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-Ease off the forum and thread ban button. It really should only be used for truly reprehensible posters (like, say, rape apologists or concentration camp denialists). Lift all the current forum/thread bans and start over. Ignore anyone who whines about forum banned people having a say. -Drop or rethink the "meet effort with effort" rule. Word count doesn't always mean effort, you can write a million words with zero substance, or a short concise sentence that cuts to the heart of the issue. Too often I see people just blast their opponent with logorrhea and it effectively shuts down the discussion.
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Sep 6, 2021 21:11
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Main Paineframe posted:One last thing: I think old D&D is dead for real this time. I didn't post till now in this thread because my opinions don't really fit the stated purpose of the thread - to poll D&D readers on the 'biggest problem' and suggest the name of a new moderator to fix that problem. I don't think picking a new mod will fix D&D, but what the hell, it's a free-for-all at this point. People remember this forum for the crazy posters who used to post and derail with weird arguments, and get educated by fellow posters. And get shut the gently caress down by fellow posters. Or torn to pieces with evidence, repeatedly, by fellow posters. Or who melted down explicitly and got banned - job done. Only the last required moderator effort, and that effort wasn't customised or driven by mod ideology - McCaine or Elotana were both perfectly capable of banning the same person for the same explicit rulebreaking. I'm hoping mods don't want to use bans because they see the pushback on small probations and imagine all hell will break loose if they ban the wrong person. Instead, that just creates a market for more de minimis moderation. As I said a couple of threads ago - fewer punishments, harder punishments, for good established reasons, job done. The more people try to customise moderation, and make it context-driven, and thread-based, and the less actual punishments like long probations and bans are used, the worse the experience is for the userbase and the worse moderation must be for the mods. Threadbans are effort and don't address actual bad behaviour. Contextual bans that don't break well-established rules serve simply to support accusations of inequity and clique bias, and if that wasn't true at the start of a mod's tenure, it'll be true by the end, because staring into a vat of seething hatred will radicalise anyone. And most of all, the more moderation of any type, the more chilling effect on the forum. You can't moderate D&D back to being its nostalgic rose-tinted heyday. It can't exist today - not in a world where posters have Twitter and Discord to get their kicks for six hours, and not in any world, because it wasn't ever some perfect bastion of debate. What you can do is stop trying to drive the discussion from the modseat, and let posters who can follow a sparse ruleset do the work for you. There's more of them. It scales better. And of course, adding one new, gleaming, golden mod can't serve the argument I've just made, because all they can do is inherent in the title - they can do more moderation. Which deepens the problem. Cefte fucked around with this message at 21:16 on Sep 6, 2021 |
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Sep 6, 2021 21:14
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I think anyone who regularly posts in CSPAM or even halfway so, if made mod, will be run out by this forum who will come up with all sorts of crap to sling at them. As much as I like Willa or yltlaya or joepinetree (who's taken themselves out of the running anyway), I think their tenure will be short-lived. You can't change a forum by installing moderators not liked by the userbase. I really wish the neutral moderator idea would be given a bit more spin because, sure, they'd always be a bit behind on context and may make poor decisions based on that, but they'd be tabula rasa in terms of expectations of users. Yeah, that'd probably quickly impact CSPAM users who like to shitpost in here, but it'd also snuff out stuff like the rape apology stuff quicker, and at the end of the day, it'd be the best step towards what D&D claims to be, a forum known more for its effort than its specific politics. It'd be like when g0m improved GBS 2.0 for a hot second. But if that's not on the table, that's not on the table. If it just ends up being one of the most prolific regulars around here (the accelerationist option pushed by a lot of people cynically or enthusiastically on here), I doubt I'll feel excited to even post sporadically on here, but maybe that's for the best. I doubt this thread or even necessarily the mod selection will decide the One True Fate of where this forum is going, but it does need to be decided, is D&D a liberal forum or an effort post forum because it can't be both. And a lot of the sentiment in here from the people who post here the most seems to be a gleeful advocacy for a liberal forum, though one they get to pretend is an effort post forum or such. Who am I or anyone else to take that away from them? It just sucks because many forums on here are the best places on the internet to talk about their chosen topics: Sports, anime, television, music, even our flame war thread is a class above its equivalents on reddit and such. True, you can find political shitposting on Twitter, but I still think it's A+ political shitposting. Which makes it all the more disappointing when our politics forum is just the type of thing you can find in an MSNBC comments section. Expecting the political effort posting thread to be a vanguard of conversation, where you can get the finest intellectualism about centrism, leftism, conservatism, while being fairly chill and impersonal, may be a bit much to expect, but so too is chill places to talk about so much on here. It just feels like a victim of a ruined society, even though it's never been great, has always been a snake pit. When I was more moderate back in the early 2010s I avoided this place because I thought it too malicious. Now it's just too malicious the other way. Ah well. So it goes.
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Sep 6, 2021 21:14
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You shouldn't pull a mod from here. I even like some of the folk who have been suggested but D&D is just toxic at this point and any decent modding is going to have to come from outside. Pull some poor bastard from Pet Island who can't even remember who ran in 2020, give them the mission to ban every aggressive rear end in a top hat they see and just let 'em loose without any consideration about ideology or clique. You'll lose a lot of loud and potentially popular voices. But what ends up left would be a much better forum. We've had forums full of angry toxic people before (Hey there Games!) and it turns out when you prune the shitheads, a lot of people pop up who didn't want to post before because they didn't want someone raging at them over bullshit. Games is incredibly chill now, and weird aggressive behavior is dealt with by the community giving weirdos the side eye more than it is by heavy-handed mods. Here, weird aggressive poo poo gets you cheered on and being angry is held up as some sort of proof of ideological purity. But D&D wasn't always like that. It used to be the dorky pedant forum where poo poo stirring and internet rage were called out for what they were.
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Sep 6, 2021 21:22
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The people that seem to get banned the most have this funhouse mirror view of D&D. Like it's some grand ideological battle between good and evil with these debates where they're getting banned for "please don't torture orphans to death  " and the evil, wicked neoliberal mods want more threads like "Exciting New Economist Article About The Rape-Based Economy" and "Fabricating Testimony Against Criminal Defendants For Fun And Profit!" Maybe some QCS thread in the future they can bring those threads up since they seem like the sort of thing most reasonable people would object to.The Usual Suspects are critical about the Democratic Party (or in a bravura show of witticism, Democrat Party) but they're pretty much critical of everyone and looking for any excuse to start a fight. But no there's got to be some colossal conspiracy involving the CIA and a bunch of pedophiles all conspiring to make them stop posting in D&D. The CIA also backed AOC bringing Green New Deal legislation to the floor and Obama singlehandedly stopped the Glorious Revolution from happening by encouraging the NBA players to play given sufficient COVID precautions. That's not some political position that they're bravely defending, that's making up bullshit so they're not just screaming at people unprovoked. Regardless, I don't really care much about who gets picked as mod. There's going to be the same aggro yet again and then a QCS thread about how through using an Ouija board to contact Vilerat they found out that *rolls dice* Willa Rodgers *spins wheel* is a sex tourist in *throws dart at map* Guinea-Bissau. Permaban her, apologize to them for her vile calumnies of the brave combat rapists of the People's Liberation Army, wash, rinse, repeat.
