Bad ways according to whom? The Mods? Have they racked up a bunch of Warnings? Or do you just disagree with them?
You do not need nit picking. Just have the Pit have the same general rules as the rest of the forums.
Yep.
It is to Laugh. Now, I kinda like the idea of a thread inATMB, “Is this post Trolling”? Where fringe cases could be discussed.
How about people calling your dead veteran father a criminal?
No, it’s not cool. It is childish behavior, conduct unbecoming and, frankly, is somewhat Trump-like.
Fully agree.
The problem is, people don’t disagree civilly but instead they frequently include calling others motherfuckingassholes, and such. That is not an enlightened and articulate place where disagreements can be hashed out in a civil and positive way. Or at least a non-negative and non-personal way.
Attack the idea or argument or stance or position, sure, but let’s not attack the person or persons.
Rants can be articulated without being mean-spirited attacks on people.
I think the Pit in its current form allows and enables almost Pit-like behavior to occur in MPSIMS and IMHO and some of the other subforums. It’s like a disease that infects and spreads.
Do we want the SDMB to grow and not to wane? Get rid of the Pit.
So I assume before the existence of the pit, there were never any acrimonious flare-ups on the board? No “pit-like” behaviour ever reared up?
It takes a lot to make me want to actually say something “negative” about another poster, but when I REALLY need to, I’m glad the Pit is there. It needs no change. If pressed, I could possibly be convinced that time-limiting certain individual-omnibus threads might be beneficial; but that’s the only possible change I see.
I joined almost 10 years ago. The Pit has always been here, for me.
Same here at 20 years. I actually found the Pit much more fun (and more caustic) back then, as a mostly spectator. The Pit is fine as it is. I don’t see any need for new rules. Then again, I also don’t care much about trolls and socks.
People are fooling themselves if they think the Pit doesn’t leak over into the rest of the board. If a poster repeatedly calls someone a cck scking mother fcking wore in the pit you can bet that person is going to remember it. And the person that said it is going to remember it. It does not just go away when the Pit thread ends, if it ends.
And the sooner we stop acting like trolls are just accidentally finding this board the better. Since it seems we can barely get new posters here at all, the fact that we have no end of trolls should tell us something.
Sure, leave those in the Pit. I don’t think most people care about that kind of stuff. I think what most people have a problem with is pitting other posters, especially the ones that run on forever. Seriously, if you can’t read this board for a couple hours a day without getting so angry at someone that you have to swear at them for a couple of days, maybe you should take some time off.
I didn’t know this was a problem but if it is happening I agree. I happen to think that mods are too lenient on trolling, and should do some more mod notes to keep it in check.
This has never worked in the history of the board. Every banned poster that was allowed back that I know of was banned again, because they don’t change their behavior. If they could change their behavior they wouldn’t have been banned in the first place.
Sock accounts are something I don’t worry about too much. Since it seems that it’s possible on Discourse to change a sock’s name to anything you want, if they start a thread that’s getting a lot of replies and conversation, just ban the sock and change it’s name to loser or jerk or sock. No use closing a good thread and telling posters to start a new thread if they want to continue, that rarely seems to work. If the sock starts a trolling thread, just ban them and close the thread.
The problem is, people in the troll thread think every new poster they see is a troll. If you call out a couple of hundred posters as trolls, you are bound to get a few. But it’s not any special troll spotting skill, it’s just the odds.
Yes you can. That’s what flags are for. Mods decide who a troll is, not a bunch of people that think everyone is a troll.
Yes, and new ones. Once you start talking shit about people in the Pit, it stays on the board forever.
I wish you had kept that spreadsheet to show the numbers to the people that participate in the troll thread. This is like I said, accuse everyone and of course you will find a couple. But who keeps track of all the ones that had a troll label on their posts from the beginning and just left the board?
Seriously. People here like to throw around the “Fighting Ignorance” line and call themselves the “smartest hippest people on the planet” but apparently can’t carry on a conversation without resorting to name calling and other insults. The Pit is like when people tell you how they were bullied in school, except we’re supposed to be adults here.
Almost exactly what I said above. The venom spreads throughout the body, it doesn’t stay at the wound site. If your next door neighbor called you a c*cksucker every day in front of your family and friends, are you going to invite him over for dinner?
What is it about you that you get so worked up about a stranger on the internet that you would need to swear at them and abuse them in such a way? What happens if someone really pisses you off at work? Do you call them out in the office and swear at them and make fun of their name? How about your wife? You probably had a fight at some point. Did you make sure you did it out in public where everyone could see it? Of course you didn’t do any of the above, because rational adults don’t act like that. So why would we want to allow you to do it here if you don’t do it anywhere else in your life?
I’m beginning to think that some people on this board took away the wrong message from the old " I can’t come to bed, someone’s wrong on the internet" cartoon. The message wasn’t that you should lead a personal crusade against everyone that you think is wrong on the internet. It was making fun of people that get carried away with their life on the internet.
Someone posted today, and correct me if I’m wrong, but they said you can Pit a mod when they are acting as a poster. You want to guess why it rarely if ever happens? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it, and I’m pretty sure our mods aren’t perfect, so there must be another reason.
