If nothing else, you gotta admire a master troll plying his craft.
If you don’t want to read the gibbering opinions of ignorant cunts blathering on about things they don’t know anything about and don’t have the sophistication or nuance to understand fully, I don’t know why you’d read Politics & Religion to begin with. I’ve managed to go over 15 years on these forums without dipping in there. Why stop at ignoring ONE annoying P&R troll when the whole subforum is such a total shitshow?
I have a better version of that button: 50/50 chance of ignoring said poster or turning yourself into a ghost, where nobody will ever see your posts as they are hidden from view of others.
It hasn’t been that way for a while. Since the beginning of 2016, there’s been mostly agreement. So why bother when everyone already agrees? Well, there’s a lot of news articles and tweets shared in there that I otherwise would miss. It’s a very informative subforum. I wouldn’t be half as politically aware these days if it wasn’t for that subforum.
Yeah the articles, tweets, and trigger’s election day coverage are most of the reasons I enjoy that sub-forum.
Edit: also bunny pics
Huh? You’ve never read the forum in 15 years but you know it’s such a shitshow?
Everyone has different topics they like to discuss. I don’t really care about discussing TV, movies, or music and people express ignorant and wrong opinions on that forum every day (insert wink here if it wasn’t clear), but if someone was shitting up that forum I don’t know why I’d act like people just shouldn’t discuss things there.
You may find an echo chamber welcoming and useful, but that isn’t actually the forum’s purpose. If one user is overwhelming the conversation due to sheer volume, report him and mods will address. If it’s just that you disagree with their politics, that isn’t actionable. Unless again, they post hate speech.
I think DrCrypt misspoke, obviously he dipped in there as have I. And we both dipped right the fuck back out!
Mostly agreement in P&R, because the minority viewpoint has mostly been driven out. Qt3 is a very leftist place no matter how you slice it, but I suspect it’s a lot less leftist than P&R.
Can we have a different thread for people who don’t like the P&R subforum to clap each other on the back for being so much better, more welcoming, and enlightened than the mean old intolerant statist Leftists™ who showcase their personality flaws by reading and posting there?
Well done.
I’m surprised hellbanning (aka shadow banning) hasn’t been mentioned as an option yet. Shift the responsibility to the moderators, not the users.
Who wants to take bets on longtime members getting banned before that guy does? That seems tradition around these parts.
The forum should have a shrinkray feature, where text from people I choose can be shown in a smaller fontsize to make them less intrusive.
Maybe 4 zaps with the shrinkray makes them actually invisible.
Maybe my posts to them seem really big, now they’re tiny. I haven’t thought this through, but I think it’s the future.
Shadowbanning is very effective.
My favorite tool for moderating offensive posts is what Teresa Nielsen Hayden called “disemvowelment,” a script that stripped all the vowels out of a post. Readers could still figure out what the poster said, if they wanted to make the effort, but the post was ignorable otherwise. The action made it clear to the troll that she was onto him. (It was almost invariantly a him.)
You can address trolls without politics entering the picture. Provocation is intrinsically harmful to discussion. It doesn’t really matter what belief system you think is motivating a troll to be provocative: you can call out the behavior purely in terms of its predictable damage to the discourse.
It’s more urgent to do that in contexts that aren’t about recreational typing. (Trolls are a real problem where I work, and this year we’ve lost a lot of work hours to trolling because online comms is how we get stuff done.)
But you can’t really expect anything to improve without moderation.
I get a lot of useful information in PR, but the threads that are being shitted up by the poster in question make getting that information difficult. He can be a tool all he wants, but I don’t appreciate that it’s so hard to find the actual news in those threads now without scrolling past everything he posts and all of the replies to those posts.
I think you are right. This is a moderation issue, because the user in question isn’t the real problem, it’s the way people are responding.
We can change, we swear we can!
I mentioned it.
Yeah, why hasn’t anyone mentioned shadow banning? Seriously. Not a single person.