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Sep 6, 2021 21:35
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1337JiveTurkey posted:The people that seem to get banned the most have this funhouse mirror view of D&D. Like it's some grand ideological battle between good and evil with these debates where they're getting banned for "please don't torture orphans to death Lmao I nominate this weirdo to be mod.
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Sep 6, 2021 21:40
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thehandtruck posted:what if nobody could see each other's names in d&d. mods too. serious suggestion. I think that it probably isn't a long-term solution, but it might have interesting effects. It would be a worthwhile experiment, particularly if it could be limited to a specific thread (not necessarily USNews). In general I think the internet has already been a great study on the impact of anonymity on social behavior, so I'm a bit dubious. But I've certainly never regretted turning off avatars, for example. I think one particular thing worth exploring would be offering mods and admins anonymous accounts to prevent doxxing.
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Sep 6, 2021 21:43
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In many ways this thread has fittingly become a microcosm of the problems with D&D as a whole. We've got armchair diagnosing of mental issues, attribution of the worst traits to Posters We Don't Like and the use of Liberal as a slur that used to only be heard on those AM radio shows that that one coworker would always listen to. If this was the discussion of toppings on a pizza knives would be drawn even before the first mention of pineapple. One thing I often see is "I looked at the post that got a sixer and it wasn't that bad" and this is something that very much can and probably will be something that sounds bad to an outsider. But then if you look at the previous handful of posts by that same person each one Wasn't Bad Enough, but tolerating people who test the lines constantly does not end well. If I have any one piece of advise to give now it's to not take this thread and it's suggestions and claims as absolutely correct (some of which is very much contradicting others) but rather look into things. Just read a page here and a page there of those troublesome threads. If you come across someone that got probed or (far more rarely) banned and the post itself doesn't seem that bad, check their posting history in the thread, or even see where else and what they have been posting in other places. That can give you a better feel for the poster. Maybe they're always a bit abrasive, or maybe they're bombing the thread to get a reaction. Almost everyone claims innocence before the judge after all.
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Sep 6, 2021 21:50
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The reason liberal is now used as a slur by the left is because the world moved. In the wrong direction. And some people tried to act like they’re in the same place they always were. Like nothings changed. Like democracy isn’t collapsing as an institution. That is why liberal is now a slur.
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Sep 6, 2021 22:00
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I have thought for a while how to say this without making it sound like I'm attacking CSPAM, because I genuinely like it and am glad it exists, and I like and agree with a ton of cspam regulars about many issues outside of DND modding. So I guess with the qualifying language out of the way, I think there's definitely some culture war stuff that results primarily from the fact that there's a good number of cross posters from CSPAM in DND, and not much of the opposite. And some of that is due to the nature of CSPAM as LF2.0 or fyad-lite, where modding and probes can be done for comedy reasons and poo poo's more relaxed. How are u can wander in there and make some bland post about Obama and end up probe'd for being annoying and no one bats an eye or gives a poo poo, because it's funny. There are some great informative threads in there too but the signal to noise ratio seems about as good as any other fyad or fyad lite, at least at first glance. I guess my question then is why we need two politics forums if one of them wants to be the dominate voice in both spaces. If both spaces generally agree with each other on "things suck and more leftist policies would make them better" then why exactly do we need two spaces on how to debate how we get there? I thought making CSPAM a top level forum was supposed to magically fix this but it seems to have done gently caress all. Also since apparently stealth mods or IK's can be scary, if you don't know I'm currently IKing in the DND covid thread. My golden rule is don't be an rear end in a top hat to each other, and I have reinstated the pet tax as covid news continues to be depressing as gently caress. I don't have many probes to my name and none since returning to IK that thread, and I hope to keep it that way. Buttons are a last resort or reserved for especially heinous behavior, specific examples being threats of violence or doxxing, but there definitely has to be some flex in there. The point is you're welcome to disagree but I will step in and ask people to behave if you start tearing into each other like animals for no apparent reason. Complaints about tone policing can go in the round file; this is a shared space and if you want to stay here you can try to be less of an rear end in a top hat to the other people in this place. I think it's funny and fine to roast people for wildly lovely viewpoints though, (Hi TDD, always nice to see you pop up in feedback threads). I was obviously trying to have a laugh with the last comment, but honestly there's something to be said for the lack of actually opposing views leading to people getting more and more worked up over minor differences of opinion. e: Complaints about specific subject matter threads seem particularly bizarre to me because when people says it "kills discussion" it feels like they are tacitly admitting that what they really want is a big built in audience for their rantings and ravings. If you can't get anyone to follow you back to a subject matter thread it's probably because what you have to say isn't all that interesting or you're being too much of an rear end in a top hat. Professor Beetus fucked around with this message at 22:16 on Sep 6, 2021 |
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Sep 6, 2021 22:02
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I think the biggest problem is the mods treating D&D like their own weird bonsai garden while also trying to maintain an aura of respectable impartiality. Discussions they dislike are immediately clamped down on and shunted off to their own threads, or are outright banned. and users that argue against their consensus without breaking rules are harshly punished at the first opportunity(Ralph in particular is notorious for this but everyone's had a go at it at some point). This has resulted in a community that feels as if they are under personal attack purely from someone who regularly posts in a different forum, also posting in this one. They're "looking to start a fight" or "trolling" simply because they're arguing in the argument forum. This mentality is why it took literal admin intervention for a thread about sexual assault to even be allowed to exist, before then any desire to discuss the issue was shouted down as just wanting to "own your posting enemies". The idea that someone could care about an issue and have it NOT be a part of some weird internet grudge is inherently alien to D&D moderators. At the same time, they desperately wish to be seen as respectable and smart debate club moderators. Long posts that say nothing are often given more weight in an argument just for being long, and outright getting mad is a punishable offense even if what triggered an outburst was a constant deluge of petty sniping in a Very Respectable Big Post. It's less debate and more whoever looks the calmest and most respectable wins. I agree with the idea that there's really no way to fix this other than an actual, hardline decision being made about what D&D is actually about, because without that this is just going to keep happening as mods can just swing between mission statements as it suits them and do whatever they want.
