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From this thread: https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/745058.page

 motyak wrote:
This is pushing way too hard into a US Politics territory. Reef it back to talking about the +ves and -ves of net neutrality, not which party is doing what, or how entrenched the sides are, etc. That kind of chat will see this locked up right away and warnings issued.

What I want to see: Posts like the one Galas has right above mine

What I don't want to see: Most of the rest of the page above that.

What this really translates to is "don't discuss the subject at all". The positives and negatives of net neutrality is a dead question, it's blatantly obvious to anyone who looks at the question even superficially that net neutrality is a good policy for 99.99999999% of the world and only a tiny handful of the ultra-rich benefit in any way from removing it. The only interesting part of the subject is which party is doing what on the issue, what their motives are, how opposition to them should/could go post-repeal, etc. Take away the US politics element and you have a thread that is effectively "hay guys, water is wet, discuss".

And this is hardly the first time that this has happened. It's a ridiculous constraint on discussion that turns any thread involving the US into a choice between moderators threatening bans over half the comments in the thread, or a pointless series of "water is wet" or "my thoughts and prayers" posts that nobody wants to read. Is this really a constructive alternative to allowing US politics as a subject, and just accepting the fact that anyone who participates in a US politics thread does so voluntarily and doesn't deserve any sympathy if they get a slightly hostile post or two directed at them?

It seems to be creating a situation where multiple threads on off-topic are developing into crypto-US politics threads. Right now there's by my count there's three threads that by my count have naturally had US politics raised as part of the conversation;
Net Neutrality repeal in USA
Movie Mogul accusation and the dark side of Hollywood
What to do with North Korea...

I'm not sure how any of those subjects can be discussed while avoiding US politics. And there are plenty of other threads on dakka that could naturally move in to US politics.

It seems to me that the old system at the very least used to keep all political discussion limited to a single thread, whereas now it's going to come up fairly often in many off topic threads.

I'm just confused why it's just US Politics. What's so special about US Politics I can't talk about that, that doesn't apply to the nationalities of other Dakka posters?

If you're going to ban politics, ban everyones, right?

AdmiralHalsey wrote:
I'm just confused why it's just US Politics. What's so special about US Politics I can't talk about that, that doesn't apply to the nationalities of other Dakka posters?

If you're going to ban politics, ban everyones, right?

The toxicity. Us politics involves more name-calling and outright delusion than any other country and that naturally bleeds into the thread as well. You can imagine how insults & fact denial leads to a lot of irritation, and in turn to violations of rule #1.

Now I'm not arguing for or against such a thread, just providing reasoning.

It's always been my viewpoint has always been that the OT should be shut entirely. It historically has eaten up site and moderation resources, I have to imagine has contributed to moderators burnout, and delivers sweet feth-all to the Dakka mission of being the best wargaming website out there. You guys split the difference with geek media, but deciding to keep a subforum open as a shunt to keep toxic posters in, hoping they won't metastasize to the rest of the forum... well, you guys would know better than I how it actually works but it seems like avoiding the problem.

However, if it's going to be open, it might be time to re-consider the US politics ban. If you look at the recent sex abuse thread, that's a p[erfect example of a thread that was pseudo-political in nature. It was obviously created with a partisan intent, to use as a beatstick against a historically left-wing population. However, it unexpectedly expanded into a larger issue that covered both parties and the weird thing is that while it got very, very US political at times it seems to never have gotten as vitriolic and, well, stupid as these threads almost always get. At points when it got heated you actually saw some self-policing, and not of the "this is hurting my team so I want this thread closed" type.

Maybe it's because a lot of the people who tended to ruin those threads have gotten OT bans since then, maybe it's because some just stopped using the site, and maybe it's because the people using it are more mature and the election is over.

Maybe it will go exactly the same as it was before, and the ban will have to be put back in place after a week or two.

It might be worth finding out. Of course, it's easy for me to say that since I don't have to spend all my time in there deleting posts and issuing warnings

To piggy back off Ouze's point what does an off-topic, politics heavy board add to a site on war gaming?

Outside of YMDC and complaints about Space Marine releases in the FW thread this area of the site seems to be an significant burden on the Moderation Team. Yes, I know that on occasion I contributed to that burden.

If we look at the traffic across the site based on the messages in each area;
- 40K Gen Disc; 1,067,184
- OT; 923,704
- News & Rumors; 917,839
- P&M Blogs; 663,584
- P&M; 594,770
- P&M Showcase; 184,653
- P&M Tutorials; 21,912

The OT area of Dakka has more traffic than the P&M Blogs, Showcase, and Tutorials combined (917,839 v 870,149), and were it not for the ban on US political discussions the disparity would be even more pronounced. In a site dedicated to painting and playing with tiny army men the second most popular area is off-topic discussion (the most popular hosts a 45 page discussion on whether or not Codex Space Marines is the worst).

The question for the community and Moderation team is what value does the OT area add to the site, and what affect does that have on the character of the community?

