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US PoliEra 2020 |OT5| Guidance recommends quarantining PoliERA
- Thread starter Brian McDoogle
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I agree.
A big issue I see is that we've replaced trolling that involves shitposting with the intent of getting a rise out of someone with trolling to bait people into crossing lines in forum rules resulting in harsh bans.
Disrupting legitimate and often unrelated communities in this way is a documented tactic by the alt right. The Donald on Reddit destroyed many communities through exactly this tactic. Sowing discord, mistrust and confusion is an end goal in an of itself. If we fall for it and move elsewhere, they'll just keep coming. New news in new threads and drive by trolling being punishes is one of the ways you can isolate it though as it makes patterns more visible.
That Kagan dissent is really baffling. She's smart so I assume she has a good reason, but I'm more surprised that in 2020 we're debating unanimous jury verdicts. I thought that had been settled sometime in the last 244 years.
It's explicitly racism. Worried that black people would have to be included on juries, the rules were changed so that their participation wouldn't change things.
As a long time lurker of EtcetEra and especially PoliEra -- I'm chiming in to agree on some points I've seen others make:
1) I appreciate the tough job of moderators, but it does feel like there has been a lack of effective moderating in EtcetEra politics-related threads lately, at least since the various lockdowns started. I can see that it's a difficult job, especially under the circumstances, but it really seems like the quality of political discussion here on ResetEra has declined as of late. As someone who generally doesn't post -- that's a shame, as the discussions on this site used to be of a general high quality, and I've learned a lot through them.
2) This thread was most certainly not the problem, but threads in EtcetEra were. If anything, my main complaint in PoliEra was that if any major news broke -- you'd see several times more posts in PoliEra about polling or electoral strategy than about the major news of the day. This thread was anything but an echo chamber, but as others have said, there have been a lot of low-effort shit-sturring posts here lately that start fights. I don't know all the posters enough to claim anyone was a regular or not -- but it says something bad about the site in general if a general 'Politics OT' or even 'Politics Community' thread falls apart with major posters being banned or taking a break.
3) I believe in Big Tent Democratic idea -- it's the only way we can beat Republicans in November. The problem I've personally seen lately is with those are the far left (in the US) that don't seem to model that idea. My first preferred candidate was Bernie -- I voted for him in the primary. Biden was somewhere in my fourth or fifth choice. Biden is the presumptive candidate, barring some exceeding unusual happenings. It's near impossible to discuss the state and path of US politics if saying anything even a smidgen to the right of the far left politics is greeted with the histrionics and vitriol seen in various EtcetEra threads lately.
I suppose, in general, I'd like to see heavier moderation of vitriolic and low-effort antagonistic posts on ResetEra.
It should be to the level that low-effort posts about Biden like "I can't believe we're stuck with this fucking asshole against Trump. Fucking hell." should be moderated. What value is bullshit like that? All that does to serve start fights and derail threads, but it seems to me that so many garbage posts like that remain in place in politics threads.
1) I appreciate the tough job of moderators, but it does feel like there has been a lack of effective moderating in EtcetEra politics-related threads lately, at least since the various lockdowns started. I can see that it's a difficult job, especially under the circumstances, but it really seems like the quality of political discussion here on ResetEra has declined as of late. As someone who generally doesn't post -- that's a shame, as the discussions on this site used to be of a general high quality, and I've learned a lot through them.
2) This thread was most certainly not the problem, but threads in EtcetEra were. If anything, my main complaint in PoliEra was that if any major news broke -- you'd see several times more posts in PoliEra about polling or electoral strategy than about the major news of the day. This thread was anything but an echo chamber, but as others have said, there have been a lot of low-effort shit-sturring posts here lately that start fights. I don't know all the posters enough to claim anyone was a regular or not -- but it says something bad about the site in general if a general 'Politics OT' or even 'Politics Community' thread falls apart with major posters being banned or taking a break.
3) I believe in Big Tent Democratic idea -- it's the only way we can beat Republicans in November. The problem I've personally seen lately is with those are the far left (in the US) that don't seem to model that idea. My first preferred candidate was Bernie -- I voted for him in the primary. Biden was somewhere in my fourth or fifth choice. Biden is the presumptive candidate, barring some exceeding unusual happenings. It's near impossible to discuss the state and path of US politics if saying anything even a smidgen to the right of the far left politics is greeted with the histrionics and vitriol seen in various EtcetEra threads lately.
