In the thread titled “General car talk”, in response to posts from Sam Stone pertaining to the future of electric car manufacture, we find this from puzzlegal:
You might want to start a new thread to discuss the future of electric vehicles. But your posts are hijacking a general thread about “interesting cars you saw today” and similar light fare. Please don’t continue the hijack.
I imagined this thread might develop along the lines of the Great Ongoing General Aviation thread, which features many interesting dives down various rabbit holes. I don’t see why posts need to be limited to “light fare” and thus I’m puzzled to understand how Sam’s post can in any way be considered a hijack.
Could I request that the reasoning here be explained?
Sam’s sealioning. He really wants to talk about battery chemical production and availability any chance he gets and he will be unfailingly polite about it.
That’s my impression as well, as IIRC he’s posted essentially the same message before. If it were new information I think it would fit well in that thread, but it comes across as an anti-EV screed since he’s posted it or similar things a few times.
And @3AxisCtrl , if you want someone in particular to see something (and here, i think you want me to read your post) it’s helpful to use the @, as in @puzzlegal . Then I’ll get a notification and come check it out next time i log on. I happened to see this, but i don’t read every thread in ATMB, and might well have missed it.
I moderated because:
the post was reported, so it bothered someone
the poster had made two very long posts about a topic that didn’t seem to have attracted other interest. And has made other, similar posts elsewhere
the tone of the post really seemed out of place in that thread. I could see why those posts bothered others.
there are other threads on EVs, i know because I’ve participated in them. And it would have fit much more comfortably in some of those. Or in an all-new thread, where it might spark an interesting debate.
But yes, it was a judgement call, and maybe i made the wrong call. I’m really swamped at work, and not reading as much context as i usually like to before moderating. Knowing that it was a judgement call, i didn’t warn, or threaten, and tried to give very gentle guidance. i just requested the poster post future content asking those lines in a different thread. I try to take “first, do no harm” as a guideline in moderating.
I’m interested in how other posters feel about this, and whether there are other posters who feel i crossed the line into excessive moderation there.
Nope, all good. Now, if that had been a full warning, maybe too harsh. But a Note was perfect. It was not the place for that debate- well, one post would be okay, but more than that- nope.
I haven’t read the thread in question, but I demand that my opinion be as weighty as everyone else’s (if not more so…I demand to be Wyoming in the electoral college).
It didn’t much bother me, and when the OP said they wanted lighter stuff, I was happy to oblige. I was just confused by the moderation - particularly the comment about the thread being about ‘interesting cars you saw today’ when the thread was clearly a spinoff from that that for the precise purpose of expanding the discussion to anything about cars. Hence the name ‘general car talk’.
But I’m not criticizing Puzzlegal. Being a mod isn’t easy, and on close calls people’s opinions can differ. And everyone misses a sentence or a nuance from time to time.
I will point out, however, that (just to pick one) Gigobuster has been bombing threads with global warming screeds for about two decades now, at the slightest hint of a climate comment. This has hijacked many a discussion. So I suspect the tolerance of this has a lot to do with a mod’s personal opinion of the content.
I strongly disagree with that comment, for several reasons.
AFAIK, @GIGObuster has consistently made well-informed and well-cited contributions to the many discussions and debates we’ve had about climate change. There are many other posters here, including myself, who have also frequently contributed factual information to such threads. I would hardly describe anything GIGO has posted as “bombing” threads. Seems to me that such a derogatory description just reflects your own bias on the subject.
Secondly, the point of this anecdote seems to be to imply that you were being unfairly discriminated against in the car thread. In my view, you were not. It wasn’t about just one post; it was a whole series of posts that were getting more and more into the weeds about the future of EVs, and specifically about how bleak that future is. This was not only irrelevant to the thread, but again seems to reflect your own bias about climate change in general and in particular your general opposition to many mitigation measures.
Like if I did not comment when universal flood proponents, moon landing hoaxers, antivaxxers, GMO critics and anti-nuclear power guys reared their ugly head. Here is what you miss, Sam: it is more likely that your sources are the ones misleading you constantly, and it is easier to complain about someone pointing at better sources and explanations than to complain to the sources that misled you.
BTW Rachel Carson, who was not a mass murderer, sends her regards…
I don’t have a problem with his content. I’ve even said in the past that some of his stuff helped change my mind on some aspects of global warming.
I merely pointed out that he has a habit of taking threads off on a global warming tangent if the subject comes up in passing, as I did in the car talk thread when I responded to another poster by probably going way too deep into a subject that has been covered in pther threads.
I suspect that it’s more tolerable to see this kind of minor hijack thing when you largely agree with it, and that was my only point. I was not criticising his opinions. I find them quite reasonable on the issue, mostly. I didn’t mean it to be a criticism of him but a commentary on how we tend to see things like that differently depending on our own opinion of the subject.
I think a lot of us are guilty of going off a little too deeply in a thread when our particular hobby horses come up.
Point taken. I never thought about it, but when mentioning someone on the board I guess it’s a little rude to not put in the @ there so they see it and can respond. My bad. Sorry about that, @GIGObuster. Also for the word ‘screed’, which was unnecessarily pejorative.
You’re still trying to make the case for allegedly biased modding. If GIGO does indeed have a “habit” of taking threads off-topic on a climate change tangent when it’s not relevant to the thread, then you should easily be able to find a few examples. Can you? I’d be interested to see them.
I think we are now devolving into exactly the sort of hijack that was modded in the other thread.
Also, I’m not interested in going back and dragging up poster’s old posts. And there are tens of thousands of them. I’m not engaging in a research project over a minor point I made. If it interests you a lot you can search for them. If you don’t care, let’s just drop it.
I think it’s relevant to this discussion if you’re trying to make the point that thread hijacks are moderated differently depending on “a mod’s personal opinion of the content” (your words). That’s a pretty strong accusation.
Anyway, fine, let’s drop it. I don’t believe there are many – or perhaps not any – such examples in GIGO’s posts. If you claim there are, the onus was on you to show them.