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Sep 6, 2021 22:08
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Cefte posted:Ideas die twice, the last time they are practised, and the last time they are mentioned. yeah if there was ever a vision for dnd, it was basically this. quote:I'm hoping mods don't want to use bans because they see the pushback on small probations and imagine all hell will break loose if they ban the wrong person. Instead, that just creates a market for more de minimis moderation. As I said a couple of threads ago - fewer punishments, harder punishments, for good established reasons, job done. I think people forget that nothing ever lasts forever. This applies to dnd as much as to the site as a whole. Personally, I think a lot of the grasping for some dnd of old is just pissing into the wind and it's overdue that dnd is handled in the context of what it currently is and not in terms of some idealistic vision of what dnd may have once been. ---- Also, apologies to cefte because I'm now using his reasonable post to springboard into something else All the no bans, 'please use thread bans and, if necessary forum bans' poo poo came down from admins and it's completely been an abject failure and any arguable success of it has just been as a bandaid that could've just as easily have been dealt with with the exact same mod buttons used on the entire rest of the site. Personally I hope dnd could have concrete rules that are enforced with the same punishments as are used on the entire rest of the site. I don't remotely get why dnd alone needs to not use the normal suite of punishments beyond there being, obviously some deep distrust of the dnd mods by the admins and/or jeff. This gets doubly stupid because now there's jeff/admin pushback against literally the exact same thread and forum bans that the admins themselves specifically requested dnd mods use. No one moderating dnd was saying 'hey we should find some half rear end way of severely but also strangely lightly punishing people.' No, we asked 'can we ban these people? why can't we ban these people?' and the response was 'use thread and forum bans first.' I hope finding some mods helps, god knows dnd is in need of help, but you know what dnd needs? it needs admins to either participate in dnd enough that they are informed of what happens in the politics forums or to shut the gently caress up and go away and trust that the people you saw fit to put in charge of the place know what they're doing. This poo poo where you tell the dnd mods to do something, then undermine it and refuse to back them up while continuing to expect them to put up with a dozen sources of toxicity and brigading and dumbass qcs witch hunts is why you can't find anyone to moderate dnd (or cspam) Sorry to do this publicly, I know sa's admin team is generally actually, tangibly invested in this site not sucking and I genuinely appreciate y'all for that, but the entire policy towards the politics forums needs to be re-examined from the ground up because it's been a total loving failure, both in dnd and in cspam
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Sep 6, 2021 22:08
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i think at least one admin should actually try to read d&d, threads like this will never ever get you a real picture of how the forum actually works. it just becomes a battleground for forum warfare, with posters on their chosen sides yelling angrily at real or imagined sins of the other side. there's also the problem in d&d that half the time no matter how mods apply their powers, they will be accused of bias no matter who they probe or for what reason. i have absolutely no idea what kind of people should be modded in d&d because i wouldn't wish that fate on my worst enemy. and i think that's a massive issue - only people who can withstand all the insults and constant calls for demodding will be willing to do the job, and it probably isn't a good thing that politics mods that last are only those who are too stubborn to give up. idk how to solve that beyond admins actually paying attention to d&d more often than in threads like this and being willing to back up d&d mods when they get yelled at for overblown stuff (and be able to figure out if the yelling is actually about a real issue and not because of forum warfare bullshit), but if admins don't want to read it (very understandable), its impossible to get an actually good idea of what to do with d&d and its modding i'm tired of constant idiotic forum wars and the active hostility on the very concept of modding by some posters. there are posting places with little to no modding all over the internet, and those pretty universally suck so much edit: very much agree with herstory's above post SpiritOfLenin fucked around with this message at 22:13 on Sep 6, 2021 |
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Sep 6, 2021 22:10
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I genuinely think all the active threads in this forum should be moved to either GBS or CSPAM depending on topic, and the forum should be deleted, because it doesn't seem like people actually want a place to debate and discuss. Look at all the dead threads on page two: libertarianism, metoo, immigration, political philosophy, somebody made a post in the Marxism thread this week and apologized for necroing! These are topics that there is a lot of debate or discussion to be had about, but clearly there isn't actually appetite for it. If people want to shitpost about the news or ragepost about the world, there are other forums where that's the point, and trying to punish them for doing that in D&D seems both hopeless and pointless. Editing my post to add that stack ranking mods and IKs as suggested below is the stupidest and worst possible solution to this problem, one that only an idiot or a sociopath could genuinely put forward. Muscle Tracer fucked around with this message at 02:39 on Sep 7, 2021 |
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Sep 6, 2021 22:30
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modding d&d isn't some impossible task that needs to burn people out. it's pretty easy to just punish the stuff that matters and not punish the stuff that doesn't. mods have deliberately been making their role harder for themselves by sweating all the small stuff for some reason. threadbans etc have always existed, only now they're part of this idiotic codified 'ramping' system, one of the dumbest ideas from the past little while. it turns out moderation isn't a science, and acting like a word filter doesn't solve anything. i've only ever seen bad probations from handsome ralph. it'd be nice if a fail mod could be dropped before their inevitable final meltdown, for once.
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Sep 6, 2021 22:32
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hmm, yeah definately reading all that
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Sep 6, 2021 22:34
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As ever, I do not think the forum needs more moderators or moderation, I do not think moderators improve the forum and I do not think any of them contribute through being moderators and that trying to get some new rear end in a top hat in to wave the mod buttons around a bunch in some new and arbitrary fashion is not going to improve anything. Politics is necessarily emotive, miserable, and impossible to compartmentalize for people it affects or who spend a lot of time on the subject, so necessarily posts about it are going to be equally heated. Trying to keep a lid on that is necessarily going to be a constant, draining effort for which nobody will thank you. You can not make people stop being angry about things that affect their lives and you also can not stop them from expressing that when they post. Or at least you can not do those things without just banning them which will necessarily reduce the scope of discussion only to things people do not get angry about at which point I do not think you have a politics forum any more.
