The rules are changing, we are going to start showing the assholes the door

Have you ever noticed you have a very high thumbs up average on your posts? I have seen many times one post marked down and an almost exact post by someone else marked up.

Apart from a community of suck-holes and haters, to what do you attribute this, in particular your brilliant posts and the complete lack of success by others?

Sometimes that can happen (e.g. I'm sure I average a higher number than you, owing in my opinion to a much greater amount of coherence), but not always and I don't let that influence what I have to say. I get down voted a lot by liberals who lack nuance and think that questioning any liberal tenet means I'm a bad conservative enemy and by conservatives who think that I am the leader of a liberal cabal who is out to get them. Just look at my latest threads, many of my posts are at 0 or below while the people who thoughtlessly ignore the discussion I'm trying to have to say popular liberal things are voted up to 11 etc.

If I gave a **** about the votes I get I would just say popular things, it's very predictable who will vote for what.

I stay out of political threads because I cant understand the idea of telling someone their opinion is wrong. It is based on all their life experiences. Every other place I have noticed you are well marked up beyond what I would think of as a fair reflection of the thought behind the post. Even in this thread there is an example of two posts saying roughly the same thing and a divergence of thumbing.

Will you be addressing the hate factor? I have suggested on another thread that we make it visible to forum members who is voting which way on what.

Yes, I see it now. You are the most coherent person here. I just went back through 3 pages of your posts and you havent been marked down once, in fact there are a 9, two 7's, a 6, a 5 etc. No wonder you think thumbing is a good idea, all the kiss-arses mark you up. Your posts are not great, I hate to tell you, and I have seen many posters continue here for years despite being handled rather rudely who put forward a much better argument it simply doesnt agree with the approved politics.

LOL but if you "flood" them with ad hominems complains to show such a pattern that is reason enough for you to be ban!!!! So reporting that problem to them might not be a good idea.

As I had said Robert statements made you feel like you had fallen into a rabbit hole with Alice .

Yes, if you use significant volume you hamper the moderator ability to do their job so you will be prevented from continuing to do so.

Just collect up the reports and send them, no need to use volume of messages to make a point.

You are being deliberately daft Bill, you know god damn well too.



You make your own silly holes to fall into.

Thank you for making your answer as clear as mud.

One of them, yes. But that wasn't my claim, my claim was that I think your problem with down votes owes largely to instances of low coherence on your part.



If I wanted a bunch of votes my name I could edit the database and do it myself. I do not find personal validation from votes.



I'll keep that in mind.

Hell compare to having one gentleman following me around for years and on such threads as the Paris attack thread once more derail the thread to try to prove that my attempts in 2009 to find homes for some kittens in a park by my home along with daring to state that his own nation laws as far as CP made more sense then the US laws proved that I am a pedophile it is mild being called a fag or a nigger or a redneck or whatever.

But then you do not care about ad hominem attacks only slur words.

Well, here

http://able2know.org/topic/164543-96#post-6087808

is a sequence in which people, including me, try to engage ci in a perfectly civil debate and he responds consistently like this:




Whenever I disagree with him, he pretty much always responds this way. I am not suggesting that anything be done in this specific case, but I assure you that numerous ad hominem attacks brought about by nothing more than an opposing viewpoint are common on A2K.

Robert, would you come tuck me in? I am going to bed, now.

Yes, and could you read me a story?

Robert open this can of worms not us. As far as I know no one was filing complains until he ask us to.

At first I did not reacted kindly to the idea of heavy monitoring but then it hit me that a board with little personal attacks would be kind of nice for a change.

Now I find he only met the used of very narrow slur words such as fag for example and it still open season for ad hominem attacks.on this website.

You mean the story about the big mean and disgusting pedophile that you deleted when we was all thinking Robert might in fact enforce a ban of personal ad hominem attacks?

I am sure as long as it does not have such words as fagot or nigger he would have no problem reading your story back to you.

Well there was a least one comment wherein Bill was called a pedophile. I know because I reported it.

