WarrenM
4241
Planetcrap is 6 people having the same revolving conversations consisting of one-liners and patent pending zingers. It’s not even close to comparable.
I’ve got a pretty big beef with some of Tom’s moderation decisions in the past. One thing I absolutely agree with him on, however, is the “no dragging shit from one thread into another” rule. Because I remember comp.sys.ibm-pc.games.space-sim.
That newsgroup dissolved under the endlessly expanding Derek Smart flamewar. Sure, much of that was Derek’s fault; he’s confrontational and easy to provoke, which made him the perfect target. The real problem, however, was the horde of people who just wouldn’t shut the fuck up about Derek, his PhD (or lack thereof), the quality of his games (or lack thereof), and on and on and endlessly on. And all of this was naturally justified by the burning need to put this upstart fraud with a fake PhD in his place. It was important. Someone was wrong on the Internet!
It was ugly, and past a certain point it didn’t need Derek’s participation to keep going. Net.vigilantism is a cancer, and Tom is absolutely right in having no truck with it here.
Calling someone out for saying something when they say it is fine. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone here get banned for that.
Shunning someone is fine.
But endlessly dragging shit from one thread into another isn’t, and I’m entirely okay with that. I like a forum where every other thread isn’t filled with “Taco Commander” bullshit.
Eilonwy
4244
Can we just all agree that there should be an immediate ban for anyone that goes in to post in a thread to tell the people posting in the thread that the thread is stupid?
Cause my arm gets pretty tired holding that gun to their head, making them read it in the first place.
We can go on ad-nauseum about the rest of this shit, so I’ll simply say this:
I will always think my opinion is more “correct” than yours. I would presume you would think the same. Anything else would be rather unusual.
The conflict comes when you start to seek imposing your opinion on me. I (naturally I believe) reject that your opinions should somehow be more apropos for me than mine are. So I would far prefer that rather than having externally imposed opinions, I simply be left to draw my own conclusions without need of forum cops to gate who I can/can’t listen to and who I can/can’t find value in.*
(*Obviously this approach doesn’t work to infinite depth. At some point, some people get disruptive enough that their shit begins carrying over everywhere and polluting things so that nobody can extract decent signal from the noise. This is, in essence, why MattG was banned due to the Elemental thread: He persisted in consistently and very directedly injecting noise into anything having to do with Wardell. Compare that to, say, Octonoo or Spatzi (or any of us, really) who inject noise more or less at random. Recovering signal from random noise may be tedious, but it’s generally possible. Recovering signal from directed noise is an entirely different matter. I believe this analogy more or less describes Tom’s approach to moderation, as well. Which is why the directed noise of mass pile-ons gets the people who pile-on banned, while the original random noise which engendered the pile-on doesn’t.)
I think you’re right, Matt, but there’s no reason truth and common sense can’t be meted out with civility.
You will notice that I, having told someone just a few hours ago to “fuck off,” am not always civil, so I’m not preaching civility. I’m just saying that truth, common sense and civility are not mutually exclusive.
With the bannings, I don’t think people got banned because they called people out - I think it was the WAY they called people out.
I agree in principle (and have probably done it myself). In fact, I think that’s what led to Adree’s latest touching.
I agree in principle (and have probably done it myself). In fact, I think that’s what led to Adree’s latest touching.
And not once have I jumped in on a pile-on against one of those that started these stupid debates, and nor do I think that we should bar these people from the site before they even get here.
If you can keep your personal shit to yourself, and act like a normal human being on here, awesome, you’re like 95% of the people on this site.
It’s the 5% who are basically asking to be grilled when they post about how asian people are stupid or how they really need to see their kids again, despite the fact that the court said otherwise.
We’ve all got our problems. Keep them to yourself. But if you bring them out, be prepared to suffer the consequences of your actions.
“The internet is written in ink, Mark.”
This I have to find myself in agreement with. Before I even started posting here, that was impressed upon me:
Sarkus
4250
It’s interesting how all these discussions come back to this particular incident. I guess I’m kind of with Tim in that I at least understand why Tom handled it the way he did. What gets lost in the “child abuser” talk is that the guy was in the process of trying to fix his problems, to the degree that he’d spent time with his family apparently with their approval. What he was frustrated about was that despite that the legal system still had a court order in place that resulted in him being arrested. But rather then ignore the thread or just tell the guy to call a lawyer, some people decided to go digging and then confront the guy in the thread with what they had found. Is that what we really want at QT3? It’s clear that Tom doesn’t think so. And while you can argue that the poster “crossed a line,” there are a whole bunch of issues that arise about what counts as “crossing a line,” which lines can or can’t be crossed, and so on. In the end Tom gets to decide that, not any of us. He made his decision, has tried to explain his thinking the best he can, and moved on.
