Bone did the weak thing. He basically shut down Jay_Jay without a ban. At least in that thread. The problem with this board is posters want the mods to protect them from their own compulsions.
I think it’s more a matter that some posters want the mods to protect the board from the compulsions of other posters.
I started this thread and I’m pretty agnostic on Jay_Jay himself. My concern is the idea of a generic propaganda spewer who’s paid to sit here spreading disinformation like poison manure across our nice park where we all hang out. There are certainly many folks in the Omnibus Trolls thread who’re convinced Okrahoma is simply a paid Russian propaganda poster.
As I almost said in my OP, the kinds of countermeasures that defeat 1990s malware done for geek lulz is very different from the countermeasures necessary to deal with the 2017 edition of the Bulgarian Mafia or the Chinese PLA.
A crank is irritating. A dedicated crank is very irritating. A paid vandal is a different class of problem that IMO requires a different solution. As long as we (community members or TPTB) refuse to believe there is such a thing as a paid vandal we’ll continue to be used and abused by them. We’re made to be “useful fools” as the Cold War saying had it.
I’m not certain this is a problem yet. But I have my rapidly growing suspicions. Hence this thread as a “consciousness raising” for anyone, mod or otherwise, who sees it.
While you’re at it, we have a poster named jayjay who has been here a while. If you’re not going to ban the guy, force a name change on him.
I guess it’s possible that someone is a paid poster. But what’s the return on investment? And how could you tell?
My thinking is the threaded nature of conversation combined with rules against spam mitigates the potential problem sufficiently.
Are you kidding? The ROI is huge and it’s the reason that the Internet is so infested with astroturf sites and fake news all trying to control policy agendas: if you can get enough people to believe your bullshit, the ROI is nothing less than winning control of public policy. Or, as seems to be the case in Russian meddling, just plain sabotage – the loss of faith in democratic institutions and the destabilization of western democracies.
How could you tell that someone is a paid agent? You couldn’t. And it really makes no difference, because obsessive monomania pushing some nonsense agenda produces the same results and should be treated the same way.
The rules against spam only work against someone flogging digital cameras and live streams, not against those peddling political agendas, historical revisionism, and random fantasies. And stating that the problem is adequately mitigated is begging the question that this thread was started about. Obviously some don’t think so.
I don’t want to give the impression that I believe we have paid posters, because I have no idea and I’d concede that other explanations for most of our past and present weirdos are probably more likely. Nevertheless it’s intrinsic to the fake-grassroots strategy that is the core of astroturfing to disguise the advocacy as the sincere beliefs of ordinary citizens. They have websites and blogs all over the place promoting everything from climate change denial to sabotaging productive health care reform to fake-news Trumpism. They’re all over Facebook and other social media spinning distorted or outright false information.
It’s hard to imagine a worse place to attempt to influence policy by monomaniacally spreading a disingenuous and illogical point of view than a message board dedicated to skepticism and snark. That would not be money well spent. This is starting to sound like conspiracy theory itself.
I think that’s an accurate assessment. In my opinion we can look after ourselves and the less moderator intervention on the board the better. On an ideal board we’d only ever see the mods as posters but of course that’s almost impossible to achieve on a board of this size. The simplest answer to the question posed in the OP is to totally ignore tinfoil hat questioners. There is no point at all in replying to them because they are not looking for answers nor are they interested in dialogue. What they want is someone to listen to their nonsensical blather. We shouldn’t be that someone. If every bizarre theory generates hundreds of replies we’ll soon become a favored destination for these people.
Snarkticism.
I’ll admit that I only read about half of the first page of Jay_Jay’s thread. Now I have read all the posts on this thread. My takeaway is how dare Jay_Jay not bow to our superior intellect and Jay_Jay doesn’t fall to his knees under the pile on. Help, get a mod in here to ban him. He is following the rules? Bullshit!! The rules are whatever the mods say they are.
IMO if he bothers everyone all that much quit responding to him. Obviously there were some people enjoying Jay_Jay’s thread, they kept it going. If there are that many people enjoying a thread why should anyone else care. The rules were not being broken.
There are several posters on this board that have a habit of ignoring questions that they don’t like. Is it going to be OK to get Bone to put special rules on them?
What I would have done was put it in the Pit and let Miller sort it out. I don’t think Jay_Jay could have held out there. His thread could have been moved into the Pit pretty quickly.
As long as I’ve been here, crackpots proposing bizarre theories have typically generated hundreds of replies without there being a noticeable increase in such threads. (As I said earlier, such threads are fewer than one in many thousands.) Eventually either the crackpot or the posters become bored, or the crackpot is banned (usually because they begin insulting people who don’t acknowledge their brilliance). I’m pretty sure there isn’t some red alert system to alert crackpots to where they get a response.