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Sep 6, 2021 22:37
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Demod handsome Ralph, a guy so bad at modding one of the other mods had to step in and tell him to stay out of the metoo thread because of how lovely and unhelpful his actions were Mod some more people, nobody is impartial and pretending to be is ridiculous so just go wild and pull some names out of a hat or something My follow up suggestion is that anyone who writes this many words about moderation should be banned some plague rats fucked around with this message at 00:46 on Sep 7, 2021 |
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Sep 6, 2021 22:49
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I stand by what I originally said but would like to add
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Sep 6, 2021 22:54
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If there's one thing that the admin team takes from this thread, I hope it's that adding mods to D&D is not going to address the deeper issues that cause the politics forums on SA to generate tons of toxicity, most of the reports, many QCS threads, and nobody wants to moderate them. I'm going to try and summarize my impression of the arguments being made in this thread as neutrally as possible, there seem to be two main thrusts: 1) The problems with D&D moderation are ideological. The current mod team uses buttons to punish people they don't like or disagree with, in particular to shut down criticism of the Democratic Party and drive leftist viewpoints out of D&D. 2) The problems with D&D moderation are structural. The rules and thread organization don't match the vision of what users want D&D to be. The mods are not given enough support or backing from admins to work towards that vision. Bigger picture, the Internet landscape has changed with Reddit, Twitter, Discord etc and we have a large, highly active FYAD-lite politics forum that competes for users' attention. Obviously from my posting I think it's mostly the second. Adding mods will help, but if the deeper structural problems remain we're just going to have this same conversation again in a year or less. In that time more people will leave because the current situation ain't great. We're not going to reclaim the "glory days" of old D&D but I think it could be a whole lot better. Again, I hope what the admin team takes from this is that this is the beginning of a conversation on how to improve D&D; it should not end with adding a mod or two. I strongly encourage one or two admins to read D&D a good bit over the next month or two to better understand how it works (or doesn't) and where issues with moderation and structure lie. Then talk to the D&D (and CSPAM!) mod team and reassess.
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Sep 6, 2021 22:54
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Well, my final thoughts are: Effortposting doesn't mean you have to write a five-paragraph essay on the subject, one or two well written lines can suffice. I've always liked the calmer, more deliberative discussions which used to be the norm in dnd. It's like dressing up in business attire to go to work, it puts you in a different state of mind, and I think that's something worth preserving or restoring in dnd. A lot of the posters in this thread can't seem to understand or accept that sometimes topics are banned, not because the mods agree with one side or the other, but because these are contentious issues that absolutely dominate any sort of general thread, that we've all said our piece, and none of us are going to change the others mind, and we're tired of seeing it. It's not personal and please just take it to the dedicated thread. (Disclaimer: I probably read one or two cspam threads, I tend not to pay attention to where a thread is once I add it to Bookmarks.  )It seems like there's a lot of people who are mad dnd exists and is different than cspam. You don't see a ton of, say, TFR posters mad that TradGames exists. I stopped reading dnd for almost two years in 2018 because I was going into a real bleak place mentally because of how terrible things were and are, I only came back late last year. It seems like theres at least a few posters who are mad that not everyone wants to be as brutally crackpinged as they are. It seems like there are posters who can't stand to let us have a quieter political forum. That they are being SILENCED! because not everyone is as doombrained as they are and doesn't really want to hear it. I don't know, maybe make dnd a subforum of CSPAM, let them have the big special boy forum. Maybe it is time to delete Debate and Discussion if the moderators can't bring it back to what it used to be. I don't really know anymore. Fritz the Horse posted:2) The problems with D&D moderation are structural. The rules and thread organization don't match the vision of what users want D&D to be. The mods are not given enough support or backing from admins to work towards that vision. Bigger picture, the Internet landscape has changed with Reddit, Twitter, Discord etc and we have a large, highly active FYAD-lite politics forum that competes for users' attention. Then why not just post there? Edit: The CSPAM/D&D conflict is also probably driven, at least in part, by Bookmark-based thread browsing, because it's hard sometime to remember what subforum you are in. Therefore, another suggestion to fix D&D: Kill bookmark-based browsing.  Edit: FINAL EDIT. I agree with almost everything Thorn Wishes Talon posted below, except: Thorn Wishes Talon posted:- Ban all tweets (both tweets themselves and screenshots) in D&D, and force people to post articles instead, along with the regular sourcing requirements (summary, commentary, etc.) Posting Tweets is an easy to post a link that at least has a synopsis of what you're clicking on before you do. Don't ban posting tweets, ban posting lovely tweets. Edit: I lied. Neurolimal posted:a lot of C-SPAM enmity & outrage would dissipate if the posters no longer saw D&D as "the serious political forum, occupied unjustly by liberals" and more "Democrat Boot Camp". Agents are GO! fucked around with this message at 23:39 on Sep 6, 2021 |
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Sep 6, 2021 23:16
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World Famous W posted:I stand by what I originally said but would like to add Request granted
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Sep 6, 2021 23:22
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When I hear people arguing that leftists frequently get probated, thread-banned and forum-banned in D&D because our mods hate dissenting opinions and have it out for anyone who criticizes Democrats, I'm reminded of this conservative 'gotcha': Change this to "if D&D mods don't discriminate against leftists, then why do leftist posters constantly get probated and banned?" and you have this dispute in a nutshell. And just like how the above image is actually a hilarious self-own, so are the criticisms of bias leveled at D&D mods: not unfounded, necessarily — after all, nobody can be completely impartial — but also not the actual reason why certain posters (who are actually a small minority of leftist posters, and overwhelmingly belong to a specific clique/faction) keep getting dinged. The fact of the matter is that, contrary to popular belief, it's actually pretty drat hard to get banned from D&D, or even from a single thread. One has to be a particularly persistent and intentionally aggravating shithead within a relatively short span of time, get ramped repeatedly, have none of the mods miss the fact that they are on ramp, and finally after all that, the mods have to discuss it amongst themselves and agree that a ban is indeed warranted. Before you start to argue that the last step is actually the easiest, please keep in mind that this is more or less the same mod team who agreed to make Majorian an IK after he came back from his self-imposed exile, then defended his calm-hitler style psychopathic "moderation" for months, until he finally slipped and got caught openly welcoming and then acting on probation suggestions from succzone posters (some of whom are now nominating posters like willa, joepinetree and ytlaya, for the same reason: so that they can slip them suggestions behind the scenes). It is also the same mod team that has given posters like 'Yeowch!!! My Balls', VitalSigns and 'sexpig by night' dozens of second chances to improve before finally realizing the futility of it. That is to say, they have been incredibly tolerant to a fault, and that tolerance has been abused to hell and back, until recently with Ralph taking a much more strict approach. That's the real reason some people here are speaking out against Ralph now: because he's very active, very thorough and also has no patience for abusive pricks. Why does it seem like he's biased? I don't know, maybe you should ask Charlie Kirk. In addition, contrary to some of the arguments made in this thread, D&D isn't this weird centrist safe space that is filled to the brim with staunch defenders of liberalism and the Democratic Party. Indeed, both the Biden administration and popular Democratic politicians have received, and continue to receive, widespread criticism and even condemnation across a broad range of issues. Just to give a few examples, the immigration thread over the past eight months has been the source of many heated arguments, but virtually every single poster in there who can credibly be described as a liberal has voiced strong dissatisfaction with the administration's handling of refugees. Similarly, the administration's lackluster coronavirus response gets criticized regularly, and liberal posters have overwhelmingly expressed their desire to see serial sex-pest Andrew Cuomo, formerly one of the most prominent Democrats in the nation, gone. So no, criticizing the Democratic Party is not frowned upon. What are frowned upon are behaviors like failing to actually read the articles one is posting, not caring about the absolute shittiness of a source as long as it makes Democrats look bad (including alt-right fake news sources, for gently caress's sake!), refusing to back down when these things are pointed out and instead blaming the other side of being rape/genocide/whatever apologists, pedophiles, etc. Such conduct sucks the oxygen out of the room, burns out everyone and makes the