Yeah obviously I could have designed the poll to make the result a little more straightforward to interpret, but I don’t know why you think there nothing meaningful to be gained from the poll - to me it’s pretty obvious. For example, we can see that almost nobody who responded supports abolishing the Pit, so I’m in a significant minority of poll respondents. Likewise, of the people who think changes are necessary, most only support relatively minor changes. The whole purpose of this was to see what peoples’ support were for each individual option, and I think this poll tells that story. YMMV.
I agree that this poll isn’t likely to be representative of the whole board population, and also says absolutely nothing about potential future members, so I don’t know if this will have any impact on mod decisions, but on the face of it it seems like its basically a confirmation of the “null hypothesis”. I’m disappointed that the majority of the poll respondents think this way but I am not too surprised.
It’s clear that enough people want the pit as it is that it’s not going anywhere. It’s probably the most popular feature on the board. I find that sad, but there you go.
I won’t bring it up again. Tilting at windmills, and all that.
I like the change that the Pit titles are a more generic “I pit Soandso”. Even if I don’t agree with permitting personal insults, having the insults be segregated to inside the thread makes them easier to ignore.
By no means. Today I see IMHO as the most popular, followed closely by Cafe Society, then GQ, MPSIMS, and Quarantine zone all having the highest “per week” stats. The Pit and ATMB are last. Which may explain the numbers of responses here.
This poll should strictly be “for entertainment purposes only”. It is not scientific and any conclusions drawn from poll results are garbage for many reasons, such as:
Not everyone reads ATMB
The people who respond to the poll may not be those who make up the active posters
The poll may be answered by pranksters with ulterior motives
The results may be biased since certain kinds of people may be more willing to respond to polls
As an example, think of all the fun the K-Pop fans had trolling Trump by signing up for rally tickets. The huge response made the Trump team incorrectly think that they had huge support and their event would be overflowing, but in reality was very poorly attended. Polls on a message board are like that. Just use them for fun rather than actually setting policy. The discussion is valuable, but the poll is garbage.
I do have one suggestion. Not about changes to the pit, but the way in which it is used.
Specifically, mods should never move a thread to the pit unless the OP asks for it.
If we are supposed to ignore the pit if we don’t like it, how can we possibly do that if a mod decides, “oh, this thread you started will get flamey, so I’ll just move it to the pit.”
I have had that happen to me. I specifically don’t start threads in the Pit because I don’t want to put up with the insults. If you move my own thread to the pit you force me to abandon it while other people are free to attack me there.
A thread that seems pit-bound should simply be closed, and the OP invited to start a new one in the pit if they want to continue.
The worst recent example of this was when Heffalump and Roo started a thread specifically to ask where controversial subjects could be discussed without the flames, and a mod decided the thread would get heated and moved it to the Pit - where people were free to flame her.
If we are supposed to ignore the Pit if we don’t like it, the mods should help make that possible.
That sounds reasonable to me. A boilerplate instruction along the lines of:
would have much the same effect as just moving the thread to the Pit, except that people who want to avoid the Pit would have an easier time doing so.
FWIW, I tend to think that threads should only be moved when it’s overwhelmingly obvious that it should be moved. I’ve had mods move my threads from forums where I’d get the discussion I wanted to forums where they died, and it mildly pissed me off.
Agreed in general, if say a GD thread is judged too controversial. However -
This is not an example of the situation you described at all. Roo’s OP was a rant, a rant against board culture and the Pit and other members. It was thinly disguised as a question, but that kind of thinly disguised disengenousness is the #1 worst thing about this board. The moderators didn’t buy that crap, and they moved the rant to the rant forum. A great decision, and I’d oppose any rule about moving threads that eliminates a mod’s ability to move a rant to where rants go.
I’m not really talking about whether that particular OP was pit-worthy or not. The point is that an inappropriate OP or a thread that goes off the rails should simply be closed, and not just moved to the pit. No one should be forced into the pit just to continue a discussion.
And people who start flamey OPs or derail threads with insults are actually rewarded by having those threads moved to the pit where they can continue the behaviour. If bad behaviour just got threads closed, they’d get more peer pressure to behave to avoid wasting everyone’s time.
