Red Diamond Threads

[Mise]

EDIT: I just read Akka's post on the previous page -- EXCELLENT POST!!!

We can't moderate what a moderator or member may find to be a ridiculous opinion.

Yes, you can. You shouldn't, but you can. And if your goal is "serious discussion", then you must.

But we can identify styles that have a tendency to degrade discussions and provoke negative reactions. We want to encourage people to move away from those styles. One of the biggest complaints with moderation seems to be that the focus is on punishing those that snap back at ridiculousness. And those that do so will still be punished. However, we are attempting to remove a large part of the provocation that causes people to snap back. People can civilly disagree all the time, and this is much more likely to occur when posting styles are not troublesome. If someone is posting something non-contributive, or simply posting, "No, you're wrong", that isn't either making a contribution to the thread, or being conducive to civil responses. The main style that is being targeted; 'non-contributive posts', is heavily linked with content, in that if your post does not provide any, it falls into that category. The community has been telling us fairly clearly the endpoint they are looking for, and this, whilst not necessarily being a silver bullet, hopefully provides the means to get to that end.

None of that addresses my point. Your goal is "serious discussion", but for a discussion to be "serious", the content of the post must be serious. It's not enough, or even necessary, for the style to be like <this> or like <that>.

If your goal was merely "the same threads as before but with more infractions and arbitrary bans", then BirdJaguar should change his OP, and we should lower our expectations. I foolishly expected serious discussion, but that doesn't seem to be what's happening.

One further thing; in order for this trial to succeed, it's imperative that people trying to work with it. It's obviously not going to work if people actively attempt to ruin it, so attempts to give it a go are greatly appreciated.

So far, nobody has attempted to ruin it; merely to point out flaws in its design and implementation. Because it is critically flawed. JR is going after one flaw, I'm going after another.

The 2nd "serious discussion" in OT is about ghosts.

 

[RedRalph]

Great idea. There will be some teething problems initially, but I think this will work very well.

 

[Azash]

I used to post here and think this was a very unique site because of its internationally, politically and age diverse posters. I think I was a rather serious poster. I also think the site is overmoderated now and there are rather few interesting discussions. Discussions of politics, religion, philosophy etc. will sometimes get heated if undertaken by normal human beings as opposed to robots. This is part of what makes them interesting. A bit of witty repartee (ie trolling) is what makes them interesting and fun to participate in (for people who are interesting and fun). The thing that makes a site is the type of people it attracts and that will vary overtime, for this site probably mostly based on the quality of the current Civ iteration. No amount of moderation will help this. Over time I saw more and more discussions stifled by infracting a slightly mocking or trollish comment that was clever and content laden bringing interesting threads to an end.

The idea of the RD or super serious forum has been tried before as a special sticky thread or an OT spinoff –or both I forget. It failed because no one participated. The current iteration is a trick to keep it mixed with the main OT in the hopes that more will participate. I think it will also fail because the whole ambience of OT is to have the goofy 14 yr olds ideas mixed with the 23 yr old recent grad and the trollish 50 yr old lawyer. It has worked and can work if allowed to. That means I have to sort through picture and happy birthday threads and one line non-sequiturs in a “serious” thread. It is not such a burden and can be amusing and anything else ruins what is special about OT. For those who want such seriousness may I suggest auditing a university course or just keep an OT spinoff forum with whatever participation you can get-ie very little.


As the mods like to point out it is TFs site and you have no rights here. Fine. I notice 19 members currently logged in to OT-moderated by 14 moderators! Enjoy your site.

You far outshone me with the same points.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

So wait. RD isn't opt-in? I thought y'all said at the beginning that it was something we tagged ourselves when we began the thread, and could otherwise request to have elevated to RD status later. Mods are going to tag threads with RD status even if the OP doesn't want it that way? Please tell me I'm wrong.

 

[madviking]

Something I'd like to throw in, my $0.02 if you wish.

In an RD thread, you (effectively) just have "serious" posters posting "serious" things. But in a non-RD thread, you retain both "serious" and "non-serious" posters posting all kinds of things. The reason I wouldn't want to make the threads I start RD is I wouldn't be able to post less-than-serious responses to some posters. Like Mark said above, I would want to be able to post some jabbing comments, since those are the kind of responses I make in real life; parodying/satirizing their points, making them say my points for me, etc. But in an RD thread, I wouldn't be able to do that.

I don't really care about the outcome of RD threads, since I choose not to participate in them.

 

[Kozmos]

I noticed my 'rights' so to speak have been increasingly limited as others have taken TFs place and duties. (ie silly auto-censoring, infracting for even using asterisks, heavy-handed moderations based solely on the mods personal opinion on what is right and proper and not the rules etc.)

 

[Gogf]

Moderation has never been opt-in.

That said, if you're wanting a lighter thread on a topic*, then by all means that's fine and it's generally not going to be made an RD thread. However, if the OP is designed to be as a serious discussion, then the serious discussion moderation is going to be applied. If someone starts a thread to discuss some contentious political issue, or a supreme court ruling, then it will made an RD thread, and moderation will be RD standard.

You seriously don't understand why people think this is a problem? Let me be as clear as possible:

You do not know better than me what I want from my thread.

If I wanted the thread to be red diamond, I would choose the mark it as red diamond. The fact that I didn't means I don't, and for you to decide that "actually, this is a serious discussion, it should be RD" and override my decision is arrogant and domineering, not to mention ridiculous. You do not know better than me.

The point I guess with saying, "I don't see why anyone would want to see it fail," is that if you've made an OP designed for serious discussion, then I don't see why that's not what you'd want. I don't see why you wouldn't want tiresome bickering and completely non-contributory posts removed.