place unreadable. It also further radicalizes the posters making those terrible arguments and fuels nasty feedback loops. For example, some people say poo poo like "well, Trump did <illegal thing> and got away with it, and so should Biden!" and then get mad when they find out that most people in D&D hate left-wing fascism as much as they hate right-wing fascism. This then becomes a "Democrats love  and don't care if people suffer!" argument that turns into "Democrats actually like it when people suffer!" which turns into "Democrats jack off to people's suffering!" and then next thing you know, posters who have come to internalize these beliefs and let that fact shine through in their posting have gotten probated/banned and gone to QCS to complain about terrible moderators who love rape, genocide, concentration camps, are actually CIA, etc. It probably looks completely and absolutely nuts to any outside observer, because it is.From my perspective, it is quite okay to disagree with people in D&D. It is not okay, however, to be a disagreeable rear end in a top hat. If you are the latter, and keep getting Mellow Seas posted:I would also eliminate from consideration anybody who couldn't follow Athanatos's very simple directives as to who should post in this thread and when, and also anybody who frequently expresses disdain for D&D elsewhere on the forums. I agree with the last bit. In order to moderate a space effectively, one has to respect it and the posters in it. Nobody who hates it and looks down upon its residents (such as by mocking them elsewhere) would make a good moderator, and it should be incredibly obvious why. joepinetree posted:All of you who mentioned me, thanks. But I don't want to be a mod. Not in a reverse psychology type of way, but for real. D&D already has the ideal mod, ardennes. If anything, he should be the only mod. "Ah, but he never probates anyone." Exactly. OwlFancier posted:As ever, I do not think the forum needs more moderators or moderation, I do not think moderators improve the forum and I do not think any of them contribute through being moderators and that trying to get some new rear end in a top hat in to wave the mod buttons around a bunch in some new and arbitrary fashion is not going to improve anything. Politics is necessarily emotive, miserable, and impossible to compartmentalize for people it affects or who spend a lot of time on the subject, so necessarily posts about it are going to be equally heated. Trying to keep a lid on that is necessarily going to be a constant, draining effort for which nobody will thank you. You can not make people stop being angry about things that affect their lives and you also can not stop them from expressing that when they post. Or at least you can not do those things without just banning them which will necessarily reduce the scope of discussion only to things people do not get angry about at which point I do not think you have a politics forum any more. If you want an unmoderated discussion space, you can always go to 4chan or one of its offshoots. Alternatively, CSPAM exists, and actually welcomes precisely the type of rageposting you seem to support. Main Paineframe posted:But there's the loving thing, no one wants to post effortposts anymore. We still have a few effort posters left. Most of them, though, probably feel strongly discouraged from sharing their expertise and knowledge, because there's an "onsite offsite" (i.e. CSPAM) where they get mocked, ridiculed and even targeted. Aggressive anti-intellectualism by a contingent of CSPAM posters, who have radicalized themselves and each other to the point of sheer lunacy, has had a strong dampening effect on level of effort and knowledge-sharing in D&D. For example, up until a couple of weeks ago the Media Literacy thread, which is one of the few effort threads we've had in a long time and is a fantastic resource, had a mock equivalent in CSPAM (same title and all) where people were blind quoting D&D posters, then coming into the actual thread and making GBS threads on it, then going back to the mock thread to laugh about it, rinse and repeat. That mock thread was allowed to exist for many pages, because who the gently caress knows. Then it finally got gassed (because mocking naturally turned into targeted harassment), but none of its residents got banned or even forum-banned despite a very clear pattern of severe inter-forum abuse. A few of them have actually been unironically nominated as D&D moderator here. (To be clear, nobody gives a gently caress if you make fun of someone's posts elsewhere on the forum, but these posters were also actively brigading the thread they were mocking in an effort to sabotage it, and worse.) In such an environment, where admins seem to insist on giving the lightest punishment they can reasonably get away with (or Jeff will allow) to even the worst abusers on SA, and others will cheer those posters on and vote to empower them, why should anyone out themselves as an expert and share their knowledge with the rest of the forum? Anyway, my final thoughts: - Add at least two more mods, ideally more - Add one or more admins who follow politics and don't mind reading D&D and CSPAM - Ban all tweets (both tweets themselves and screenshots) in D&D, and force people to post articles instead, along with the regular sourcing requirements (summary, commentary, etc.)
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Sep 6, 2021 23:22
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Speaking as someone who used to read and post plenty in D&D, but has gradually shifted away from the forum and towards C-SPAM, I feel that the forum has an underlying identity problem, where a large segment of its regular posters are center-left to liberal, but obviously want to be the esteemed, objective, educated & rational politics forum. It subconsciously yearns for partisan fervor, but also wants to be a valuable resource for informing oneself on politics. C-SPAM threads this by being very open & secure about its leanings, and because a lot of computer touchers still on this forum are leftist or left-sympathetic, it's eaten D&D's lunch (especially as far as usercount is concerned); politics is too heady and niche to have an irreverent and uninformative fyad-lite, so it's evolved into "the politics forum for leftist commentary, informative updates on political goings-ons, and casual discussion", and D&D is...the politics forum for commentary, informative updates on political goings-ons, and tedious discussion. Some threads survive this just fine by having their subjects be so esoteric that there's minimal passion to get in the way of posting some quotes and resources, others like USNews thrive by being unabashedly liberal & most posters have reached an acceptance with this, and then the rest seems to decay. The China thread, for example, tends to woefully lag behind the Eurasia thread on political topics, and is the least active of the GBS, D&D, and C-SPAM China threads. Be it because there's certain posters that nobody wants to engage with, heavy-handed moderation, or just no oxygen for neoliberal discussion when there's the fervor of the "weird gen-X conservatives who want to talk about chinese women having peanut brittle pussies" thread in GBS, and the optimistic "expats and maoists eager to signal boost anything good China accomplishes" thread in C-SPAM. I'm not sure if there's any real moderation change that could effectively reverse the decline. If I had to go with a solution I'd earnestly, and without any irony, recommend Raenir Salazar and How Are U as moderators. Embrace the identity, and honestly a lot of C-SPAM enmity & outrage would dissipate if the posters no longer saw D&D as "the serious political forum, occupied unjustly by liberals" and more "Democrat Boot Camp". Neurolimal fucked around with this message at 23:38 on Sep 6, 2021 |
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Sep 6, 2021 23:27
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How about less moderation? Do we really need moderators to curate and shape the discussion in each thread? I don't see why probations need to be issued for anything short of NWS/bigotry, goons have been good at self-policing for a long time now
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Sep 6, 2021 23:36
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as someone who's never sent a dnd related report, i honestly don't give a poo poo about the supposed dnd and cspam cliques, i just hate when it drives white noise poo poo posting. i appreciate posters with a non-consensus view when they post links to well written news articles or when they write thoughtful critiques of consensus policy. i don't appreciate posters who link to bad clickbait articles and use the misleading headline as a jumping off point to win fights against their posting foes, or who make a drive by post consisting of a single sentence using terms they know it will get a rise out of their posting foes. these days i just rapidly scroll through most threads stopping to read posts with links or longer posts because the majority of the shorter posts are just going to be circular slap fights. i don't think the answer is to turn dnd into some super formal debating forum, but we already have a quality forum for combative ironic shitposting about politics and if i wanted to read that type of stuff i'd just go over there. i think the current moderation can be too heavy handed and has some ideological bias, but also a lot of the people who were forum banned would consistently post in a way that inspired pages and pages of grudge posting that sucked all the oxygen out of threads for hours or days at a time and was annoying as poo poo to have to wade through. a lot of these arguments are about things were there's no way to bring things to a definitive end, and the same posters will bring out the same arguments and the same insults with the same opponents till the end of time. as a third party, that's tedious as poo poo to read i again recommend paracaidas for mod solely because i appreciate their posts, even when they don't fully align with my politics. whatever solution gets put in place, i hope we get to a place where non-biased mods can encourage posters who are posting new material reporting on conditions in the border detention facility while discouraging posters on both sides who want to relitigate the minutia of what to call them for the umpteenth time.