If you don't think that is as vile as calling someone a fag, so be it. You make the rules and if only slurs related to so-called protected classes are banned, I doubt there will be any cases of unequal application...which is a good thing. I was concerned about equal application when it came to ad hominem attacks but as they will remain fair game, I guess I can put those concerns aside and go back to trying to ignore the attacks.

This entire discussion has, frankly, grown tiresome. Clearly there are people in this "community" who are disturbed with how things are and at least several of them are very reasonable individuals who are rarely, if ever, guilty of offensive rhetoric. Whether or not that is something for which you should have concern is for you to determine.

I'm just looking forward to the proposed changes. Perhaps they will make a significant difference in the environment, but it's clear that despite the title of this thread (your words and no one else's) nothing is going to change before them.

I'm sure you've already given us an indication when the changes can be expected but would you mind repeating it so I don't have to scroll through the pages of this and other related threads? It will be appreciated.

Thanks

I'll have to look at it (I don't always see all reports because our interface for them sucks right now). If you have it handy a PM to me would help there (so I don't have to dig too far in the shitty interface).



I don't think it is as vile (again, calling someone a "fag" in an insult to more than just the person) but it's vile enough in the right context (e.g. "you are a ******* pedophile Bill" vs "gee you kinda sound like a pedophile Bill").

I get why people suspect it. Though I don't hold that opinion the thought crossed my mind a few times too, the obsession with encryption and the age of consent etc arguments correlate well with pedophiles. I don't think expressing the concern in some cases would merit a suspension but I do think straight up accusing someone of being a pedophile would in most cases merit a suspension (in one case where a pedophile came here to argue that it was not wrong that might not be a case where I think it is valid, if someone self-identifies as a pedophile it is very different optics).



I've never said that they were the only things that are not going to be allowed. If someone launched an extremely profane tirade it would likely qualify.

If someone merely says "you are dumb" or is just consistently sarky that is a lot harder of a line to effectively draw without losing the majority of the community (I've seen almost every one in this thread with a few really nice person exceptions like roger) call someone dumb before.



Not all ad hominem attacks are fair game. I think ad hominem is one of the most misunderstood terms on this site. It merely means an argument against the person instead of the idea.

So it could be as simple as saying "your argument is wrong, you are biased toward X".

This is an ad hominem argument, but it is hardly an insult worthy of actions. I think most people here are conflating ad hominem with personal attacks that reach the level of abuse but that's not what an ad hominem means, many of them don't even have to be insulting at all.

If a woman says to a man "you aren't a woman your opinion on abortion isn't relevant" this is an ad hominem but we aren't here to enforce perfect arguments.



I think most of the concern is about how things are imagined to be more so than how things are. Most of the concerns expressed aren't just not based in reality.

For example, I would love nothing more to find high-EQ conservatives who can help moderate the site. It would take a lot of the wind out of the sails of the "unfair to conservatives" perception. When I stared this forum I strove to keep a balance. We had fishing and timber as conservative moderators and more.

Over time it has been tough to do, given that there are few conservatives and the high-EQ ones haven't been interested in helping (no fault to them, this is a thankless and shitty job).



So far the changes have resulted in the following concrete actions. Suspensions for such slurs that have always been the rule were enforced after a lapse in the consistency of this application. Additionally an older policy removing high-volume low-coherence posters has been applied (and before anyone gets worried we are talking about them this is really for that .1% of people that we all consider pretty much spam. The guys who come in and start thread after thread of incoherent ramblings that nobody responds to and that possibly not a single other member sees value in.

The new system will not need manual intervention in this case (it will do better to just highlight the good and this allows for more tolerance for gibberish posts but at the moment the gibberish topics were outnumbering the ones the community values in volume and until more nuanced tools can be deployed to handle this we are going back to suspending the members who flood the forum with the same incoherent topics over and over.



These things are tough, and it will not be a black and white change. We are debating the issues in the moderator groups (and once again, I would love to get more diversity in political positions in the group to defuse the pernicious notion that these rules are politically applied).

The change started when I came back to trying to improve the community after a hiatus caused by needing to save the company that pays A2K's bills. Now I am going to spend significant resources on trying to improve A2K (we have begun rewriting it) and am going to try to do more community management. It's hard stuff and the team is understaffed and some of the stuff that I don't think was falling through the cracks was.

