Hey, Can A Woman "Ask To Get Raped"?

LOL!!!!!

I don't think you've thought it out very well. It's very easy to use your personal ick factor and decide who needs killing. But that is not a fair way to operate. We need objective rules, not just gut instinct, when banning people.

What is not nearly as easy as you seem to think is creating such rules in a way that they just "take out the trash" that you want. For example, you demanded that we ban the sock puppets you think Bill created. But I am pretty sure that others here that you don't want banned have tried similar things and that is an example of how the rule, if objectively applied, will not be the lazer-guided trashman you think it is.

Try to think about it from the perspective of objective governance. I don't run this site like my playground, there are plenty of people I wish weren't here but I don't want the moderation here to be based on such arbitrary authoritarianism.

Furthermore, if you really think Bill is using tor to circumvent our actions you should realize that banning is merely a temporary impediment to a determined troll. It takes as long for me to ban a user as it does for them to sign up again. It's just not the absolute ban-hammer you think it is. It represents a game of whack-a-mole, it's not magic. It is manual labor in a game of attrition and we already have enough of that to deal with with our clear and objective rules (mainly in regard to spam and illegal content).

And all this ignores that people have different opinons on what a troll constitutes, I value having a free marketplace of ideas and think that despite how annoying I find hawkeye and bill their opinions have a right to be aired here.

I haven't followed bill on this particular thread , but in that case it is possible to make a case that there is a volume/monopolization thing going on that could potentially run afoul of our current rules. But even this kind of thing is a timesink for us to become involved in.

Right now what I am leaning towards is letting thread starters moderate their own threads, but banning is a hammer and not everything is a nail. Whether or not this thread is a better place with or without Bill is not what you should be asking yourself, but whether this site is a better place or not with the rules that would need to be in place to ban him.

It's easy as hell to lynch someone, Bill. But doing something with real fairness requires objective rules or objective processes through which subjective judgements are made (such as voting).

I don't think you've ever bothered to think about, much less articulate, a set of objective criteria through which the people you want banned would be banned that does not catch other people in its net.

My example about the way you post, with liberal use of rhetorical bludgeons and insults, is apropos. That is the most common anti-troll rule, prohibiting insults and such behavior. It's easy to just decide that someone's worldview is so demented it must be censored but harder to construct a rule to guide such censorship that does not cross other boundaries of individual liberty here that most do not want crossed.

IMO, the ability to moderate your own topics is probably the best thing for the site to address this kind of situation. It has significant downsides that I need to think through but at present I think the social upsides far outweigh the downsides. In that scenario the thread author would be able to block someone from further participation in the thread if they are trolling it.

Another idea I had was to let people subscribe to ignore recommendations. Something along the lines of a list that is either humanly curated or that uses aggregate vote and ignore data to make a list of people that it recommends you ignore, and it would be up to any user to have those automatically ignored or not.

But you really need to understand that banning users is nearly a 1:1 game of time with them. Sure, I could pretty easily just use my gut and ban a bunch of people and probably make this place better (at least by my standards) but my impeccable judgement of character just doesn't scale. I can't just add moderators and administrators with that kind of policy ("we know a troll when we see one") and not expect power struggles authoritarianism and abuse of power. Even the limited bannings we do now cause angst, drama and complaints. The bottom line is that adopting your policies will just mean another group of people start complaining about how we run the sites instead of you.

A good set of rules can scale but they are very hard to objectively identify the trolls you want banned versus the trolls you don't want banned. This is why I push solutions that scale. So if you want someone banned, propose a policy change that would allow us to objectively do so. We aren't going to take lynch requests.

I agree with that, and that many very traumatised people would do well to avoid posting here if they cannot deal with people like Bill RM etc. and that they likely elect NOT to post here when they see the sort of thing he and others post.

Thing is, you know, that probably really open net fora like this are likely not the best place for people so sensitized to reveal themselves. Even if there was still pretty active top down moderation here, such postings as Bill's are not going to be disappeared immediately and even bannings don't prevent the next person of similar ilk from saying similar things.


O'Bill, given that, whatever you think, nothing is going to change, and if you wish to continue in your "Catcher in the Rye" role, might you consider that your efforts would be better spent in assisting those traumatised folk who DO post here and don't deal well with the Bill RMs of this place to learn about and use the tools like Ignore/voting down etc., (should they feel the need and choose to), that we have so that they CAN effectively "ban" for themselves people whose views they find hateful and distressing, and don't wish to debate?

By the way, Bill-RM-type attitudes are not generally unknown to most people who have been raped or abused....such views are pretty well represented out there in the general community, so they may not be as distressed as you think, and there is likely benefit for some in seeing such views rationally debunked by those folk here who still have sufficient energy to bother doing so. (I simply disappear such threads as this because I DON'T have the energy and likely get too emotional too.)

Do you think that these things you and Robert get into are really beneficial?

I came here because I saw he'd posted here, and thought he might have something interesting to say re the topic...

I understand how you feel when you get the kind of treatment he showed here...but

a. Is the exchange worth it?

b. Speaking of trauma, whether he should or shouldn't get so angry, this stuff (demands for policy change re moderation) is clearly very triggering for Robert, and I suspect anyone who has tried to manage any sort of community will empathise with this...(I still have flashbacks from being dragged onto the management committee of a particular highly dys-functional community organisation) and perhaps that might sometimes be taken into account by you when you get het up about it?

By the way, now that I have looked into it there are at least 6 sockpuppet accounts on this thread voting you up Occom Bill and voting BillRM down.

Edit: yeah, they are all voting on your side Bill. For example, the post of mine where I first disagree with you has 11 sock puppet votes to bury it.