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Sep 7, 2021 00:02
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Verus posted:Ytlaya and joepinetree should be mods.
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Sep 7, 2021 00:09
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I adminned a forum of hormonal preggos & new moms several years ago and as horrible as it was at least I didn’t have to change the diapers of their whimpering toddlers. Seeing the mewling of some of the old-timers & regs itt shows me how much I’d hate modding here, particularly given the lack of self-reflection, and even worse, the utter projection. (  It isn’t c-spammers who run to QCS crying EMERGENCY! POSTS ARE MAKING MY TUMMY HURT! SEND HELP NOW! or who demand that topics that do the same be siloed or shut down.) And that’s leaving aside the issue of having to work alongside & moderate those whom I despise & who equally despise me. No, I don’t want to argue with Handsome Ralph whether jokes about Hunter Biden are impugning his military service, as short & scandal-ridden as it may have been. No, I don’t want to read GJB’s multi-edited & added-on theses on whether a poster deserves a thread ban. It’s difficult enough having to read their posts in forum threads. So as schadenfreude-laden as getting modded for dnd would be, especially anywhere close to 9/12 never forget, and as flattering as it was to read my nominations, I’d sooner spend the rest of what’s left of my life rubbing my eyeballs with sandpaper and chewing glass than serve as forum cop in dnd. 
Willa Rogers fucked around with this message at 00:36 on Sep 7, 2021 |
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Sep 7, 2021 00:17
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This is clearly the most toxic forum on this website, and the repeated attempts to fix the problem has proven that the problem is too much moderation, not too few moderators. Every time there are new rules and new policies, it just gets worse and at this point I'd agree that there's no turning back without a complete purge of the mod team and a rework of the existing ruleset. But neither of those are going to happen So, I nominate How Are U and Thorn Wishes Talon for new mods.
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Sep 7, 2021 00:34
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I'm not convinced that a new mod, or some kind of mod code of ethics would change D&D. I think it's a culture thing, something that comes from the bottom up. Maybe we should all just decide not to be huge jerks to each other, and hyperbolically misconstrue everyone's posts in the worst possible light? Is it really that hard not to be inflammatory and sarcastic all the time? EDIT: Like it's not hard. I don't consider anyone on the forums to be my enemy, or whatever. Sure there's a few people whose posting styles are kind of annoying to have to read, so I either just scroll past them or ignore them if particularly odious. Maybe it should be a forum rule? "Treat others like you would like to be treated." DrSunshine fucked around with this message at 00:51 on Sep 7, 2021 |
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Sep 7, 2021 00:44
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Oh wow one post okay well I hope it's okay if I talk about three things in it. Hope that's not against the rules or will get me probated or whatever. Here goes: 1. This is an idea that I kind of hit upon a while back in a QCS thread. It doesn't apply to D&D but I was mostly thinking of D&D as I discussed it. The response was of course mostly the usual QCS white noise shitposts, but there were a few that seemed to like it and also some constructive feedback. I'll try to summarize it here as best I can and try to address some of the concerns about it as well since I won't get a second crack at it. What I proposed is: Every so often (I said once every quarter) the community of a forum ranks their mods and IKs. Each person basically just ranks them from who they think is doing the best job, to who they think is doing the worst. Once the voting is over, the worst-ranked mod is demodded, and a new mod is added to the forum by whatever means the leadership usually does it. That's it - I think you do that and you end up burning off a lot of the hate directed at the leadership of this forum, and in turn you lower the temperature around here in general, and that means more meaningful discussion. People will feel like they have some control over the process, because they will have some control over the process, but at the same time it's hardly handing over the reins: four mods a year, that modmins replace with whoever they want? That's really not, in the grand scheme of things and even if this idea totally doesn't work out, a dictatorship of the poster complete with posting gulags, or whatever the hell it actually is that's got the administration of this god-damned hellsite utterly loving terrified of meaningful community engagement of governance. I think we can do this on a few of the sub-forums here, but none of them need it as much as D&D (CSPAM would be second IMO). My rationale for doing it this way is: One problem with D&D and to a slightly lesser extent CSPAM, is it's very difficult for the community to successfully lobby to get rid of a mod that is really harming them and that they just can't loving stand. Flavius is a good recent example of this in CSPAM, where it took like what - two megathreads and several smaller threads in QCS over the course of a month to finally be rid of him? Handsome Ralph is a another good example and the feedback on him in this thread seems to pretty clearly dominate on the negative side of things - however there are a few posts which also praise him which I'm sure will be used to keep him around for the time being. Most of the time the only way to "get rid" of a bad mod is just wait for them to finally, mercifully flame out cf Main Paineframe. Such is the way of things here. And the other thing is that for all the talk of giving the community here a say in governance (or whatever you want to call it) there isn't a lot of it, and when there is some, it's ad hoc, half-assed (yes I'm talking about this thread, but not only this thread), and seldom. Community engagement will solve a lot of problems, but merely the appearance of community engagement will not and in fact will likely just make things worse - you have to actually do it. Like "give me some suggestions for mods and I'll make one of them a mod" what the gently caress even is that? Like you know that's almost indistinguishable from just picking whoever you wanted in the first place, right? Anyone you were going to make a mod before asking for suggestions was likely to be well-known enough that someone would suggest them anyway, and based on what you've already said in this thread Athanatos, it seems we can take it for granted that you're not basing your choice on the number of suggestions you receive for whoever. So you should have just saved us all a bunch of time and picked the person you wanted in the first place, or that the mods suggested to you, or whatever. All of which is to say, it's pretty clear that the leadership here isn't willing to hand over control of moderation decisions to the community to any meaningful degree. And maybe that's fine! Actually, that doesn't bother me a great deal - the hypocrisy and doublespeak you engage in does, but not just, you know doing stuff you think is right without asking about it first. Not really. In fact, the truth is that while a bad mod can be very harmful, the difference between a mediocre mod and an excellent mod isn't all that great, really, and if the admins just kept the moderation team here mediocre we'd all be much better off. What we need isn't a process for the community to promote people to moderator - we need a formal process for the community to turf out bad mods. There was some earnest engagement with this and it mostly centered around disliking doing what is effectively stack ranking on mods. My take on that is that stack ranking in the workplace sucks - but this isn't a