I suppose, in general, I'd like to see heavier moderation of vitriolic and low-effort antagonistic posts on ResetEra.
It should be to the level that low-effort posts about Biden like "I can't believe we're stuck with this fucking asshole against Trump. Fucking hell." should be moderated. What value is bullshit like that? All that does to serve start fights and derail threads, but it seems to me that so many garbage posts like that remain in place in politics threads.
Agreed with all of this, but especially #3. If you come in with basically the mainstream Democratic Party position on an issue in OT, you can expect a myriad of people to lunge at your throat, and it's never moderated. You shouldn't have to start every post with a preemptive apology just because you're excited to support the Democratic candidate. Letting the discourse play out like that just ends up creating an alternate universe where the Era position is disconnected from the real world.
Edit - Removed accidental quote.
It's really crazy that lurkers can be following the community silently and post high quality thoughts like this one.
And the only reason they returned it is they acquired a loan elsewhere.
I agree with everything said here. Hostility should be policed more thoroughly than it has been and thread titles should be edited more often to have neutral tones. Too often I can pick out threads I don't want to enter just by how the topic is phrased. I even prefer not seeing threads taking cheap "President Shitbag" jabs in thread titles. There aren't too many people on this forum that don't already have that view of him and it seems unnecessary to prime threads with that tone before even entering them.
It's even crazier that lurkers recognize the issues and yet we have mods and other posters (weirdly, the same posters are often the ones starting fights 🤔) saying they have no idea what's wrong. Even though we've been telling them in the Discord for months.
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Etc has been nigh-on unreadable in any politics thread. Just look at the absolute craziness that was the Primary thread and tell me that's acceptable behavior. Is that a problem moderation can fix, or is that just who were are collectively as the people on this website?
Someone several pages back suggested having Mods for the Mods, essentially an "Internal Affairs" group. I was laughing to myself thinking this is an overkill, but on further reflection NeoGAF/ResetEra are basically the size of a large virtual city that's as diverse as New York city if not more. It might be good to have an official group that regularly monitors moderators actions and behaviors. That would be their only function, this group can't make bans themselves.
It also might be good to have an official "appeal" function built-in to the site that goes to that group or something similar. As with most appeal systems, the majority of appeals are rejected but at least this would add an extra check or surveillance on questionable bans before things get out of hand.
Of course at some point someone is going to ask who is going to police this "Internal Affairs" or "Appeals" group. No system is perfect but sounds like here a few mods got too close to the discussions they were trying to moderate. Maybe adding an extra layer of oversight might encourage some mods to deliberate a little longer before dishing out bans in heated topics.
Having been a moderator in numerous forums and running communities myself, I understand how tough it is and it's often a thankless job. When people don't say anything, it usually means you're doing your job well. And everybody knows your name when shit hits the fan. But from what I've done and observed, the difference between successful communities and declining communities is that when problems emerge, the successful communities course-correct and try to make reasonable improvements where they can. The declining communities the moderator teams tend to get overly defensive and insist the members are the problem, not with how the site is run. They don't make changes and things decline further.
I don't think Era mod team should take every single suggestion here. Many things we suggest may not be feasible. But you should take in the criticism, own up to it, and then try to make some meaningful change that you guys feel will address the problem or at least improve the situation. The majority of the community will always appreciate good faith efforts to improve things from concerns people have brought up..
It also might be good to have an official "appeal" function built-in to the site that goes to that group or something similar. As with most appeal systems, the majority of appeals are rejected but at least this would add an extra check or surveillance on questionable bans before things get out of hand.
Of course at some point someone is going to ask who is going to police this "Internal Affairs" or "Appeals" group. No system is perfect but sounds like here a few mods got too close to the discussions they were trying to moderate. Maybe adding an extra layer of oversight might encourage some mods to deliberate a little longer before dishing out bans in heated topics.
