I hope you’re not suggesting that there are no rules in the Pit.
Hah! Excellent answer. All good points.
…of course.
No. Of course there are limits to what one can post. But Beck isn’t doing anything that should be considered troublesome according to the rules of the pit be they de-jure or de-facto. What upsets people is when people aren’t responding to a pitting the way they believe they should respond which infuriates in a way that being disarmed or disempowered typically does. Which in my opinion, for what little that counts, is too bad.
Yes, and one can only wonder why you endorse this tactic.
Beyond the above, he’s also there is respond to bright-line offenses. Most things go in the Pit, but not everything. There are rules listed in the sticky: Hate speech isn’t allowed. Threatening harm isn’t allowed. Pitting moderators for moderation is no longer allowed. Deliberately misquoting people isn’t allowed. etc.
Yeah. This was the mot juste for this particular “tactic.”
But if we were a Congressional body, and this were occurring, and if the rules permitted us to, we could all just wear noise-canceling headphones tuned into a ‘broadcast’ comprising solely the rest of the legislature, and get back to the business at hand, unmolested by the filibuster.
Which, in SDMB Land, involves a relatively large and steadily increasing number of Dopers putting the fractious member on Ignore.
If you think about it, there’s very little downside, and the likelihood of the Board, writ large, achieving its overarching goal(s) seems pretty high.
“… and nobody is around to hear it …”
Oh come on @cairocarol you are responding as if she is some lady villainess, blanketing the dope with machinations and manipulations effectively creating a shift in the doper universe that threatens to crack open the very foundations of this storied institution.
I’m surprised at you coming here to whine about it when it’s one pit thread advertising her posting faults. You my dear are able to get many many may words in wherever you want. Non one is censoring YOU!
There is a simple and elegant solution to your problem. Unfortunately, since this is an ATMB thread (where I can’t go into the detail I’d like) about a pit thread (where ordinarily I could, but I fear I would run afoul of Miller’s mod note if I put forward my suggestion there) I am kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place.
At base, I guess I’ll just say I don’t see a problem with a pitee trying to take over their own pit thread. If they acquit themselves well, they might just expose the impropriety of the pitting itself. If they don’t… then they only further justify my preferred solution for dealing (or rather not dealing) with people whose posts I don’t care to read.
And note, I’m not saying that I do or don’t put Beck in that category. There are rules against disclosing such things outside of the pit, after all. I’m just saying that, for any poster who posts things you don’t care to read… the board software provides a solution. One which I have been pleased to employ most liberally.
There is another reason to post in a pit thread. You might hope the pitee sees the reaction to something they’ve posted and changes something about their posting style, or apologizes, or…
And that’s relevant to the thread in question, which started out in “what were you thinking”, until there were enough posts in it that @What_Exit moved them to their own thread.
A lot of the behavior discussed in “what were you thinking” actually does lead to a constructive response from the person pitted
But i would say:
- you can lead a horse to water… No poster is obliged to read your criticism or to agree with you.
- the fact that the poster of honor is responding suggests they actually do read the thread, and haven’t just muted it
So i don’t see that the blogging is interfering with that, either.
An argument could be made that if a poster stops doing things that people in those threads are complaining about, they’ll stop complaining. People aren’t complaining about Beck for fun, they complain because she gets under their skin. I know there’s a pile-on effect, but it’s often triggered by something specific.
No poster should have to see threads they are enjoying get turned into The Beck Show. I know I’ve given up on threads that she takes over when they go from a discussion about one thing to a discussion about whatever she wants to talk about. I think I’ve made this point in the past, but it seems like we always have one or two posters that are allowed to get away with this behavior for years. Right now it’s her.
Never mind.
I don’t think Beck is a villainess. As I said, she responded “rather cleverly, in my opinion.” I actually chuckled when she started doing it. But then I found it a bit tiring when the posting outlived the joke.
Anyway, I’m not “whining,” I’m just curious to hear what people think of the policy regarding filibustering, pro or con. Like I said - I was a moderator for years on a very contentious board, where we had a very collegial approach to moderation. So I am interested in talking about this stuff sometimes. Some of the posts in this thread have been thoughtful, and I appreciate them.
If there has been whining in this thread, it wasn’t from me. I think I’ve been fairly mild-mannered.
I realize I could put Beck on ignore, but I don’t use the ignore function. I prefer to see all the posts.
I could also go back to the Mild Pitting thread, or any Pit thread I guess, and start gunking it up myself with bloviation and trivia. That would be a real asshole move, and I’d never do it. But if I did, I think mods would be justified in telling me to knock it off.
And doing so brilliantly, IMHO.
Well, if it deters posters from Pitting people, I think it is a great idea. Remember- it is only in the Pit.
There is no such spirit of conversation in the Pit.
Good point.
You’d be surprised. Sometimes we do have pretty decent discussions there. Those are the only parts that interest me - the empty name-calling stuff doesn’t appeal (beyond a sort of detached fascination with human behavior).
The universalization principle is probably a decent question to ask yourself when moderating. “What if everyone did this” and if that result would be catastrophic, you probably shouldn’t allow it. Yes, I know, we can think of some exceptions to this.
To give an example, people who post something like “posting to subscribe” drive me absolutely nuts. Hundreds of other people have to read their post that they’re just using because they don’t want to bother using the tools built for that purpose. People just move on when one person does it, but imagine every did that? Then every thread would be more “posting to subscribe” than any content.
You have to wonder: when would her behavior become a problem? 10 posts a day? 100? 1000? Is there a cutoff when the “fillibuster” drowns out the signal to noise ratio so much that moderator action would be warranted?
(I haven’t read the thread in question, just replying to the descriptions of it. Also, I would remind posters that the mute function would let you skip past her content relatively easily)
If someone is prolifically posting in their own defense, that seems perfectly fine. If someone is just trying to sort of drown out criticism of themselves by posting a prolific amount of unrelated content to make the thread very difficult to read and thereby discourage participation, that’s a different in kind and shouldn’t be tolerated.
For me, this nails the salient issue(s):
Vandalism is (almost) always wrong. Spamming the board w irrelevant nonsense is (almost) always wrong. The hoary old “recipes in response to a newbie troll” is now a mostly stale in-joke like lists of three or 20 minutes. And serves the very legitimate purpose of covertly jolting the inveterate troll feeders into even noticing the troll they’re encouraging is thought by others to be a troll.
It doesn’t seem that Beck’s posts serve that purpose.
This is great too, although I’d push back gently on “valid” as opposed to “allowed under the rules”:
Very well said. At least for the Pit, of course.
I would actually suggest a broader rule: any time the poster’s intent is clearly to just add noise, that should be a rule violation, even if it’s just under the “don’t be a jerk” umbrella. yes, it’s a judgment call, and it shouldn’t be hastily enforced, but a long and obvious campaign to add noise (or a short and obvious one, for example, by deliberately posting a wall of nonsense) should be a rule violation.
Speaking for myself, that would be a nightmare to moderate. One persons noise is another persons “lighthearted contribution” to another’s “important anecdote”.
I understand where you’re coming from (even if I disagree), but anything that fully subjective sends me into a near-panic considering the number of protest ATMB threads it would generate.