I’ve always hated the rule about that breaking news threads in MPSIMS must stick to breaking news and leave out discussions about why the breaking news is happening. Some breaking news is inherently political, in several of the many senses of that word, and heaving that discussion into a different thread without the context provided by the news itself diminishes both threads.
Hamas attacks Israel, October 2023 is, pardon me, the breaking point. People have been trying to discuss the “why” behind the current attack, something that is totally logical and emotionally inevitable and necessary. Puzzlegal has been - I was going to say shooting them down, but that’s just an example of how thoughtlessly violent and often inappropriate causal language is.
It’s time to call a halt to this anti-community bureaucratic pettifoggery. I want to discuss the whys of this attack in the same thread as reports on the back-and-forth of the missiles. So, apparently, does the rest of the board since the two P&E threads have a bare few posts.
Just to make it clear: I’m protesting the very existence of this rule. If you mods want to suspend just for this thread as an experiment I’d be pleased. But I think it would prove my point that the rule must go.
Sorry, don’t agree at all. When news is breaking fast, I don’t want to be wading through dozens of posts on whether Ilhan Omar is antisemitic or the definition of ethnic cleansing. There has always been tolerance for discussing the proximate reasons for things happening in news threads. There’s no bright line, and this time I think most people are self-policing sensibly on what belongs in a separate thread. Perhaps I’ve missed some, but I only see a couple of mod notes in almost 200 posts.
That particular thread has dozens of posts that are neither political nor actual breaking news, posts that should be scrolled past by your measure. However, interspersed with them are many interesting posts discussing the circumstances leading up to the breaking news. If they were all shifted out the thread would be absolutely gutted and much would be lost. Scrolling is easy and a much better alternative for those who want it.
I don’t see what argument you’re making. If something happened that isn’t actually happening you’d object to it?
Like I said, I don’t think there can be any bright line. Discussing the proximate reasons for what’s happening has always been allowed up to a point, I think the common sense practical approach is just whether something is likely to digress into a hundred-post P&E-ish debate.
Thread seems to be working just fine to me. Often more informative than monitoring news sources direct.
The freewheeling ones can be very useful also and the Mods can redirect the Opinions and sidebars to it from the breaking news thread. Hell, I can even add a tag for it if that would help.
I ask as I do understand what you’re saying and agree to some degree, but think a Breaking News thread is extremely useful on big issues like this. And by breaking news I mean quoting news and answering on-topic questions.
The modding is going with the rules. I think the rules are not working well, not complaining about the mods correctly applying them.
As for a parallel thread, I’m not sure what exactly you mean “the Mods can redirect the Opinions and sidebars to it from the breaking news thread.” There are two moved collections of posts that were made into P&E threads already. Neither are garnering much attention now. I assume that such threads, or a Pit thread, will grow in the future, since no other alternative exists. They will grow long if the war continues but that just means anyone seeking information has to cope with multiple sets of long threads. I can’t see how that’s a good thing. It hasn’t been in the past.
So trying to flesh out WE’s idea which IMO has considerable merit. I’m mostly stream of consciousness here; I did not put a lot of thought in ahead of launching my flying fingers. …
I’m going to pick a less controversial and long-running example than a guerilla war in the Mideast. Talk about hard cases making bad law!
For my example let’s imagine a sensational building collapse like that beachfront condo in Miami. Or a big earthquake wherever that kills a bunch of people as just happened in Afghanistan today/last night. No terrorists, just a disaster. We’d create multiple threads along this line.
An MSPIMS thread titled like “The [whatever event] News {date}” and tagged [breaking news] where pretty much the only acceptable posts would be:
A. Cites to news articles, tweets, photo galleries, etc. with a smidgen of (non-editorial) intro by the poster of why they thought this cite would add value. In effect this thread becomes like a twitter feed was in the pre-Musk era: a concentrated record of what’s known about what’s happening as that history is being written in real time. Full of mistakes & early guesswork, but that’s all in the cites not in the content we write.
B. Posts along the lines of "Ref [this] and [that] posts nearby above, I’ve started a new thread [here] to discuss the [whatever] aspect of this event.
An “Omnibus commentary on [whatever event]” thread, probably also in MPSIMS. Here’s where ranting, fuming, arguing, etc, goes on.
Those spawned sub-topic threads from my item 1.B. In the case of our disaster that could be threads on earthquake safety, corrupt building inspectors, the rescue effort, or whatever. So we’d have all these threads running in parallel. And depending on the subtopic, they could be in any category. FQ about earthquake engineering, P&E about corrupt government, IMHO about the rescue effort or survival chances, etc. And these would be as wild and woolly and digressive as our threads on any topic. The only tightly focused and therefore heavily modded thread is my item 1.
Now if I was running an intel shop or a news bureau I might well run something just like this in-house to keep my flow of inputs organized & readily searchable and to keep my analysts who produce my outputs productively employed and focused on their assigned topics, not wandering like a herd of cats willy-nilly everywhere.
I think this would be a magically useful way for us to do things. If we were all employees here and trying to produce a coherent body of knowledge about [whatever] event. Instead, we’re actually all here for recreation, camaraderie, and to hear ourselves and our friends talk. I’m not sure the cats want to be herded that carefully, no matter how noble and logical the intent of the catherd.
I could imagine this working if we got enough community buy in, and enough mods to watch it. Heck, that might even be reason enough to create a “Breaking News” category, just to make it more obvious how much more disciplined we all want to keep those threads. And to create really fussy rules abut how we all will cooperate in keeping the Breaking News threads pure.
For something as wooly as this new Hamas / Israeli conflict, or the Ukraine / Russian war, or “All the News about Donald Trump”, this structure may prove impractical.
How much do the mods want to take on the project of curating our knowledge production versus just managing the greater or lesser jerks? A darn good question.
My point is that people are indeed talking about all sorts of things other than actual breaking news in that thread right now. Some posts are being noticed; many others I would consider to be equally non-breaking news aren’t. It’s understandably a hodgepodge, but the result is that people are not being treated equitably. Topics that arise from the flow of conservation emerge naturally whether they are “breaking news” or not. That’s as it should be.
You missed my point completely. The mods are now attempting (and failing) to prevent digressions in breaking news threads.
Because there is no community consensus on what “breaking news” really means. And some mods are trying to police this in a heavy but violently inconsistent way, while others ignore the problem completely. I don’t much care which.
But to avoid a Sisyphean task for the mods and to avoid a lot of heartburn amongst the members, maybe we ought to make some sort of coherent thought-through plan that gets buy-in from the community, the mods, and the rule-makers. Then most folks will do the right things, mods can stop being full-time thread re-arrangers, and we can go back to the business of yakking, not the business of running a yakkers’ club.
Because right now, as the OP says just above me, we have a mishmash of displeased mods and angry posters. IMO that’s dumb.
Nope. This has already been discussed to death and it comes up when there is a big news, fast moving thread. The overwhelming consensus, every time, is to continue the way it is.
And doing it your way consistently failed so often that the special rules for breaking news threads were created specifically to deal with that problem.
I have created a dedicated discussion thread for the Hamas attacks Israel thread. Please use that for in-depth discussions and restrict the original thread to posts that conform to the rules for Breaking News threads.