It’s nice to see I’m not the only one who remembers that particular incident in a totally different light than the usual portrayal, Sarkus. My memory jibes well with yours, but the adamant insistence of the other folks had me doubting whether or not I’d misunderstood something in my original reading.
Maybe I’m not understanding your point then, because I can assure you my timeline has those and I attribute them to the sort of confrontational approach to community self moderation you seem to be espousing.
In regards to message boards of this level, where the vast majority of posters are people I will never meet? Yeah, you nailed it. Polite discussion is great but if someone starts getting wound up it’s utterly pointless to continue.
That’s a fairly good summation, but I’d don’t think it’s a philosophical difference. I think in five or ten years you’ll get tired of raging at the unending wrongess on the internet and finally realize the futility of it.
RepoMan
4253
Regarding the Munky Incident:
The problem is that we don’t have, and can’t have, enough information.
- Was he really working through his problems? And was he really turning a new leaf with his family, redeeming himself and no longer abusing?
- Or was he playing on their fears and getting them to take him back yet again, even though the court had overridden their own desires in this regard?
NONE OF US KNOW FOR SURE. The redemption odds are pretty poor, statistically, but that’s not the same as certainty.
So everyone’s biases and instincts get projected onto this Rorschach test of a person we know only through a page or two of text.
Censuring Munky for having abused badly enough to get a restraining order at all was justifiable. Casting doubt on his sincerity was justifiable. Dealing sharply with his story – as he presented it – was justifiable.
But people didn’t leave it there; they escalated off the forum altogether, to no particularly good end.
And I think this goes back to the morality brigade here, people who feel entitled to judge and harass and condemn someone, in thread after thread. No controversial opinion, no personal mistake, no opposing political view is safe. The person who becomes known for saying such things will be hounded off the board.
kerzain
4255
You should have stopped right about here.
Hey… no fair distracting weighty internet discu… OOOH! Look at that belly! Someone must want their belly rubbed! Here, kitty!
which does not square with
As far as I can tell, suppressing the flamewars and disruptive behavior has been the goal.
The point is, they weren’t suppressed as a matter of course. Truces were negotiated, not dictated, or the thread was simply allowed to run its course. PMs were a factor, but not in the “I have here a list of names of known communists” manner that has become the fashion lately (with a preemptive assumption of PM guilt by the always helpful peanut gallery). And so on. If you don’t see a contrast, I guess that’s because when it’s all confrontations and troll baiting you have no means of making fine distinctions between them. Some jackass being allowed to shit up a thread or two is the same as two occasionally reasonable people getting out of hand and conflating personal disagreements with the matter at hand, and so nothing has changed. Which is why I described in terms of a worldview issue, or internetview, or whatever it would be. I’m not asking you to concede its superiority, but merely that it was, in fact, qualitatively different in ways that could have a profound impact on how freely people speak.
That’s a fairly good summation, but I’d don’t think it’s a philosophical difference. I think in five or ten years you’ll get tired of raging at the unending wrongess on the internet and finally realize the futility of it.
Simply because you lack the desire to produce a coherent epistemology around it does not make it any less of a philosophical question. Clearly you view interaction on the internet as conversation lite, some sort of masturbational thing that you give up on when you start getting tired. What you are failing to acknowledge is that while winning arguments and all of the rest of that is always a part of any human interaction, no matter how virtual, there is also the fact that rhetoric and the quality of ideas have to be constantly tested in order to evolve or change. It’s not futile just because few admit defeat. The internet provides its own set of strengths and weakness in that respect, and this forum has been and continues to be a good example of that. My ideas and views on the world have changed quite a bit since 2003, and qt3 has been a useful part of that. It’d be pathetic if I’d spent all that time online to take home that eventually you’ll be tired and give up more quickly, and I’m confident that’s not a fair summary of your experience, either.
JM1
4259
No, not really. The problem is people not leaving the fuck alone when the initial matter is done and dusted, sometimes trying to start fights in irrelevant threads months later.
There will always be disagreements. There will always be deeply unlikeable people. There are always going to be feuds and flamewars and shitfights. But they don’t need to dragged up time and again purely for the purpose of starting another argument.
