Even aside from the trolling, it’s a poorly designed site. There’s no site map, much of the navigation is blind, the search function sucks, the voting hangs my browser and there’s no way (that I can find anyway) to find or monitor your own comments.
Maybe they should have forgone the moon map technology and talked to somebody who can actually run a web forum.
By the way, how could they possibly not have forseen that this is exactly what would happen? The second I saw the idea, I thought “that’s going to be troll central.” Has no one on Capitol Hill ever seen the internet before?
“…the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.”
As I noted on the other thread, the site now defaults to showing the “Most Interest” posts – but that merely replaces one problem (the site threatens 4chan’s title of “Troll Central”) with another (it seems that the Voice Of The People may not be quite what the Republican Party wants to hear).
For instance, some of the front-page “Most Interest” posts under the “Open Mic” miscellaneous category at the moment are as follows:
The rest, however, provides a dose of the satirical trollishness we know and love:
This one, which I’m paraphrasing because I forgot to copy-and-paste it, gave me the proverbial turn your guffaw into a cough so my boss doesn’t think I’m losing it:
‘Mandatory abortions for all gays so they can’t keep getting each other pregnant and producing more gays.’
[QUOTE]
Aramaic as the Official Language of the US. We do this to respect two facts: this is a Christian Nation and Jesus spoke Aramaic, therefore, that should be our language as well. Anyone who refuses to speak the language of our Lord should be deported back to where they came from. This includes the Native Americans
[QUOTE]
I can’t decide if I think this one is a joke or not. Time was, a reference to “sending Native Americans back where they came from” would have pinged my humor meter, but these days…
Poe’s Law, show of hands. Are these sincere or trolls?
[ul]
[li]We should hold a Puritan Revolution. If the executive does not support it and tries to assert High Church Anglicanism (dangerously close to Catholicism) we should chop off his head. We should then enter a republican phase with a Lord Protector chosen from the godly community [/li][li]Pass a law making it legal to film, record, and photograph all government employees while they are doing their job. Make it a fireable offense to arrest a citizen for filming/recording/photographing law enforcement officers doing their job. [/li][li]We should stick to ideas originally in the CONSTITUTION: unregulated guns, strong laws against immigration, Jesus as Lord of the U.S. and A, and English as the only language allowed to be spoken. Good enough for the Constitution, good enough for me.[/li][li]Only married Christians should be allowed to have children.[/ul][/li]
This one made me laugh out loud:
Federal tax rebates for good Christian men who have had back surgery so that they can afford to pay handsome youths at airports to lift their luggage for them.
[li]We should hold a Puritan Revolution. If the executive does not support it and tries to assert High Church Anglicanism (dangerously close to Catholicism) we should chop off his head. We should then enter a republican phase with a Lord Protector chosen from the godly community[/li][/QUOTE]
Troll. Obviously a reference to the interregnum.
[QUOTE]
[li]Pass a law making it legal to film, record, and photograph all government employees while they are doing their job. Make it a fireable offense to arrest a citizen for filming/recording/photographing law enforcement officers doing their job.[/li][/QUOTE]
This could be real… but probably not, as most conservatives are pro-LEO. The ones that are anti-LEO tend to be Libertarian in bent, and thus probably wouldn’t support allowing recordings, etc…
[QUOTE]
[li]We should stick to ideas originally in the CONSTITUTION: unregulated guns, strong laws against immigration, Jesus as Lord of the U.S. and A, and English as the only language allowed to be spoken. Good enough for the Constitution, good enough for me.[/li][/QUOTE]
Obvious troll. The final line gives it away - a variation of “If English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me”.
[QUOTE]
[li]Only married Christians should be allowed to have children.[/list][/li][/QUOTE]
This could be a troll, but I’ve heard the exact same thing from people in all earnestness… Poe’s law rides again.