimate about a quarter of user alerts here can be summarized as people reporting something they disagree with, and just declaring it to be off topic or political or rude. And that is already taking the politics ban into account. It was far, far worse before.
I seem to recall having some disagreements with mods over what constituted rude in the old political thread. The old thing of indirect insults can be a fine line, and indeed I recall some of the mods saying things that I thought overstepped the mark for polite discourse.
   
Made in us
[MOD]
Solahma






RVA

Sure, the trouble with concentrating power in the hands of a small number of moderators is that they might not agree with your perspective.

I can say that a given poster has an X% chance that some other poster has reported them to us and a Y% chance that we have decided it warranted action, where X is almost invariably much greater than Y and where as X increases Y almost invariably seldom does. This is not a policy, just an observation of fact.

And this is also one of the reasons I’m arguing that a politics-focused discussion board should not be designed around a set of quite particular rules enforced by negative sanctions.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2020/12/15 20:45:20


   
Made in us
Stormblade



SpaceCoast

 Scrabb wrote:
Mods are just people.


One of the smartest things posted in this thread
   
Made in ca
Junior Officer with Laspistol





London, Ontario

Ahem...

I think my moustache twirling, Saturday morning cartoon villain impression hit its mark.

I hope it can be viewed (by others) in hindsight as an antithetical argument. I hope that if my posts in this thread are reviewed, that hints and side-eyes can be found, that indicated that it was coming.

I hope that by displaying a cut-throat style of argument that the need for a section in the future ETC where that is *not* the objective has been demonstrated.

I hope that it shows that approaching an argument as a conflict just winds up with people failing to move forwards with understanding. That there were no "winners", despite my exaggerated claims to the contrary. A win in this scenario would have been understanding each others view points. Understanding, even if we don't agree, the other's position.

I hope it shows how valuable a resource the ETC could be, to help train people to argue in a way that promotes these ideals. By teaching about logical fallacies. By teaching about how to spot a bad faith argument.

To which, I hope that in (other's) hindsight, my overall stance has been consistent. That I have held good faith to my point of view, even if at one point it was delivered sharply. Sometimes my trixy nature gets the better of me. I hope I have an opportunity to help mentor future debators and arguers in the future of ETC.

If not... thanks for all the fish!
   
Made in ca
[DCM]
Dankhold Troggoth






Shadeglass Maze

Sorry to pick just one thing to give a good response to at the moment, there has been a lot of great feedback and I am reading everything! But it's the holidays so, also, crazy

Herzlos wrote:
Leaving it up to the people runs the risk of people being voted out based on their stance and not the quality of the arguments.

This is my concern with a community-self-moderating model, and a few of the paid options I looked at that had this didn't seem like the best fit to be honest. I would certainly Love to be able to "share the load" on moderating to the community, but some of the polar responses on issues also extend to people's views on moderation.

The concern about a biased mod is also very valid, obviously... for better or worse, at the start it's just going to be me, so the only bias is mine. I've noted a few times in the other thread that I'm an independent voter and not registered to either party in the US, and have voted for both or even for split tickets many times. This might already be concerning to some but just noting that I truly don't have a dog in the fight on a lot of issues here, and am interested in seeing a robust debate more than anything. Also just to reiterate, that I won't be participating in any of those debates myself.

Really hoping to use the holiday break to get everything sorted on this front. I'm fortunate in that our entire company closes down from Christmas to New Years, so I can have some time to get things ready

I'll keep reading all the suggestions here, thanks again for the interest and for the excellent feedback!
   
Made in us
Humming Great Unclean One of Nurgle






 RiTides wrote:
Also not sure whether or not it would be helpful to have a "N&B" type section, since ours invariably turn into a "Discipline that guy!" type of discussion... which I really, really want to discourage. Does anyone have a suggestion on how I could get feedback without having that kind of dedicated space (which might result in just a lot of bickering not directly related to the topics we want to discuss)? The feedback in the N&B thread here, for example, was really helpful... but I'd like to at least start out the board trying to talk about issues, rather than talking about how we're talking about them
Are you talking about having us talk about how to talk about talking about issues? Because I could converse upon that topic.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2020/12/16 06:05:38


Road to Renown! It's like classic Path to Glory, but repaired, remastered, expanded! https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/778170.page

I chose an avatar I feel best represents the quality of my post history.

I try to view Warhammer as more of a toolbox with examples than fully complete games. 
   
Made in us
Longtime Dakkanaut





Denison, Iowa

I'd like having a political discussion with other scale modelers. I'm sad to say that that was a disaster here on Dakka, almost entirely due to users. I can see why the mods ended it.

I got the hankering for it a few months back and checked out the Wasteland.... and that place is way more toxic personality wise than the Dakka forums ever thought about being.

My decision not to join that forum was heavily weighed by repeated acceptance of a call for genocide. Now, I am mostly in favor of a light touch from mods, but seriously, there ARE certain lines you do not cross, EVER.

Some of the best mods I have seen in action from other forums have taken a neutral stance, even in topics they themselves were discussing. It's depressing whenever a situation boils down to using the mods as a tool to silence the opposition because you don't like what is being stated.

As a side note, there is no "Political Discussion" if no one wants to have a discussion. Sometimes you're just in an echo chamber with people parroting the same idea. If someone with a conflicting opinion comes in it can be helpful to play devil's advocate and argue against you're own point. It's not that you are a Gak person, you are only acknowledging and trying to understand the other side. If you easily get mad when you're stance is challenged than you're stance is likely not as strong as you think it is.

This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2020/12/16 07:50:18


 
   
Made in gb
Joined the Military for Authentic Experience





On an Express Elevator to Hell!!

 cuda1179 wrote:

As a side note, there is no "Political Discussion" if no one wants to have a discussion. Sometimes you're just in an echo chamber with people parroting the same idea. If someone with a conflicting opinion comes in it can be helpful to play devil's advocate and argue against you're own point. It's not that you are a Gak person, you are only acknowledging and trying to understand the other side. If you easily get mad when you're stance is challenged than you're stance is likely not as strong as you think it is.


Yes that's very true. You could see in the Nuts & Bolts discussion on this topic you could almost visualise a few posters starting to kit themselves out ready for the new forum like...


Hopefully I think it should be fairly easy (with an ignore function) to recognise the people that just copy-paste the soapbox argument of what they think (and is posted purely just for the purpose of shouting it at people) and then only engage with people when it is a discussion.


Epic 30K&40K! A new players guide, contributors welcome https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/751316.page
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