workplace. Also the most obvious failure mode of stack ranking - which in a workplace resolves to "everyone is doing a good job" and which here would be equivalent to "what if everyone likes the mods" is pretty easy to fix if you want to fix it. I addressed that, and a few other things, in my main effortpost on this subject, the tail end of which I'll copy here: MSDOS KAPITAL posted:To briefly give my opinion on your objections to stack ranking in particular: -------------------------------------------------- 2. This thread sucks! It's pretty clear from the posts by admins, mods, IKs, ex-IKs, and ex-mods ITT that you already have an idea for what you want to do, have probably already discussed it extensively, and while this thread may pull it one way or another a little bit it's unlikely to have any significant effect. I think if you want to make a thread to discuss your next forums experiment and break it easy to what's left of the community here, you should just do that next time. My two cents. Also: Main Paineframe posted:One last thing: I think old D&D is dead for real this time. You're probably right and as the person most responsible for making that happen I think it's fitting you make the pronouncement. All the poo poo that's been complained about the most in this thread and driven the most people off, is stuff that you did first and worked to normalize while you were mod. Nice work. -------------------------------------------------- 3. Don't make good CSPAM posters mods of D&D. This isn't because it will make D&D worse - in fact I'm sure it would make D&D a lot better. But it would make CSPAM worse, because those good posters would necessarily be less active there. And CSPAM is the more active forum with more users, so it seems more important to keep it good than to try to clean up a years-in-the-making mess here. Solve your own problems, please. MSDOS KAPITAL fucked around with this message at 00:55 on Sep 7, 2021 |
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Sep 7, 2021 00:51
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fool of sound posted:To be clear, there are users who frequently max out their daily reports spamming a single thread/single user in D&D. This phenomenon is not limited to particular cliques or political persuasions, the last two instances of it we've had were from two very different types of posters. You should be punishing these people and if you don't it's another indictment of how toothless the modding here is. Again, this is a large part of why being asked to mod D&D is more a punishment than anything, and has often ground mods to dust to the point that they just leave the forum entirely. The current regime is unwittingly dedicated to making sure things only worsen. If Athanatos buys the familiar cry of a particular and small band of C-SPAM people who feel "unwelcome" in D&D yet often also post in here all the time, without realizing exactly they feel unwelcome (the mods are not fellow sufficiently left ideologues), D&D is doomed. It was already a serious mistake to invite forumbanned and threadbanned people in here for a feedback thread and bodes ill about any decision that will be reached, assuming anything measurably different than the status quo happens from this thread at all. As far as U.S. News, the main hub of D&D traffic, it is today functionally no different from U.S. Pol, it has the same problems it ever had and it didn't take an oracle to predict this. In that particular case, Fool of sound literally ignored any feedback that didn't jive with what they had already decided to do on post #1. I think my only real agreement with people brigading in from C-SPAM to nominate people who hate D&D as its new mods is that the slate should be cleaned. D&D mods really need to realize that the current strategy for modding the forum goes beyond ineffective into actively harmful, but I doubt they're capable. I endorse this post wholeheartedly: Valor posted:I've been reading D&D for 15 years and at this point have entirely written off the forum because right now the atmosphere is worse than probably any other time in SA, mostly due to how worthless the admin staff is. I also essentially endorse Thorn Wishes Talon's last post, though I don't agree tweets should be banned outright. I would nominate Thorn Wishes Talon and I suppose Roth, if Roth was actually serious.
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Sep 7, 2021 01:08
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Cefte posted:Ideas die twice, the last time they are practised, and the last time they are mentioned. wadup cefte Willa Rogers posted:I adminned a forum of hormonal preggos & new moms several years ago and as horrible as it was at least I didn’t have to change the diapers of their whimpering toddlers. 
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Sep 7, 2021 01:18
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Nix Panicus posted:This post is an example of the largest problem facing D&D. The guy thinks they're being persecuted by gangstalkers because someone made fun of the dumb thing they said. Making fun of the dumb things people say is a core SA value. Many of D&D's posters have this bunker mentality where they are under constant assault from the laughing hyenas who do not respect their obviously correct worldview. Anyone who disagrees is an unserious troll posting in bad faith. Arguments can be easily dismissed with no effort as childish fantasies that don't bear engaging with. Only *serious* people, who believe *serious* things, should be allowed to speak in this *serious* holy place and everyone else is a defiler. It leads to mods policing the argument itself rather than the posters making the argument. Uncomfortable topics get siloed off to wither and smug posts on the 'right' side of an argument are ignored while the 'wrong' side gets smacked, because obviously the only reason anyone would hold a 'wrong' belief is to harass and troll Nthing this as a fantastic summing-up of things. also everything World Famous W said
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Sep 7, 2021 01:18
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I'll quote two others whose points I found flawless:mawarannahr posted:Please consider the character and moral fiber of whom you give buttons to. Several people named in this thread, including some of the most popular candidates, are devoted to using slurs and exploiting stigmas to win arguments, calling those who disagree with them “psychos,” “broken brained,” making appeals to sanity, and so on. ( The same people who call another forum here a den of slurs.) Do these incorrigible ableists represent D&D? You decide, because we’re not doing the one thing we all love so much here - voting. Cefte posted:What you can do is stop trying to drive the discussion from the modseat, and let posters who can follow a sparse ruleset do the work for you. There's more of them. It scales better. If you can't do this, at least have someone who is graceful when people disagree with them. --- "democrat party" --- Main Paineframe posted:This whole "DEMOCRAT PARTY" stuff is utterly asinine on both sides. The entire poo poo is loving stupid. Burning the Dems by leaving a couple of letters off the name is dumb and petty, and unironically getting mad about it is even dumber. I may have a little OCD. I also correct people for other incorrect things that are entirely apolitical. I don't report people for this, and I've reported people 2-3 times overall in 18 years. (I personally think that in a civil discussion, which we should always have here, we should generally use the pronouns and names that people want to be addressed with, unless an exception is warranted.) This is what I'm seeing as a major problem in this forum: If you deviate one iota from the only opinion you're allowed to have, you're automatically one of THEM. You don't like this term we're using, probably you're reporting people for it 24/7 and a chud and "open 'er up" and... and... and... There's always this insane emotional load on everything in D&D. There is zero tolerance for the slightest dissent. It's not healthy.
