Making this post to say I think the mods are trying too hard to moderate at times, particularly I've noticed in the Legion Imperialis N&R forum, maybe it happens in other threads but I've mostly noticed it in
LI.
I appreciate a line needs to be drawn of how far to let threads go off on a tangent before you moderate them.... I just think that line is not in a good place currently.
The extremes would be to allow zero discussion of tangents, or just letting tangents follow their natural course (assuming they don't become vitriolic).
At the moment it seems like the line is drawn in a place where there's enough space for tangents to get people interested in those discussions and then it be annoying/frustrating when the discussion is killed.
Like, an example would be the discussion about AI rules in the
LI, which came up because it was asserted that the minis for
LI should sell because the
AT/AI ones did. Now, on the one hand, it's not an AI thread, and the mod commented "if you want to continue discussing it then do so in a new thread for it". BUT, I'd assert that...
- The discussion was only a few posts away from a natural conclusion.
- Most people who are interested in Epic are tangentially interested in AI and
AT.
- It kills interaction, because while it might have been an interesting enough discussion I know if I made a new thread for it many of the participants of that discussion will not even see the new thread pop up (I'm assuming many people on this forum are like me, and just check the titles within a few subforums and have a few threads I check, I don't check the whole site regularly to see what new threads there are).
Another example would be the scale discussion earlier in the same thread.... we were literally having a scale discussion about a game whose defining feature is that it is at a particular scale, after we'd got enough information to start making good guesses at the scale, immediately after
GW just made a "news" post in WarCom about the game's scale.... and the discussion was shut down for, I dunno, maybe because a person or two was sick of the discussion even though a bunch of people were still enjoying the discussion?
Now, I totally appreciate that some N&R threads are horrible to read because there'll be 3 or 4 or 5 pages added to the discussion in a single day and only 1 post in that thread actually contains either News or Rumours, and those threads are probably a headache, but that's only the case with core
GW releases (e.g.
40k) and some excessively popular subfactions (e.g. Sphess Mareenz).... but the Legion Imperialis thread doesn't move that fast, it's mostly the same dozen or so posters, and it's not hard to skim over the parts of a thread you aren't interested in being involved in.
That last point gets at the pros and cons of moderating the discussion in a thread. Pro: Yes, tangential discussions might be off-putting users, but unless the thread is gaining 3+ pages of tangential discussions in a day then it's only a minor inconvenience to skim over the bits you aren't interested in. Con: If people get far enough into a discussion to be mentally engaged in it, it's off-putting for them to have the discussion quashed.
In the end, I just want Dakka to be a more pleasant place to be. I'm not sure what the site statistics say, but I'd guess Dakka is less popular now than it was a while back when I was following it more closely, but maybe that's my bias because I'm personally less involved. And again, maybe it's my bias, but I find Dakka is less friendly these days, to the point I took a 6 month or so "holiday" from Dakka because it was becoming a net negative in my life.... and I further find over moderation of discussion makes it even less friendly. A couple of the "Its also off topic so drop it." posts have led to me just taking a few days off the site.
I think the answer would be either to let people discuss tangents more... or go the other extreme and just stop people discussing tangents
AT ALL so that people don't get engaged in a discussion for it to be shut down.
Do what this opinion what you will, maybe the solution is simply for me to turn off Dakka and delete the bookmarks