Having been a moderator in numerous forums and running communities myself, I understand how tough it is and it's often a thankless job. When people don't say anything, it usually means you're doing your job well. And everybody knows your name when shit hits the fan. But from what I've done and observed, the difference between successful communities and declining communities is that when problems emerge, the successful communities course-correct and try to make reasonable improvements where they can. The declining communities the moderator teams tend to get overly defensive and insist the members are the problem, not with how the site is run. They don't make changes and things decline further.
I don't think Era mod team should take every single suggestion here. Many things we suggest may not be feasible. But you should take in the criticism, own up to it, and then try to make some meaningful change that you guys feel will address the problem or at least improve the situation. The majority of the community will always appreciate good faith efforts to improve things from concerns people have brought up..
That's a disappointing response to recent events imo. After Abstrusity 's excellent post here which tons of people agreed with, that response reads like "kthxbye".
Almost nobody in this community supported Biden during the Primaries and we were all very much Anyone But Trump and pragmatic about that: the Senate, the Supreme Court, all that stuff blah blah. A trend I've seen recently is visitors coming in to proudly say they won't vote in the GE, and they won't take any responsibility for what happens as a result. This upsets the regulars, but if they speak up they risk a ban themselves. More recently we have visitors coming in and calling Biden a rapist, instead of alleged rapist or credibly alleged rapist. You and I had a brief PM about that and you said those posters wouldn't be moderated. The inference of that is that any of the regulars here who wants Trump out supports rape, which is of course total bs and extremely offensive, but again if anyone speaks up they risk a ban themselves.
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Yeah. For discourse to work, it needs to be honest discourse. And since moderators don't have a magic ball to see into the hearts of posters, it's difficult to separate honest discussion from dishonest discussion -- but that's where heavy, rules-based, fairly-applied moderation comes into play.
Look at the Biden ad threads. Having watched the ad, claiming that Biden is 'more racist than Trump' (as the first thread title did) was clearly dishonest bullshit -- and I'm glad that thread was locked and reformed.
But look at the current ad thread -- even with the fairer title and moderation statement, it's still a shitshow of dishonest garbage. There's a fair critique of the ad in which the Biden campaign uses terms like 'China' and 'Chinese', where being more specific about those terms meaning 'Chinese Government' would be better. Awesome, I'd love to see a detailed discussion about how such specificity is needed in the current political climate, or about how different or ethnic groups understood those terms when they heard them.
Instead, that thread is full of the same dishonest discussion and shit-stirring that has been popular lately.
Yes, I'm complaining about the garbage -- but the real sad effect is the loss of quality discourse...
Those posts should exist bc its an expression of dissatisfaction with a candidate that has a history of racism as well as a rape allegation and several other harassment allegations. The idea that someone is not allowed to say "i cant believe we are stuck with a man that has had a destructive career in politics" is something I dont really comprehend.
Bdubs, I hope this doesn't count as community warring or bannable metacommentary or something, as I'm only trying to clear the air here. The Socialism OT has been basically clean since the staff brought down the hammer with their staff post, and whenever people do mention PoliEra I tell them to get back to discussion of socialism. It moves at a snail's pace relative to PoliEra. If there's some sort of bad behavior going on in there, it would be pretty hard to hide!
Gotcha thanks for the update. Be well. Hopefully I'll eventually at some point be allowed in. ^^b
I respectfully disagree. Your post explains why the poster might have felt that way, their post did not.
The issue is that post is low-effort -- it adds nothing to the discussion, and instead is what -- another tally mark on the 'people dissatisfied with Biden' slate? OK, how does that move the discussion forward?
My argument is not that people are not allowed to be dissatisfied with Biden -- of course they are. My argument is that low-effort posts saying essentially nothing of value to the discourse shouldn't be allowed.
I think there's also a harder problem here -- so many posters (honestly) dissatisfied because of some quality of Biden's. We get it, people have opinions of Biden -- but they just get tossed out in every political thread as a thead-spoiler or bludgen without contributing to the discourse on-hand.
I don't know what to do about that -- some sort of 'Biden OT'? There is real, honest, and in-depth discussion to be had about him as a candidate -- but low effort posts about his various perceived failures are derailing every political thread that pertains to Biden in some way.
In the ad thread, I want to see discussion about the ad, how it plays towards various groups, and how it could have been better -- not dozens of more low-effort posts from people saying they dislike Biden.
In order to foster discussion:
What do you think about the current state of political discourse here on Era lately?
