These seem contradictory.
I don’t see how. A subset of users complaining about something doesn’t necessarily mean that change is a desirable outcome for the entire community. That’s a fallacy you see again and again in every online community.
This entire thread is predicated on a “many people are saying” appeal.
I’m pretty certain that we agree.
Not really. IMO @hajario 's point was that we already have different digression modding standards in different categories. Whether or not the posters all remember that fact while they’re posting. So the idea of proposing differing digression modding standards by category isn’t novel; it’s business as usual.
OTOH, the idea that the digression modding standards of a particular category might benefit from tweaking, or that we have over- or under-zealous mods versus the community’s understanding of those category-specific standards? Well … those are certainly debatable propositions.
My own challenge with digressions is this:
When I’m about to post one I don’t know whether it’ll prove to be one comment that is loosely related to the current thread and is read with interest by many people, OR will prove to be the seed from which a large response kudzu grows, threatening to strangle the whole thread if not hacked back by a brave scythe-wielding mod.
This is especially true for joking or wordplay posts in the context of a mostly-serious thread. Maybe I make a useful funny, a bunch of posters chuckle at home, and the thread marches on unaffected, and maybe 15 people join in with posting related funnies of their own which destroys the momentum of the serious topic. No way to know what’ll happen once the digressing seed post hits the server.
If I took up the policy of starting a new [reply as linked thread] for every arguable digression, I think I’d find myself creating multiple threads per day, most of which would garner no responses, and rather few of which would constitute worthwhile OP’s in their own right (unless massively upgraded in size and contextual background and hence effort). While making my actual comment less accessible within the thread whose context I think it best belongs in.
It would certainly be an interesting experiment for several of the high volume posters to agree to always [reply as linked thread] for a couple of weeks unless their planned response is right up the centerline of the existing thread. Right now we’re left arguing about a hypothetical: “Will or won’t the cure be worse than the disease?” Having some actual data might be useful. Might.
One issue I have had, and it is completely on me and not the mods, is seeing a hijack in a long thread so eventually I quick scroll to the bottom and replay only to find out after posting that a mod has said stop the hijack. That got me a warning.
Granted.
My general take for any thread is once I get more than about 20 posts behind the current tip of the thread, I should write off any attempt to reply to the posts I’m reading. Both for your cited risk, but also just for timeliness and context.
I may choose to read through to the end, or I may choose to just jump to the end. But in either case, I’m bringing the attitude that I’m pretty much restarting my participation with that thread 8ab initio* at its current endpoint.
I’m here enough that I’m normally all caught up on everything every day. But due to a busy IRL week & some topic fatigue, right now my unread queue has 17 threads, with 4 of them showing me 200+ posts behind the tip, and 4 more that are 100+ posts behind the tip. I’m about to simply mass move my read-to cursor up to current and leave those intervening 1000+ posts unseen and uncommented on.
Thanks to everyone for their replies and thoughts.
I think it’s something that is worth a trial for a month or so. It will not increase burden IMO on the mods; one mod has said it will have the opposite effect. The question is whether it will work in terms of poster interest and utility (i.e., will people, at least a subset of the board, enjoy posting in P&E under this new “hijacks allowed” format). If not, we just get rid of it. No harm done.
I leave it to the mods to try or not try. Thanks for listening!
I’d still suggest investigating if Discord has or could be modified to include sub-threads for tangential discussions, that trail off from a post.
Full discussion trees, like you get in reddit, disqus, etc. are horrible and useless for any discussion between more than 2 people. But Slack’s “linear with subthreading” system does work well. It allows the main flowline to stay on-topic, while allowing people to clarify, argue minor points, etc. in a tributary, keeping the mainline free.
Of course, if a couple of them are increasing moderator demands to leave a particular issue alone, and you happen to bring it up –
Otherwise, I suppose, what you’re risking is that 500 of those 1000 posts are a long argument about a point you’re about to make as if it were a new one.
It has that functionality. You reply to a post into a new thread. It’s automatically linked both ways.
Then you’re polluting the category listings with topics that the people didn’t consider worthy of creating a whole OP about.
I’m also not seeing the option in the browser. It might be an app only feature.
In the browser:
Click on reply.
Look at the top of the reply box, where it says who you’re replying to. There’s a curved arrow. Click on that.
If you are responding to something in a thread that is basically off-topic or likely to lead to a hijack, try this:
How to Reply as a linked Topic:
Click Reply, in the upper left corner of the reply window is the reply type button, looks like a curving arrow point to the right.
Choose Reply as linked topic and it starts a new thread. As an example, you can choose GD, IMHO or The Pit for it.
That is actually the best method.
So, how many different threads in P&E have the exact same link to the recent Iowa poll? Pretty spot on indication of my difficulty with the (IMO extreme) thread splitting. And hijacks are targeted with a hairtrigger, before there is a chance to SEE if they turn into a distraction.
The mods preach as gospel something written 4 years ago urging clear, specific topics, claiming “large omnibus threads” are detrimental. (Solving a “problem” I personally did not perceive.) IMO, the mods have taken that too much to heart and have applied it far more frequently and stringently than needed. Then, while causing themselves this unnecessary self-imposed work, they complain about how hard they have to work.
But they are the mods, and are doing an unpaid, largely thankless task. And many (most?) folk are fine with it. So that is what we are dealing with for the present. At least until someone writes new scripture or a new crop of mods interprets the existing scripture differently.
Oh yeah. Aeschines, I think your suggestion has considerable merit. IMO, if one thread gets too cumbersome, anyone is free to pose a new, more narrowly targeted thread, and see which thread posters prefer. But the idea of denoting threads either “Open discussion-loose moderation” or “No hijacks-strict moderation” seems worth a try.
Some of us are not just “fine with it” - we actively like it this way. Some of us are the reason the rules are as they are now. We had a whole thread to hash them out at the time. You posted in it. And said zip about the hijack part.
This is a “you (pl)” problem, not a “we” problem. It very much is not the “mods vs. everyone else” issue you’re trying to spin it as.
Even a trial is not supported by the staff or has much interest outside of a few posters. So we’re just going to leave it be. I thought the thread had expired, but apparently it was pining for a bump from Dinsdale.
This is a feature, not a bug. Posters should be encouraged to cite relevant references wherever they are appropriate, instead of worrying if it’s the “correct” thread.
Agreed, I’m only following 2 of the 30 election related threads. So a posts to a poll in 4 of the threads is not a bug. Some people are reading all those threads, many and I believe most aren’t reading many of them at all.
I think timing plays into it. If an OP is new, I think it is important to stick with the topic in a pretty strict sense because the topic is why the OP was made in the first place. As a thread ages and you can see from the posts that pretty much everything has been said on the topic, I think a little more latitude can be and is allowed. Also, as has been shown on a number of occasions, an offshoot thread can be constructed without a lot of effort.
A trial would be extra work for the mods. Having a flag that mods need to check each time is extra work. For that matter, it would be extra work for posters, who have enough trouble just keeping track of what forum they are in, let alone what extra flags might be on threads