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Sep 7, 2021 01:25
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Speaking as someone who more or less lurks D&D since previous moderation practices (or lack thereof) have slowly but surely discouraged me from posting, I think this is probably the best example of what's wrong with D&D:Athanatos posted:
In essence, people who do dumb or malicious poo poo are given endless second chances because the appropriate level of punishment is either never meted out or never enforced. Quite frankly, I don't think D&D needs more moderators or IKs; what it needs is an admin who's capable of directing and supporting the existing moderation team, along with clear and concise guidelines on what is unacceptable behavior and the appropriate actions to take when encountering said behavior. There are enough cooks in the kitchen, now you need a chef - and ideally one who is not part of the existing D&D hierarchy, since D&D on the whole has a very "us vs them" mentality where disagreements frequently make lifelong Posting Enemies™. Honestly, even if it was just someone whose only job is to look over the ModQueue and approve reasonable-looking punishments would probably do wonders for moderator confidence: nothing sucks worse than queuing up a ramped probe for a consistent pattern of lovely behavior and then seeing the initial placeholder sixer expire before the real thing gets approved. I know it's not the simple "nominate a moderator" answer you were looking for, but unfortunately the issue is too deep for simple answers. Kith fucked around with this message at 01:43 on Sep 7, 2021 |
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Sep 7, 2021 01:36
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There are no current thread or forumban restrictions in this thread. If you are one of those things in D&D, you may post in here to give your opinion.
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Nix Panicus posted:This post is an example of the largest problem facing D&D. The guy thinks they're being persecuted by gangstalkers because someone made fun of the dumb thing they said. Making fun of the dumb things people say is a core SA value. Many of D&D's posters have this bunker mentality where they are under constant assault from the laughing hyenas who do not respect their obviously correct worldview. Anyone who disagrees is an unserious troll posting in bad faith. Arguments can be easily dismissed with no effort as childish fantasies that don't bear engaging with. Only *serious* people, who believe *serious* things, should be allowed to speak in this *serious* holy place and everyone else is a defiler. It leads to mods policing the argument itself rather than the posters making the argument. Uncomfortable topics get siloed off to wither and smug posts on the 'right' side of an argument are ignored while the 'wrong' side gets smacked, because obviously the only reason anyone would hold a 'wrong' belief is to harass and troll I agree with all of this, except I think admins should exclusively be drawn from PYF.
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Sep 7, 2021 01:39
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final post: get rid of ralph e: quote:For example, up until a couple of weeks ago the Media Literacy thread, which is one of the few effort threads we've had in a long time and is a fantastic resource, had a mock equivalent in CSPAM (same title and all) where people were blind quoting D&D posters, then coming into the actual thread and making GBS threads on it, then going back to the mock thread to laugh about it, rinse and repeat. That mock thread was allowed to exist for many pages, because who the gently caress knows. Then it finally got gassed (because mocking naturally turned into targeted harassment), but none of its residents got banned or even forum-banned despite a very clear pattern of severe inter-forum abuse. A few of them have actually been unironically nominated as D&D moderator here. (To be clear, nobody gives a gently caress if you make fun of someone's posts elsewhere on the forum, but these posters were also actively brigading the thread they were mocking in an effort to sabotage it, and worse.) this is an almost entirely wrong reading of what happened fart simpson fucked around with this message at 02:25 on Sep 7, 2021 |
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Sep 7, 2021 02:02
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I put through some spurious suggestions for mods before, but honestly I think that the best thing that D&D can do right now is go the gently caress away. It's the battleground of the site, there's people coming here explicitly and exclusively to cause each other harm. I stick exclusively to politoons and the NZ thread because everywhere else has turned to loving poo poo. I had several avatars bought for me here, one a racist caricature because I defended Mexico too aggressively, three advertisements for Joe Biden, bought after I'd made it clear that a) I believe that he is a rapist and b) I am a victim of sexual abuse myself. I watched someone bring forward evidence of people soliciting, via PMs, usernames for lists of "the worst D&D posters" and nothing happen despite it being about as clear as possible that this was a deliberate attempt to target users for abuse. (I put through a request in QCS to allow people to actually report PMs and nothing came of it) I don't think this has anything to do with a leftist/liberal divide and I think that people claiming that are missing the forest for the trees. Maybe once upon a time D&D was a place where people made informative effortposts, but now it's just a place where people want to fight and the in-group who want things to stay that way are the ones winning those fights, which they do by targeting and driving out people they don't want through whatever means necessary. These are people who are addicted to hurting others. Burn the whole thing to the ground, let them disperse and re-integrate into other forums communities, start threads where appropriate, learn to not be fighting all the loving time, and then maybe in six months or so bring back a politics discussion forum for them once they've chilled out.
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Sep 7, 2021 02:22
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Whoever draws the short straw and has to read D&D to choose new mods and/or rules (like other people have said, choosing based on recommendations in this thread or choosing someone who wants to do it is a bad idea) might also want to read some of the less contentious US politics threads, like the state and local politics thread or the polls thread. It's not One Weird Trick and I think US politics threads mostly get worse the more active they are, but there are threads that cover primaries without being unreadable and the differences between those threads and USnews probably matter. Adding mods doesn't hurt but I don't think it fixes the underlying problem. Moderation is very inconsistent and there are almost infinite second chances even for users that abuse them. sexpig by night spent the first five months of 2021 being probed more than half the time before finally being forum banned in May. In there is a 6 hour IK probation with no follow up for the second thread ban violation, after the first got a week. Same thing for (forum banned in 2020) Yeowch!!! My Balls. I don't know anything about the context, but the newest probation on the leper's colony is Dongicus, who was banned from threads in ADTRW and Games after less than a page worth of posts and ~4 probations in each. Is it really surprising that uspol is toxic when people can spend actual months or years trolling it and still get a random succession of probations between 6 hours and a day? I don't know why the moderation is the way it is but I don't think adding mods is enough to fix it.
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Sep 7, 2021 02:32
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