I am sure people are just fucking tired of hearing it.
Yes -we know- people don't like Biden. Yes, -we know-, some people are not going to vote in November because they hate Biden and everything associated with him.
No, we don't need the thread or Era brigaded every single day reminded everyone Biden is terrible and people will not vote for him.
It's exhausting.
Apparently some businesses took those loans they did not need, speculated in the market with them for a bit, kept the profits and then they return them for the PR.
Best part is that during the primary it was always pointed out that whomever would be the frontrunner, there'd be factions afterwards trying to tear them down and other supporters. Pragmatists were derided all along.
This cannot be restated enough. In 14 years of the old site and this one, I've never used the Ignore function. I've now used it multiple times over the past few days.
Just want to cosign this excellent post. I'm also generally a lurker, but the amount of quality information I receive from this thread has really helped me tighten up my political views and have a better understanding of how policy affects the real world. As a result, I've gotten involved with local candidate forums and events in my districts, and feel way more engaged with my reps at all levels of govt.
All this is to say that the OT has been a huge benefit to me thanks to the information posted, the astute analysis of that information, and the respectful debates that hash out the finer points. When those things get replaced with angry arguments, the thread loses its value.
On point #3 specifically, I was really shocked when Biden support became a test of ideological purity. Throughout the primary contest, there was a pretty clear baseline established in OT that, no matter which Dem got the nomination, there was no question that we would support them in the general. I don't remember a single person supporting Biden as their first choice, but there was universal agreement that voting for him was lightyears better than voting for Trump. Obviously emotions are going to heighten when the rubber meets the road and your candidate actually gets eliminated, but to have to re-litigate this point after all this time seems really unproductive, and it does make it feel to longtime posters like the thread has changed materially.
I haven't been in here since Friday. It sounds like things must have been really bad over the weekend if a bunch of the regulars left. Hopefully this thread won't die. It's still a much better source of news than 90% of news sites out there.
She's wearing a bandana around her neck, which means she most likely brought that with her for the protection she's protesting against.
I'm not a frequent poster in this thread at all but I do lurk.
I'm posting now just to say that you're holding the mods and people posting in ETC to unreasonable standard if you think that posts expressing basic exasperation should be actioned and discouraged.
The thing is that the threads were people show up to remind everyone that Biden is terrible are usually also threads where Biden has done something stupid like suggest that he will include republicans in his cabinet or release a xenophobic ad.
You can argue all you want that saying those things is somehow good (I personally dont know if you have) but the reality of the situation is that a candidate flirting with a far right party or making ads that make people uncomfortable is going to bring up dissatisfaction and negative feelings. If you and other people want Biden threads to be less negative or to feature people that arent critical of Biden, then he should probably be a better candidate. And well, having a rape allegation drop isnt exactly going to build many bridges.
Banning or warning people over that seems to be like tacking the surface issue without acknowledging the reality of candidate, and that is that people arent happy with Biden as the nominee and they suddenly wont be just because he won the nomination. And if he wins the presidency only to be as conservative as some people fear, then the complains and hatred wont stop.
If you go into the FF7R review thread and go "this game is shitty" you get banned. If you go into a "Joe Biden announces climate change plan" thread and say "he's so shitty, the dems are shitty, I can't believe how shitty everyone is but me and people who think like me" you don't get the same response. You actually have moderators doing that. So why is it not ok? It has to be OK. Which means people who are fatigued by that have to put you on ignore (which works GREAT) or leave.
I don't want to silence you so why don't you do something productive like shout at a wall? At least the wall accurately reflects how important your voice is.
I don't want to silence you so why don't you do something productive like shout at a wall? At least the wall accurately reflects how important your voice is.
If someone complains about this, they either don't understand how the game of politics is played or they simply want something to complain about. It's not like he's gonna be putting Betsy Devos in at Education.
there's also a lot of effort put into drawing the mask. I'm thoroughly confused.
Also noone is depending on FF7R to win GOtY to ya know. Not live in a fascist hellscape. It's a little bit more serious than that to constantly shut down any support for someone who isn't even the real enemy for so many is going to alienate those many. If that's the goal, it's a nefarious goal and shouldn't be put up with.