I would guess that people like Dakka's OT section exactly because it's policed and relatively civil/rational amidst a sea of internet toxicity. It adds to the community, but in a non-wargaming way. The question is if that's worth dealing with when it doesn't directly contribute to wargaming discussion at all.

DakkaDakka should follow Verizon example. Do you want to be able to discuss US politics on dakkadakka? Pay a 2$/month fee and you are good to go.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I would guess that people like Dakka's OT section exactly because it's policed and relatively civil/rational amidst a sea of internet toxicity. It adds to the community, but in a non-wargaming way. The question is if that's worth dealing with when it doesn't directly contribute to wargaming discussion at all.

I think that the moderators would probably beg to differ on that assessment.

Surely if you want to discuss politics there are better, more relevant sites to do so other than a war game site. I would understand it more if we were a historical war game focused site and we were discussing period politics, social trends, etc. but we are not.

I'm just trying to provide reasoning for why people use the OT so much.

 Dreadclaw69 wrote:
Surely if you want to discuss politics there are better, more relevant sites to do so other than a war game site. I would understand it more if we were a historical war game focused site and we were discussing period politics, social trends, etc. but we are not.

It doesn't matter if you think there are better sites, the people having the conversation clearly want to have it. Just look at the frequency of "this is totally not a US politics thread" conversations going on, with just enough of a flimsy pretense of not being about US politics to avoid getting banned. And at the threads like the one I linked in the OP, where it's a subject where the entire constructive discussion revolves around US politics but a certain moderator is deleting anything besides banal "HAY GUYS I LIKE THE INTERNET" posts.

It's different when the discussion is US politics as pertaining to a certain issue than when it's US politics in general.

See what I mean about it being in different environment then previously? Disagreements, but it's already going better than that time that people banned from the OT got a thread about the OT locked in Nuts & Bolts

 Peregrine wrote:
It doesn't matter if you think there are better sites, the people having the conversation clearly want to have it. Just look at the frequency of "this is totally not a US politics thread" conversations going on, with just enough of a flimsy pretense of not being about US politics to avoid getting banned. And at the threads like the one I linked in the OP, where it's a subject where the entire constructive discussion revolves around US politics but a certain moderator is deleting anything besides banal "HAY GUYS I LIKE THE INTERNET" posts.

There are better sites to debate politics than on a war game site. That should not be a controversial statement.

I'm not disputing that people want to have the discussion. I'm disputing whether a war games site is the best place to do it, what value it adds to the experience of the site, and whether or not the is a sufficient cost/benefit to the Moderators and Admin to have those discussions here.

Clearly the rule banning US political discussions was put in for a reason, and that reason was that they were so divisive to the community, and required so much time and energy for the volunteer Moderators to deal. As a community the Moderation team had given us plenty of warnings before the ban was put in place. Has your ability to enjoy the war game aspect of this site, or hobby, been compromised by a ban on political discussion?

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

AdmiralHalsey wrote:
I'm just confused why it's just US Politics. What's so special about US Politics I can't talk about that, that doesn't apply to the nationalities of other Dakka posters?

If you're going to ban politics, ban everyones, right?

The toxicity. Us politics involves more name-calling and outright delusion than any other country and that naturally bleeds into the thread as well. You can imagine how insults & fact denial leads to a lot of irritation, and in turn to violations of rule #1.

Now I'm not arguing for or against such a thread, just providing reasoning.

Um.

Not to state the blindingly obvious, but could't we just ban toxic posts and name calling, regardless of whose politics they're involving?
Or is that behaviour totally okay, as long as it doesn't involve American elected officals?

 Ouze wrote:
See what I mean about it being in different environment then previously? Disagreements, but it's already going better than that time that people banned from the OT got a thread about the OT locked in Nuts & Bolts

I say this with all seriousness; people have had more practice now. Certainly I used to be much worse at remaining calm while engaging with a viewpoint I find infuriating. Maybe it's just that so many are now so jaded to the crap that has plagued this decade.

At any rate, maybe there could be a specific mod for the off topic forum so that other mods don't have to deal with it. I nominate Ouze because the irony amuses me on a truly deep level (sarcasm).

AdmiralHalsey wrote:
Um.

Not to state the blindingly obvious, but could't we just ban toxic posts and name calling, regardless of whose politics they're involving?
Or is that behaviour totally okay, as long as it doesn't involve American elected officals?

It is not ok, and is contrary to the Dakka guidelines. That being said many of the US political threads which have gone off the rails seem to reach critical mass of negative posts very quickly, and require an inordinate amount of time to quarantine, investigate, and clean up.

I say the US should be annexed BY Canada, like some kind of inverse Fallout thing in which instead of the world going to hell, the world enters a new golden age.

Then you wouldn't have US politics to consider, but instead the relatively tame Canadian Politics to simply observe. Given that we have 3 major parties, and an additional 3 minor parties, we generally are more accepting of others' views, even if we don't agree with them.