Oh, goody. Another DefundDestroy The Pit thread, don’t see many of those nowadays…
I voted “No changes are necessary” because the Pit was around when the Board was at its height, so any argument about it bleeding out are thereby given the lie. If anything, messing with the Pit has led to way more trouble than just leaving it as-is.
What I think drives this, quite frankly, is pushback from a bunch of regular Pitees who have woken up and noticed most of their cohort isn’t around anymore, and don’t like the hot breath of improved moderation on their necks. So they lash out, decrying “leftist bias” and “bad new mods”, and one target for all that is the Pit. Or more specifically, the Troll thread - not because it doesn’t work, but because it works all too well. Then a bunch of other curmudgeons have signed on because they never actually grokked what the Pit is for (and it isn’t for reforming recalcitrant reprobates).
Because the kind of poster who gets made a mod generally isn’t a troublesome troll?
This is factually untrue. The vast majority of new posters do not ever get mentioned in the Pit at all, let alone in the troll threads.
Yes, it’s good to tell the mods. But the people who most need to be informed of trolls are the people being trolled. That way they stop taking the bait. Mods never ban a poster the second they are reported for trolling.
As someone who posts in the Pit but tries to avoid going overboard and mostly refrains from direct attacks, I find your characterization of the Pit to be completely off. It’s not a place where people post because “someone said something wrong on the Internet.” And, while namecalling does occur, it’s far from the bulk of the content, even in threads about other Dopers.
What you do get are people who are extremely irritated with certain posters, and want to be able to tell them to knock it off. And the other posters aren’t usually just innocently going along. They’re being bigoted, arguing disingenuously, being hateful (but technically in the rules).
Sure, in real life you don’t respond to your wife or friends like people do in the Pit. But, in real life, your friends and wife don’t do those sorts of things in general. And, when they do, you can usually tell them to knock if off and they will. And, if not, you no longer interact with them.
There are arguments against the Pit, but the ones that talk about it like it was 12 years ago and/or heavily exaggerate everything while seeming like you’re angry about it? Those aren’t convincing.
Heck, I could easily argue that what you posted from the reply to Kron on is more of a rant than an argument. Yet you argue against a forum for rants.
Which reminds me: I’ve not seen the Pit leak. There were some problems with hostility outside the Pit, but a whole of that has been fixed. The mods are much more on top of it, and we’ve instituted rules that get rid of a lot of it, like the GD rules or the misogyny and trans rules. If the issue was the Pit leaking, then that wouldn’t help.
It actually seems to me that there’s a better argument that it goes the other way. The Pit is so, so much less of a “cesspit” than it was when I got here. It’s gotten better.
Those of you against the Pit always seem to approach this as if the people getting angry are the only possible issue. But you ignore the people who make them angry, and how justified that anger so often is.
I would argue that, 9 times out of 10, it is the people who get Pitted who cause more problems. Not always. I have popped in when I think some people are being unfair. (I even agreed with you about one situation where a poster was clearly having a nervous breakdown and people needed to back the fuck off rather than make it worse.)
Getting rid of the Pit means they keep causing those problems, but no one can say anything about it, other than trying to argue they should be banned or Warned. And, if it doesn’t go that far, you get nothing.
I agree with most of what BigT just wrote, except this:
To be fair, lately it seems to be leaking into ATMB a lot. But that’s an ATMB moderation issue, not a Pit one.
The only change I’d suggest is getting rid of the link function - having a “You’ve Been Pitted!” notification appear under non-Pit posts can look like a rather passive-aggressive attack against the poster in question. There’s nothing wrong with having the Pit posts, but the auto-announcement function is counterproductive in this instance.
Someone once called my father a coward, based on his response to the Vietnam War. That was in Great Debates. I decided not to bring up family stories any more, especially not as a way to make political points.
Good heavens, NO! Get me my smelling salts!
This is exactly right.
I checked “Language”, but there is a problem because people have different ideas regarding what constitutes “insulting language”. Calling someone, “a fucking piece of shit”, tells me nothing and impresses me not one iota. That should not be allowed in my view. Saying someone is, “a two-faced liar”, and then supporting that assertion, is fine in my view.
Therefore, if the SDMB is declining, then the Pit has helped drive it all the way down.
Not true here.
The trolls and socks which are called out in the 'bus thread often have certain tells that give them away; something is almost invariably off about their posting styles & their rhetoric. If an honest newbie wants to stick around, he’ll just join conversations in pretty much every forum without being deliberately imflammatory/slyly obtuse/focused obsessively on a single issue/or JAQing off/sealioning.
That said, there is a bit of an insular culture here, and some posters who stuck around and turned out to be reasonably good citizens were initially called out as trolls. A recent example would have to be beckdawreck, but I never considered her as such because she has had a unique if quirky voice–trolls by contrast often seem generic, as I indicated above.
I really dislike the omnibus threads so I voted for that. However, I’m fine with the pit as it is and I was never intimidated by it even when I was new.
That’s phrased like statement of logical entailment, and yet I have no idea what the connection to what I wrote is supposed to be. Certainly nothing in what you quoted from me leads to that logical inference.
I agree💯
The pit scrum are ever so quick to jump on their targets anywhere else on the board with harassment.
I’ve never seen this rule upheld.
No harassment of other posters
If you quarrel with a poster in a particular thread, fine. If you follow that poster from thread to thread and attempt to pick fights, that’s harassment and may get you warned or banned.