Criticizing Biden is an important part of making him a better candidate and should continue. However, to be absolutely frank, some of the people who have been critical have no intention of changing their minds. I have seen posts saying things along the lines of, "Fuck Biden, he will just do X," where X could be anything, such as nominate a conservative Republican for the Supreme Court, or refuse to sign off on new health care legislation, etc. Then someone will post an interview or a statement by Biden that contradicts the initial point, and the response is, "Well I don't believe him, he's a liar." What meaningful dialogue is there to be had here? I do believe there are people who do not support Biden who could be persuaded, but it seems like there are a fair amount of people who are masquerading as possible converts but who have actually made up their minds on the matter and nothing he does, outside of morphing into an entirely different person, will change anything.
If you want to have high quality discussion, then such low-effort posts have to be dealt with. It's a fact of life. This isn't Reddit with downvotes that allow the community some level of moderating power -- it's a forum where all that power lies with the overworked moderation staff.
It's a sad fact of life that high-quality discussions require high levels of moderation to keep them in line.
I think that, to those of us that are exhausted by the discourse of late -- is the histrionics (as we see them).
Biden saying that he might have some Republicans in his cabinet? That wouldn't have been that big of a deal a few presidential terms ago, but now it is somehow 'flirting with a far-right party'.
Biden saying 'China' and 'Chinese' in an ad critiquing the current administration's relationship to the Government of China? OK, yeah, I can see how that terminology is not terribly precise -- but now it's 'xenophobia'.
Biden doesn't match the platform that Bernie supported? Well now he's 'conservative'.
It's fair to have all those views, and to discuss them -- but it's so unbelievably tiring to constantly see black-and-white terms like that thrown around day after day.
Want to talk about how his policies don't jive with your views, awesome! Let's move the Democratic party forward! But absolutist statements like those are not helpful to that discussion.
Yup. Low-effort shit-stirring posts should be moderated, be they about a video game remake or presidential candidate.
I think there's a difference between going into a FF7 thread and shit posting versus going into a Biden thread where hes done or said something shitty and expressing exasperation with the candidate. As per your example of Biden announces a climate policy and there's posters who feel he doesn't go far enough for their liking but they only express that through "omg he's trash" as opposed to substantiating that position then you have a point. If we're talking about rape allegations and racism then you don't
I think in general posts such as these
And previous ones by other members basically outline a one sided set of critiques that de-legitimizes complaints of others and function as performative in group soothing. To claim value in your own thoughts and claim others as low effort displays ironically a lack of effort and also a lack of empathy and engagement with other posters. There are legitimate critiques about biden and just because someone doesn't type out 10 paragraphs explaining why they feel this way doesn't make those thoughts illegitimate. "Oh i've never done that" aight i'm sure you haven't. Totally not "spilling the tea" in your discord either.
The reality being that most of you are having your jimmies rustled over a primary while the whole time claiming other voters who were for candidates that rhyme with ernie were incompetent, stupid, or uninformed. And like that's the nature of the discourse, i've participated in it, but don't try to pretend like there was some hallowed before time when all the posts in this thread were somehow higher value because there wasn't some socialism era that came in and dained to disagree. Most posts are boring, unoriginal, and performative. Mine now is extremely performative.
The irony in constantly eulogizing over a thread yall are supposedly fleeing for a discord where you had to ban and then re-invite kirblar because he was so fucking toxic is endlessly amusing.
How to fix it? Probably make moderation anonymous so they get less shit, give mods more leeway to make bans to enforce consistent discussion, more bans for shorter periods of time to give people time to cool off.
But mainly just realize you're posting on an internet politics forum. If someone calls biden shit that's their prerogative. Get over it, report their post, block them, take time out of the thread to cool off, just stop having crisis and creating spinoff servers/forums because you feel invisible slights from moderation which has been extremely deferential all the way along.
Yeah, threads have become exhausting to read or post in because it feels like the forum politics policy is "the world sucks therefore shitposting is impossible." People get dogpiled for not seeming angry enough and then the targets are the ones who get banned if they object to getting treated like shit. People are annoyed and tired of a forum version of "stop hitting yourself." When you spend a year treating a bunch of social democrats like they're personally shoveling the bodies of the working class into a furnace in Bloomberg's basement, people are just gonna stop posting.
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