Because you've already been treating us like children, and this system only makes it worse. Think about the messages you're sending out:

"You guys are incapable of having a productive discussion without our us flexing our power!"
"You guys all think this new restriction on your posting freedom sucks, but just trust us it's going to be AWESOME!"
"How is it possible that anyone could not want this thing that we want?"

Honestly, you have completely unrealistic expectations for this forum. As Mark says, this forum is full of young teenagers, college students and recent grads, and middle-aged lawyers. Yeah, people can have some interesting conversations here, but it's never going to be the picture of Socratic dialogue. And that's fine. In fact, it's good. This forum would be a lot worse without the irrelevant comments and a lot of the trolling. You think anyone want to read nothing but an unpunctuated super-serious argument about whether or not God exists waged by 14-year-olds? I don't come here for high-level discourse, and no matter what happens, I never will and neither will anybody else.

Stop pretending this forum can turn into a model of fangless intellectualism and treat it like what it is: the off topic section of a gaming forum.

[By the way, Camikaze, in case you didn't know, I just want to make you aware that you have some pretty serious public credibility problems on this issue, because almost everyone thinks that you are enormously overzealous and trigger-happy in your moderation. I don't mean this to insult or troll you, just to give you a heads-up how the general public here views you.]

 

[RedRalph]

Give it a chance folks. Let's see how it works out before the outrage starts.

And BTW, I think Camikaze does a grand job moderating. Not sure who made Gogf spokesman for the board.

 

[Kozmos]

And BTW, I think Camikaze does a grand job moderating.

Uhh no. I won't say more because of the 'law'. But just no.

 

[Perfection]

Why can't we all just not get along?

 

[Yared]

Give it a chance folks. Let's see how it works out before the outrage starts.

And BTW, I think Camikaze does a grand job moderating. Not sure who made Gogf spokesman for the board.

Yeah, I agree. He's doing his job and it well. For what it's worth, it's not the first time a new, upcoming moderator has gotten crap.

 

[Kraznaya]

Uhh no. I won't say more because of the 'law'. But just no.

To be fair, it does oftentimes provide for much hilarity.

 

[azzaman333]

Yeah, I agree. He's doing his job and it well. For what it's worth, it's not the first time a new, upcoming moderator has gotten crap.

This is not a comment about him in particular, but I find if I don't respect a moderator within the couple of months they become one, they don't lift the standard to a respectable level. I won't name names, but there's quite a few examples.

 

[Moss]

Why can't we all just not get along?

Because not everyone here is "Minnesota nice."

 

[_random_]

You seriously don't understand why people think this is a problem? Let me be as clear as possible:

You do not know better than me what I want from my thread.

If I wanted the thread to be red diamond, I would choose the mark it as red diamond. The fact that I didn't means I don't, and for you to decide that "actually, this is a serious discussion, it should be RD" and override my decision is arrogant and domineering, not to mention ridiculous. You do not know better than me.



Because you've already been treating us like children, and this system only makes it worse. Think about the messages you're sending out:

"You guys are incapable of having a productive discussion without our us flexing our power!"
"You guys all think this new restriction on your posting freedom sucks, but just trust us it's going to be AWESOME!"
"How is it possible that anyone could not want this thing that we want?"

Honestly, you have completely unrealistic expectations for this forum. As Mark says, this forum is full of young teenagers, college students and recent grads, and middle-aged lawyers. Yeah, people can have some interesting conversations here, but it's never going to be the picture of Socratic dialogue. And that's fine. In fact, it's good. This forum would be a lot worse without the irrelevant comments and a lot of the trolling. You think anyone want to read nothing but an unpunctuated super-serious argument about whether or not God exists waged by 14-year-olds? I don't come here for high-level discourse, and no matter what happens, I never will and neither will anybody else.

Stop pretending this forum can turn into a model of fangless intellectualism and treat it like what it is: the off topic section of a gaming forum.

[By the way, Camikaze, in case you didn't know, I just want to make you aware that you have some pretty serious public credibility problems on this issue, because almost everyone thinks that you are enormously overzealous and trigger-happy in your moderation. I don't mean this to insult or troll you, just to give you a heads-up how the general public here views you.]

Well said, man. Take the Anthony Weiner scenario from a short while back. It would have been totally possible to have lots of serious discussion about the interaction of politicians with social media and the extent to which we ought to consider the private lives and morals of elected officials if they don't relate directly to politics. Alternatively, we could have cracked some really funny dick jokes with an actual opinion expressed here and there. On their own merits, either one of these could be a great thread, and provided the latter stays PG-13, I don't think the moderators ought to be dictating which one the posters and the OP choose to create.

And BTW, I think Camikaze does a grand job moderating. Not sure who made Gogf spokesman for the board.

You may disagree, but I've seen that opinion expressed in several places outside of the forum, and that does seem to be the consensus.

 

[Save_Ferris]

Great addition! Will it be put in other forums?

 

[ParadigmShifter]

Well as long as you never make my threads red diamond I am OK with it.

 

[Cutlass]

Having read what is written here by a variety of posters, my opinion is that this is going to be a hell of a lot more work, and not as successful, as simply disposing of some of the worst offenders and letting the rest know that it can happen to them. And then relaxing a bit with the remainder.

I foresee burnout in the future of many....


And, fwiw, I don't think Cami is doing a bad job moderating so far. A bit on the overzealous side, maybe, but that's just part of being new to it. I think he'll be fine.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Good stuff from many of you. I will wade through it and try to get some responses up later today.

Please let's not make this thread some sort of moderator evaluation. issues with moderators should be addressed to the admins.

 

[GenMarshall]

Well said Gogf, well said .