In my experience I have not seen posts that are just noise for the sake of being noise, or posts whose sole purpose is to annoy, as Pit behavior.
And that is the question regarding the blessing of the tactic: is posting noise whose function is just to be noise that drowns out the complaint, is posting things whose only intended purpose is to annoy, an acceptable Pit behavior, or should it be “noted” and at least discouraged?
No this has nothing to do with Beck. Other than if she was being given some special behavioral dispensation.
It was far beyond trying to derail the thread. And the thread was not, as @Miller ruled “about her” so anything about her was on topic: it was, once upon a time, about her board behavior, a very different thing.
And it also isn’t about the futility of the tactic and how anyone trying it will give up soon enough and never “win the thread” using it.
Not really. He wasn’t one warning shy of a ban, at least 2 and probably a few more. Also he just got tired of the arguments and didn’t need the added stress if I recall correctly.
I didn’t agree with him much politically, but I liked Sam and exchanged a fair amount of PMs with him.
And for a reverse Pitting it was pretty mild, certainly not hateful, just not the affirmation he wanted. Much of it was closer to constructive criticism than mean spirited. Which he was free to ignore if he felt it was off base.
Definitely a case illustration of don’t start (or join) a fight in the Pit if your skin is paper thin.
Because that’s not what we’re talking about and that’s not what happens. It’s more like one person yelling with a megaphone and the other one trying to drown them out with static. The person with the megaphone is doing their best to make actual discussion. They’re making points. They’re calling a person out. Maybe they’re using insults creatively. Generally, they want whatever they write to be relevant or useful or funny or otherwise contribute to the board and be something people would want to read.
The person with the static is trying to make the conversation worse, trying to drown out real conversation with noise, not trying to contribute to the conversation, not trying to make the boards better.
Now I’m not saying the first person succeeds. But at least they’re trying to contribute. The other person is trying to anti-contribute, trying to foul the board up with something they know is not relevant, doesn’t add to the discussion, and would not be something any target audience would want to read.
I don’t know why you guys think just because something is in the pit means that it’s perfectly fine for someone to start trying to make the discussion worse or drown out the discussion. Would you tolerate that in any other forum? Just because the pit allows more heated and more personal words doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t try to contribute to the discussion.
Now, I admit, moderation of this could be tricky, but I don’t understand why we can’t agree in principle that people should try to contribute to the boards or to the discussion when they post, and trying to do the opposite is bad.
Signal is good, noise is bad.
This is why I made the examples earlier about someone posting a wall of text or just posting as many times as they can to drown out the discussion. At some point does it become a problem to you? Or is it okay when it’s a little bit of noise but not when it’s a lot of noise?
You’re missing the point. If I’m having a conversation I want to have, and someone comes in and starts posting noise, ignoring it is not a solution because I can no longer have that conversation. It is very different from someone being pitted who can just mute that thread.
As someone who thinks the tactic should be officially discouraged … meh. It was easy for me to read one and then skip every other post in that series only checking out a first three words every several posts to see if there was more than noise. Fast forwarding in a thread is not too hard.
And, importantly, it’s intended to negatively affect the conversation. Most other forms of deliberately making a conversation worse - like trolling - are recognized as being violations of the rules or at least contrary to the purpose of a message board. There should be an implicit rule that says something like “what you post is intended to contribute to, rather than inhibit or degrade, the conversation”
I realize that moderating that is fraught with problems so I’m not saying it has to be an enforced rule, but philosophically, we should recognize this as part acceptable conduct on a message board.
The way you’ve characterized the argument makes your position sound reasonable, but there are crucial details missing that make all the difference. Namely that we’re talking about the Pit, and specifically about the type of thread in which someone is being Pitted. What you describe as someone contribut[ing] to the board and “trying to make the boards better” is very often just someone hurling invectives at the Pittee. Meanwhile the victim of this verbal assault, if they’re participating in the thread, is trying to defend themselves.
One operative principle here is that in this kind of Pit thread, they have the right to defend themselves in any way they see fit that doesn’t violate even the loose rules of the Pit. And what Beck was posting wasn’t “noise”, it was the same sorts of little anecdotes about her life that she’s been posting for years.
Not relevant to the thread, you say? In a sense it’s actually quite relevant, as it cleverly and with admirable civility shows disdain for her detractors. As an alleged hijack, it’s no different than the practice of posting recipes in a Pit thread when the thread gets really silly, which is also allowed in the Pit, except this was more clever and effective.
I’ve changed my mind because of reading comments in this thread, and thinking about the issue more. To be clear, I don’t agree with everything people have written (on any side of the issue) but I have tempered my opinion as expressed in my OP.
I know we’re supposed to focus on the topic at hand, and have had moderator instruction not to turn this into a general discussion of the nature of the Pit, so I won’t offer specific refutations to some of the characterizations of the Pit that I have read here. But, to everyone in this thread who has generalized about what the Pit is like, without spending time reading there because of what you think it’s like … um, y’all really don’t know what you’re talking about.
Ignore the Pit if you want, but kindly resist the urge to share your conclusions about it! if you think posters there do nothing but savagely insult each other, with no actual content or thoughtful conversation, you’re waaayyy off base. (Yes, there can be savage insults and posts devoid of substance. But that’s like assuming a grocery store sells nothing but candy because all you’ve seen is the sweets by the checkout counter.)
This line of argument requires someone to make the objective determination that one side is “doing their best to make actual discussion.” In a thread that ultimately was probably started just so people could call someone else a poopyhead.
As someone not particularly invested in that pitting, all I saw from everyone in the brief time I read it for the purposes of this thread: all I saw was noise. From everyone.
I agree that enforcement is problematic and probably only possible in extreme cases where the noise is obvious and deliberate. But I was surprised to see how many people didn’t agree with the basic premise in principle that you should try to contribute signal rather than add noise whenever you post, even in the pit.
…because “signal” and “noise” are both subjective. You might think someone is “doing their best to make actual discussion,” and I might think that same person is being a poopyhead who is drowning out the conversation.
Which one of us is right? Well, in order to moderate it, someone would have to make that call.
That is a perfect analogy. Honestly, there should be no sympathy for the aggressor in a pitting. I remember someone being banned for being a bit too effective in a pit thread with dealing with being the subject of a pile on.
Yes I know. And if the Pit got rid of Poster pitting and concentrated on what 80% of what it does best- rants against little things, rants about public figures- especially you know who- people in the news doing stupid things and so forth, I’d be happy. (In fact there are a couple threads that look interesting. ) But those arent the kind of threads were are talking about here- we are talking when a thread is started purely to insult a fellow poster. But - the Pit is what the Pit is, and that is the way it is. So, many posters are happy with that, so so be it.
Again, I strongly suggest you read @Miller’s post on the banning of Pedro that I linked upthread. Yes, it was specific to the poster, but it made an important distinction about how he evaluates reports of “trolling in the Pit” and what he considers important in moderating such.