I guess… I’m just not sure I agree with you, though. People are generally lazy, and even though many get up and march, I think the much larger lazy majority just looks at them as rabble rousers in 2018 and thinks to themselves, “That’s not how the majority feel.” That’s especially true if they’re in the Fox News bubble.
Certainly something to think about…
Yeah. That’s true. Wumpus liked Tom’s living room, but he wanted to rearrange the furniture a bit.
Does that mean he sometimes… comes back? I didn’t realize he’d left before.
No, he fundamentally rejected that analogy and felt the will of the community or some mod team should prevail, providing he agreed with said will.
My feeling is that since he paid to host the site he felt linked to it, on a personal level, when potential spammers were allowed to post (before actually being proved spammers) or when an alt-right poster wasn’t immediately banned. Like he was letting that guy post when really he had no control over the matter. Like he felt he definitely should.
Yeah, heh, he has a few times over the years.
Yes and if he changes his mind again he’s welcome back!
That makes sense. I think his investment in the idea of communities and trying to promote the positives over the negatives sometimes clouds his vision because he knows what he thinks is right and jeez, why can’t everyone else agree with that?
That said, I think his heart was always in the right place and probably still is.
We are missing the next step. Protesting is great, it tells people that their is a movement, but the next step is economic pressure. It’s putting the screws to those in charge.
Sometimes this means a boycott, but sometimes it means walkouts, strikes and generally being a nuisance. Blocking roads. If you stay nonviolent, you keep the moral high ground, but that doesn’t mean be passive.
Basically, you need to cost the people in power more than your worth, but again, keep the high ground so that the general population doesn’t turn against you.
Also, make the message inclusive. King Jr. Wanted the next social movement to be about poverty.
Good to know!
I know I’ve disagreed with him on a few things, and some of his approaches, but I agree with this entirely. I always thought his approach was genuine even if he could get a little, well he might forget he’s not in a room full of kids sometimes. We’re fully functional and often professional adults, not idiots!
It’s confounding to me that this doesn’t sink in. I’ve had enough of people academically engaging someone who takes every oblique angle they can imagine to undermine basic human compassion.
Well he’s an arrogant asshole, but he’s authentically that way and if you take a step back, almost always entertaining.
I’d wandered out of this thread but wanted to bring your comment back up, Fishbreath. And please understand what I’m about to say has no bearing on my feelings about you, I like you here as a poster and fellow-QT3’er. I’m stating that because sometimes having a different opinion here can be taken as something personal and I don’t mean this to be at all.
What you ask for there has been done before. It ends horribly, every single time. Remember the Bananas and Nuts thread back in the day? Or perhaps a similar thread in another similar forum to ours? Any time there is a open airing of bans (temp or full) in a thread, it leads to eventual bickering and arguing, and in some cases, like here, it even led to more bans from simply discussing the banning. It takes an admin action and makes it an eventual “take sides” argument, and people get hurt along the way.
I’m happy with things as-is. We entrust those who are mods here to make that call for our QT3 Neighborhood. Sometimes we might find out about the calls, sometimes not. What really matters for us is how the result works for the community here. I don’t get copied when reddit bans someone, or perhaps banned from one of the news sites I visit, or when someone is 86’ed at the local watering hole I am a regular at. I entrust them to make those calls, and I make my own judgement on being active or a customer based on what I see as the result.
Opening up discussion or even posting of admin actions can have very unintended and dire results.
I don’t want to suggest that it’s a one size fits all approach but Something Awful has managed to thrive just fine and they have a link on every single post a person makes to every single moderation action that has been made on that account, with reasoning and a link to the offending post. Plus the post says “user was banned for this post” or whatever.
Understood, and the remainder is taken in the good faith you intend. Same disclaimer on this side.
Discussion of bans can be bad, sure. I don’t think a ban list naturally leads that way, however. The ban list at that certain other forum (looking just now, that page appears to be gone, but it used to be there) was the main thing that convinced me to step away, because it indicated a pattern of moderation I wasn’t comfortable with. If it hadn’t been there, I likely wouldn’t have noticed the occasional wrongthinking unperson vanishing, and then I would eventually have had to deal with the volksgeist turning my way, Eye of Sauron-like.
Scroll up a bit, and you’ll find a post in which I, a Christian and a conservative, am lumped in with the ‘worst of America’ and called a ‘villain’, and those are far from the worst names people like me have been called around here. I can’t speak to @tomchick’s personal opinion on those perspectives, but I am pretty well convinced he doesn’t think they’re worth a ban either way. I can say that because, to date, there has been openness and transparency when he’s considering the banhammer; I’ve seen how the sausage is made, and even if I would maybe follow a slightly different recipe sometimes, I find it acceptable. I can’t say that about other moderators, in part because there’s very little history at Qt3 off of which to form an opinion when it comes to people who aren’t Tom kicking people out of Tom’s living room, and in part because the way they post in public doesn’t fill me with a great deal of confidence that they’ll be as even-handed as Tom when dealing with several classes of posters to which I belong.
And honestly, if the moderation is being done in a reasonable, even-handed way, where the hammer is reserved for spammers and obvious trolls, I don’t see a public ban list as a problem. It’s not a take-sides situation; nobody is on the spammers’ side. It’s only contentious if bans are, for lack of a less inflammatory word, ideological, and in that case, I think it’s better for the long-term health of a community that those standards be out in the open.
Hi @Fishbreath, It seems like your are referring to my post, but I am not sure, since I don’t think I have said anything about either Christians or Conservative in this thread, but I did refer to certain groups as villians (mostly it was a reference to groups like racists, white supremacists and Nazis, groups that have seem to lurched into the lime light recently). If anything did offend you, please let me know.
I don’t think you are necessarily including the Christian Right with “villains” here, but you are certainly including them in “the worst of Americans”.
Yeah, but those people are neither Christian nor Conversatives, and they aren’t the villians that have recent come out. Those people have always been around.
You both make good points. I’d say that it would take quite a few additional steps for mods here to ensure they would have defined processes for how the notifications are handled, and what kinds of feedback is allowed after the fact. Especially in reference to how things played out here before when news leaked out, in whatever ways that came up post-banning.
I found him almost unrecognizable compared to the original iteration of Jeff Wumpus Atwood that was a constant poster on this forum in its earlier incarnations, but those attributes never changed, heh.
Hope he comes back too.
In a previous life, I was an admin for a moderately large forum. We had a stickied post as you describe where we listed banned accounts with a (very) brief rationale for the ban. It was also a locked thread and had accompanying text very explicitly saying that public discussion of bans was not appropriate and that if anyone had concerns they should contact any of the moderators to discuss. It wasn’t perfect, and relied heavily on the inherent trust of the community that the mods weren’t capricious, but I’ve never really seen a system that didn’t rely on that. 99% of the time, the bans were completely self-explanatory (spammers and the like). On the rare occasions where they weren’t, it generally worked out.
With the benefit of significant time, distance and reflection, I’m not sure the post added a ton of value, but neither did it cause any more controversy or strife than was already present otherwise and the transparency was a good thing. I’d call it a net positive for the community.