So rather than fixing Dakka, we should just fix the US. Boom. Problem solved. Apply to your governing bodies to be assimilated into the Great Dominion of Canada.

 Ouze wrote:
However, if it's going to be open, it might be time to re-consider the US politics ban. If you look at the recent sex abuse thread, that's a p[erfect example of a thread that was pseudo-political in nature. It was obviously created with a partisan intent, to use as a beatstick against a historically left-wing population. However, it unexpectedly expanded into a larger issue that covered both parties and the weird thing is that while it got very, very US political at times it seems to never have gotten as vitriolic and, well, stupid as these threads almost always get. At points when it got heated you actually saw some self-policing, and not of the "this is hurting my team so I want this thread closed" type.

I've said it a lot of times before, but the problems in the politics threads came from a very specific handful of posters. They weren't the only ones who said rude words, and often they weren't the only who got suspensions.

These were the posters that showed a kind of aggressive, obtuse ignorance. They'd make big claims, which were either dubious or straight up false, and when other posters responded they would reply by repeating their claim, changing the subject, or doing anything to actually reply to the argument made against them. Often this would just be drive bys, They all belonged to the extremes of both the right and left, but at the same time most weren't that ideological, it was more a partisan thing.

They weren't always around in off topic, but when they did appear it was was when the politics was particularly ugly. There was a lot of them through 2016, particularly by October/November.

Its why I've said that banning people for rude words and harsh posts was never going to solve the problem, it was punishing the people responding to the real instigators.

WHat was needed all along was a focus on penalising the people who put up bad arguments and refused to respond in anything approaching good faith, and who posted partisan drive bys, not on penalising the people who got frustrated dealing with that crap.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I'm just trying to provide reasoning for why people use the OT so much.

I can't speak for other posters, but I came to dakka because I wanted a place to talk about 40k. When I moved back to WHFB, I moved to the WHFB part of the board. Then when I moved back in to Epic... well there's better sites for that game as its a more niche market.

But that whole time I've always enjoyed talking about a lot of other issues, particularly US politics. So I split my posts between the gaming sections and off topic. Over time as I stopped going to the gaming sections, I was still a part of the dakka community, and was more interested in talking politics here than elsewhere. I don't know how much this applies to other posters, but its my experience.

The special thing about US political threads is that DakkaDakka members have pretty much demonstrated through empirical evidance that many of you are unable to follow the forum rules when discussing US politics. This is logical given the extreme polarisation of the US political landscape at the moment.

This was undeniable a year ago.

What I question is whether it's still true now.

I'd bet that it is - partly because, as KK mentioned, the political landscape in the USA, and partly because...of the people who will be involved in these threads again.

Still, it is worth considering, especially if we just kick the offending parties completely out of the OT Forum if they can't behave.

I don't really have a dog in the fight, as I self selected out of the OT a long time ago. It's one of the nicer places to discuss politics on the internet, but that's such a painfully low threshold it hurts.

Modern US Politics is basically trolling, on a national scale. I'm not sure you can have a civil conversation about it, and certainly not when provocateurs have free reign.

My (non-existent) vote would be to shut it down, but really, it's existence or non-existence doesn't affect me, so feel free to disregard me.

For what it's worth, I really only discuss politics with people that can articulate to me a time in which they've change their position on a policy, and why they did so. Otherwise, we're just shouting propaganda at each other.

 Alpharius wrote:


Still, it is worth considering, especially if we just kick the offending parties completely out of the OT Forum if they can't behave.

So much winning, Charlie Sheen would OD from it...

If US politics remains a forbidden topic of discussion then in the interest of fairness you should probably go ahead and ban all political discussions period. This is primarily a wargaming site after all.

 Future War Cultist wrote:
If US politics remains a forbidden topic of discussion then in the interest of fairness you should probably go ahead and ban all political discussions period. This is primarily a wargaming site after all.

Just because one kid in the kindergarten can't play nice doesn't mean you have to takes the toys away from the all.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Galas wrote:
DakkaDakka should follow Verizon example. Do you want to be able to discuss US politics on dakkadakka? Pay a 2$/month fee and you are good to go.

Ya know, I have been on other forums with off topic forums that are only accessible to paying members.

You aren't paying for access to the OT forum, it's just only contributing members do have access to it.

I actually kind of like the idea because it keeps the poo slinging behind somewhat closed doors, so randoms don't stumble in and think "geeze, wargamers are all d-bags".

The idea of having OT for DCMs only was discussed on the mod board a while back, but given that part of the point of having the OT board is to give the masses somewhere to vent without polluting the gaming-related parts of the board, restricting it to paying members somewhat defeats the point.

Don't see an issue myself. I believe in free speech and a persons right to say anything anywhere. Easy enough to ignore a post or person if you don't like it.

I also feel that if you feel the need to kill political discussions about one country, in fairness you should kill discussion about the other ones.

If political discussion involving any other country generated the same levels of silliness, that would be a fair point.

It doesn't, so there is no problem. There is little to be gained by extending the ban to cover disussion that isn't actually causing drama.