I personally don’t see a lot of point to responding to such posters beyond a few posts to establish the flaws in their arguments, but I don’t think such threads are the menace to the future of the board that some seem to think. If they were to become much more common, we’d deal with it.
Gotta agree with Col. With our nearly 20 year policy of ‘be a crackpot so long as you’re polite about it’ if there was going to be an onrush of weirdness it would’ve happened already. The fact that it hasn’t is indicative that we just bring them in occasionally.
But to ask us to control and moderate for basic content? That might be a line no one wants us to cross. One man’s crackpot is another man’s plainly sensible belief. I sure don’t want to make that call. Note that the thread in question was closed not for crackpottedness but for repeated warnings for Failure to Follow Moderator Instructions. If he’d paid attention he could go on for a long time for all I care.
OK, obviously a number of us have different views on how to deal with CT postings and we’ll probably never agree. So I’ll just say this. Let’s examine your comment in light of the course of action that many are recommending …
Whatever way you want to describe the character of this board, that character is determined by the nature of the conversations in it, the informed arguments and interactions between posters. If someone posts a crazy CT thread and we follow the above advice so that there is little or no rebuttal, the commendable ignorance-fighting “skepticism and snark” effectively becomes tacit acceptance. Moreover, whatever message the thread conveys would be promoted by the Google results whose rankings TPTB are always working hard to enhance. Right now if I type “9/11 events physics” into Google – a very basic and generic set of search terms – the stupid CT thread we are discussing is right there on the first page, ranked 8th out of 17,300,000 results.
Hmm. My note is that Jay_Jay behaved exactly the same in the first half of the thread as the half in which mods warned him. He started out being a jerk and continued being a jerk. The subject matter was irrelevant.
As the OP I may not have made one point as clear to y’all as it was to me 
Jay_Jay is not the issue. **Jay_Jay ***reminded *me of this issue: paid vandal posters. The point of this thread is not “Should we ban Jay_Jay?” or “Should we ban any/all CT enthusiasts?”
The point of the thread is as wolfpup says in #65. Large amounts of money are being spent all over social media to try in effect to troll the whole damn country. A nation of deeply suspicious cynics steeped in conflicting versions of fake news will not be a successful democracy for long.
My Q: Are we being targeted too? Are we doing anything about it?
See something. Say something.
I thought I maybe saw something so I said something. Here it is.
If this is the concern, you point fails. If no one had responded to him, that thread would have had only a few posts and would not show up on Google at all.
And if that happened, information debunking bullshit like that would be harder to find on Google. As it now stands we are high on the first Google search page.
The problem with this is…?
No, t doesn’t. First, I repeat that this board does not have the responsibility of correcting all the errors in the world, especially the wilfully stupid ones. And B, if someone from outside the board does come upon that hypothetical thread, the lack of response is, in my opinion, more likely to look like disinterest than acquiescence.
You can perhaps take comfort that in this dispute you get to take the hero’s side, while I must side with the evil, because like the world I construe according to my wits:
*Cromwell: Yet how can this be? Because this silence betokened, nay, this silence was, not silence at all, but most eloquent denial!
Sir Thomas More: Not so. Not so, Master Secretary. The maxim is “Qui tacet consentire”: the maxim of the law is “Silence gives consent”. If therefore you wish to construe what my silence betokened, you must construe that I consented, not that I denied.
Cromwell: Is that in fact what the world construes from it? Do you pretend that is what you wish the world to construe from it?
Sir Thomas More: The world must construe according to its wits; this court must construe according to the law. *
I think we’ve both made our positions clear on this issue. I respect your sincerity even as I think you are quite wrong.
I understand that Google uses your browsing history to rank results. Because you regularly access the SDMB, it comes high on the search results. For another person, who has never heard of us, using the same terms it would come low on the list.
I don’t have a problem with it.
That’s not my only or even primary concern – it was just another point worth considering. As for whether my point fails or not, I don’t know; I know virtually nothing about how Google works, but I’m not sure if you’re necessarily correct on that. Google uses hundreds of exotic criteria to rank pages in their entirety. It’s not clear that low activity in an individual thread in a highly ranked page, or the thread aging and falling off the first page, is necessarily a major factor compared to the ranking of the domain, the page, and other aggregate factors. I just don’t know. And it’s also notable that Google looks for many quality signals like grammar and spelling, so I would think junk posts drag down the whole site’s ranking by some small amount. So do junk posts that link to disreputable sources, as many CT babblings do.
I did a little test on this thread which has had only 13 responses in 10 days, certainly not a raging hot-button topic. I threw in the short first sentence in the OP (“the idea is to destigmatize HIV”) and this one still turned up #6 out of 62,500 hits. Anyway, that point was just a side argument. Google seems to like this place, is the general message I get, which is not an insignificant point in the larger scheme of things. 