So looks like your ban demands are going to end up taking away one some folks on your side instead of Bill. It looks to have been started by one of your close friends here. Do you still demand banning on the basis of this behavior?

Here are the sock puppets voting Occom Bill up and folks who disagree with him down:

sherrydove34
marydave40
mercy234me
smithtodie
sallyheartt
redtomatoee
firemancraig
countrysarah38
samgloss
cloversleafs
marcycraig80
C1

That's pretty sad . . . and incredibly petty.

Yeah, it really looks like a single someone (you) did. You are the only non-sock puppet account that voted the same way as the sock puppets each time and you also did so prior to their votes each time.



Apparently there are. And apparently you can't help but gloat about it, making it even more obvious it was you.

The simple solution is for you not to be such an ass. While I don't agree with sock puppets, I do agree with having the ability to ignore an asshole's posts without necessarily ignoring the said asshole on all threads.

And, to think that this post would have gotten me banned a couple years ago.

Big man.

ha!

I suspect more than one person knew the truth before you posted.

One minute a sock-puppet...the next minute a dirty limp sock.

Down with sock-puppets...except in theatre.

Lambchop! I used to love Lambchop!

I saw a zebra chasing a leopard in Africa.





David

Seriously? Must have had some mule in him.

The truth is out there as in the X-FILES?

Why in the in the hell by the way can we not have great TV shows any longer such as the outer limit, twilight zone, or mission impossible?

Before the voting business, and for a good part of this thread, what was going on was a concerted effort by both BillRM and Hawkeye to deliberately derail and trash this thread. Hawkeye, in fact, bragged that, because there are no moderators, anyone could take control of a thread and post on whatever topics he wanted, and no one could stop him, and that was just what he and BillRM began doing. So they began posting, often in tandem, with multiple posts by each of them, to such an extent that it was difficult to find the last post made by someone who was actually addressing the topic of this particular thread. This thread was rapidly becoming almost unreadable by anyone actually wanting to join in the discussion about rape.

Nothing stopped either BillRM or Hawkeye from starting their own thread on mens rights issues, or general issues with the "sex laws", or their feelings about "feminists", or any other issue that they apparently wanted to harp on, in a thread where those things could be addressed. But, they didn't start their own thread, because their main motivation was clearly to trash this one, and, for a while, they were doing a pretty good job of it. In all the time I've been at A2K, I'd never seen other posters try to do something like that, to try to hijack a thread out of apparent sheer perversity, although I'm sure it happens. But it was a display, by both of them, that certainly seemed to fit the definition of trolling. Their joking banter about rape, and insensitive and hurtful remarks to rape survivors on this thread were bad enough, but their concerted effort to completely derail the thread was very difficult to deal with by the people who were still interested in discussing the topic in a serious way.

Some people used the ignore function. Other people simply ignored their posts, or tried to, to avoid encouraging them to reply. I had never used the thumbs up or thumbs down voting system before this thread, and I really had no idea how it actually worked. I am very glad someone on this thread suggested using it. I was delighted to find that, when I voted a post down, it disappeared from my page. That's all I wanted to happen. I simply wanted to be able to read this thread more easily, and I am happy there is a way to do that without resorting to the ignore function. I'd rather glance at posts, see their content, and then decide whether to keep them visible on my page. In the case of Hawkeye and BillRM, since they repeated their same few issues incessantly throughout this thread, I had already replied to those numerous times, and further response on my part was pointless. I have no political agenda with this topic, I am not responsible for the Department of Justice rape statistics, I am not anti-male, I am not anti-sex, I am not proposing changes in sexual assault laws, nor am I responsible for the existing laws, I have not ignored the problem of false rape allegations, and I was quite tired of reading these same accusations directed toward me, over and over again. I am glad there is a way of removing these posts from my page view.

Even though I was using the thumbs down to help clear my page, I really didn't think of it as a popularity poll, I mainly saw it as a measure of expediency. It was Hawkeye and BillRM who suddenly began complaining about that aspect and the fact that their posts were being voted down. After doing their damnedest to trash this thread, they were upset that they felt censored and really ignored. They weren't being censored, but they were being ignored by the people who continued to discuss the topic of rape. That seems to have motivated Hawkeye to finally leave this thread. BillRM remained, continuing to remark and complain on how voting was going on his posts, and this was followed by a sudden influx of negative votes on posts made by those still struggling to discuss the topic of this thread, and that led to suspicions about what was going on and who was doing it.

I'm not sure there should have to be a continuous battle about trying to keep a thread basically on topic. There seems little logical reason for people to try to appropriate or hijack threads for their own purposes since everyone is free to start a thread on a topic of their own choosing. Power games like that are childish and annoying, and, in this particular thread, when the topic is serious and personally relevant to several posters, trying to maintain a discussion under such conditions becomes extremely frustrating and occasionally emotionally upsetting. Perhaps A2K isn't the ideal place for this kind of discussion, but, even with all that's gone on in this thread, we've managed to keep it going and basically on topic.

I wouldn't favor having people moderate the threads they start because I can see problems with that approach. Banning people won't work unless you have definite rules in place for some sort of forum decorum, so it is clear when they have been breached, and that has its drawbacks too. The ignore function seems to work for some people, and, when I finally learned about it, the thumbs down worked just fine and allowed me to read this thread without having to wade back several pages just to find the last post that was on topic. I'm not really sure what else could have been done in this thread. Disruptive or domineering posters, with their own needs for attention, will feel comfortable in any forum board that lacks some moderators. The only solution seems to be to ignore them, one way or the other, if you want to maintain a completely open board, and yet want to be able to dicuss particular topics in a coherent, focused manner.