The mod team was dealing with a flood of spam that was not allowing them to do much more than be spam janitors (we actually had to block all of India temporarily this month to help with this).

So don't expect a single seismic change, rules are very difficult to establish because they need to be future proof (able to be fairly applied, a rule as broad as this title implies is not viable). I already see an improvement (slight) in the tone of the forum just from the warning that this thread represented that the lapses in moderation would be addressed and some of the employees in my company are contributing more now that we have some time and resources to do so.

I lean towards inclusiveness. I personally prefer more hands off and less getting involved in forum spats and things like blocking (though some here do not like the idea) are going to be the answer to most of the "so and so insults me all the time" problems when that is ready, relieving us of the need to get involved in each dispute. I sincerely believe that threaded conversations, blocking and decentralizing community management to allow for different approaches are going to be completely game changing to the community and the quality of discourse it supports.

So I really have no expectation that the slight change in community management direction is not the purge some here have in mind, but merely a commitment to incrementally improve policy and its application on this site.

Edit: if you are asking about the forum platform changes and not moderation changes that is something I expect to be ready the second half of the next year but we don't have a deadline, we'll wait until it is really better than the current software before releasing it.

This is a good case for being able to block a member. Not all following around and being mean is actionable for us. However some actions certainly are and as I've repeatedly said if someone is going around following you and calling you a pedophile this may well qualify.



Bill at this point, I've said tonight to you several times that this is simply not the case. We have suspended more members for the incoherent flood of topics so far than this and slurs about race, gender or sexuality are simply not the only things we would act on.

You know this and your repeated assertion otherwise at this point is clearly not confusion but intentional dishonesty.

He wants the forum to be PC. Hatred is PC, you just have to hate the right people.

So was Hawkeye. I jumped in with facts about what is and has been perceived as the "age of consent" and everyone ran away. They wanted to hate, not discuss.

They are trying to make themselves look bigger by lowering others.

I agree and as much as I like CI as a human I think he argues as bad as anyone can and almost always resorts to the logical fallacy of ad hominem. For this reason I do not have political conversations with him. However we are not here to enforce the prohibition of logical fallacies in arguments.

While his debate style almost always leave plenty to be desired I have not seen his vitriol in his ad hominem reach levels I think we should act on.



I agree, like everywhere in life there is a LOT more shitty debate here than good debate. But we aren't enforcing absolute logical soundness or absolute politeness.

Calling someone an "ignoramus" is a mild enough insult that if made into a rule for suspension would result in the collapse of the community. You are much less prone to logical fallacies, for example, but I don't' doubt that someone thinks you've said something to them as mean as "ignoramus" and we just can't be expected to arbitrate all of that.

In this thread (mainly because of my thoughtless title and initial post) there is perception that we are going to rid the community of all impoliteness but that's not the case, we are going to address egregious cases that harm the community as a whole, not just people who are mean to each other.

Hawkeye has spent nearly a decade insulting me at every opportunity (it's an odd obsession and after coming back after years of not even looking at the site I see that he's been talking crap about me doing things wrong in the community the whole time) and that never got him in any trouble whatsoever. He's pissed off a ton of people who think he's a misogynist and also was allowed to keep arguing his points of view.

But crossing the line to using that kind of slur was simply not something we ever tolerated and that is why he was suspended. If you ran a community and a member went around calling another gay member a "stupid fag" would you tolerate it?

If your answer is no then that settles the merits of that, but if you think that fairness dictates that someone like CI be suspended for his inability to argue without ad hominem I disagree, these are not equivalent things and if we banned every shitty debater here a significant part of the community will be gone. It's not easy to strike the right balance but my goal is a simple one:

Foster the most vibrant exchange of information that I can.

Allowing such slurs does not do this, it drives away entire classes of people. Allowing egregious insults also does not do this. However prohibiting all insults in general would preclude fostering the most vibrant exchange of information that we can and also change the scale of the community moderation beyond what the current team can support (I am trying to recruit more moderators to help with this, we do not have enough volunteer moderators to ideally manage the community.