Why should it be left to you moderators to determine what’s “too stupid to live.” If it truly is, it will die a natural death, by virtue of no one responding. However, if it does show signs of life, that suggests your original (subjective) premise was incorrect.
For every thread that is too stupid to live, there are 100 dopers stupid enough to keep it alive. Or undead. Whatever.
Too stupid to live, unfortunately, does not literally mean instant death. If it did, there would be a lot loss traffic in the morning.
Are you saying that the Dopers are not up to the SDMB standards? A community is what its members make of it. Especially a paid membership one. If there are 100 stupid dopers for every bad thread, then that’s what the SDMB is.
Completely disagree. There are more than enough race-to-the-bottom free-for-alls on the internet without letting this turn into another one. The willingness of this place to maintain some sort of standards is arguably its main selling point (more in the debate forums than MPSIMS, but still). To argue that once people have paid their money, anything goes, is to completely miss the point of why they paid in the first place.
Some of them, clearly*. This board did not get good by some magical self-selection process whereby we’re all stunningly attractive hyper-intelligent beings (no matter what some people may nauseatingly insist from time to time). The community standards are what set the tone. I don’t see any point in arguing that these should be entirely self-policing, because we have the entire internet to show us what that leads to. Arguably GQ’s continuing descent into an “aw shucks” guessathon is far more concerning than some loony deciding to share his morning glory with the world, but still.
(*That’s not aimed at you, by the way.)
I kind of thought there would be more pro/con discussion, myself. Makes me feel weird, like I’m looking like some kind of crank. I’m not, really…just trying to give another POV on the subject.
Oooh - I’m so bad. 
The thread has gone on for four days now; you’ll notice I treated it seriously for the first part.
Part of the reason this isn’t a hot topic is probably because we’ve seen it and done it so many times already. You could probably lump threads like this one in with the complaints about the board performance, and I think most of us are fairly burned out on these complaints.
I was thinking more goofy than bad, but my comment sort of makes me look like I got a stick up my butt so I take it back.
I don’t know if there’s burnout on this issue. Probably has a lot to due with most people being happy with the status quo and not many wanting to come out in favour of censorship. Maybe I’ll start a more general IMHO thread to get a few non-Pitizen views.
“Goofy?” Well, okay. I can’t really deny that charge.
Maybe an IMHO thread is the way to go. Not everyone with an opinion feels strongly enough about the topic to take a chance in a Pit thread.
-nitpick- Shouldn’t the “r” next to Kleenex be lower case?
I’m just saying.
I’m a fan of the exclamation point that allows me to report a thread or post. I don’t think I’ve used it to report a painfully stupid thread but that is our right, as Dopers. Just as a Mod or Admin can read our Notify and decide if our comment has merit.
I rarely have seen a thread locked down for any reason other than, at the end of the day, it violated The Prime Directive: “Don’t Be A Jerk”.
Cartooniverse
I’m saying it is a one tailed distribution. With a very long tail, trialing off even past Sapo, and nearly into single digit IQ’s. That isn’t a knock against the average doper, or the dopers I enjoy.
Unless there’s a handful of busybodies hitting the report button. If you really want the community to set the standard, let the threads live or die on their own merits. Seems the best way for the standard of the community to be set.
Again, I disagree. There’s so much evidence out there of what happens if you simply let people rip on what they want. You end up with insipid, troll-ridden bullshit. I think there are genuine, articulable standards at play here, and these are why most of the members here are, in fact, members.
I was not suggesting that we turn the boards over to the trigger-finger offenderati, you’ll note; a simple number of complaints should not be sufficient to close a thread (I myself have only reported one thread, ever, and that was because I recognised a well-known troll who had polluted numerous other messageboards across the web). I merely think that the standards of debate we purport to have are worth preserving, and that they are articulable above and beyond what happens to be popular on a given day. I also think that, while of lesser importance, the very accommodating decorum standards we appear to have are worthwhile too. I see absolutely no value whatsoever in allowing some moron to discuss his morning hard-on, and I don’t see the value in waiting to see if such a discussion proves popular. It is, on the face of it, worthless. Get rid of it. If said moron wants to talk about his dick, he can fuck off to any of the myriad places that want to hear about it.
I really don’t see any value in a laissez-faire system. We know exactly what that leads to; there couldn’t be more evidence if we wanted it. This place is what we made it; not what it became by accident. As long as we can question the acts of the mods (and I’ve seen very few places more accommodating in this regard), then it’s all gravy. But I refuse to see us devolve into a morass of pervy crap simply because we’re overrun with the sort of idiot who thinks that’s fun. Stuff that.
Again a disclaimer - I have nothing against you personally; indeed, my limited memory informs me that you’re one of the contributors whose posts I enjoy, for what it’s worth.
Prolly a good idea. Many Dopers would probably stay out of a discussion if it involved being addressed as “Fucknugget” without prior cause, or having their wives compared to Eva Braun.
Well, now, can’t you play the delicate flower? I didn’t compare your wife to Eva Braun, you idiot. If anything, I compared you to Hitler, and I didn’t do that either. From the specific quote I was replying to, it ought to be pretty obvious that I meant “Even Hitler had a girlfriend so it’s not exactly a mark of good character”.
I’m not in the mood to put together a IMHO OP tonight. If anyone wants to beat me to it go right ahead.
Actually, we have a pretty good idea of who is a busybody and who isn’t. Some people will report anything that goes against their particular agenda, whether it’s against the SDMB rules or not. And some people will report posts that support their pet causes, because the posts in question violate our rules. Mods quickly learn which posters tend to fall into which categories.
Or at least that’s the way it was before I semi-retired. I no longer receive reported posts, I simply browse the forums and if I see something that I think needs to be acted upon, I act on it.
Because that’s part of what moderators DO. By your reasoning, we should leave spam posts in, too, because they’ll sink to the bottom. There are plenty of places on teh intarwebs where stupidity is allowed to roam free. The SDMB isn’t one of them.
Now that you mention it, it would be fun - for the sport of this thread- to move an example spam thread or two out into view for us (I assume you have one or two saved in the mod forums somewhere). Some people might be surprised how many views/responses some of the more bizarre/sexy ones get before they are disappeared.*
*In fact, some people might then realize that view counts don’t really mean they are so great at writing a sexy OP so much as any explicitly sexy thread will get looked at a bunch. Of course, then some people’s egos might be deflated; which would be a shame.
Well, this one got 43 views:
I’ve snipped the contact info, and changed the username, but really most of the spam is incredibly boring. This spam had one reply, and probably didn’t last more than a few minutes in whichever forum it was originally posted in. Of course, there’s always the Make Money Fast spam, we get those now and then.
Nope. The registered trademark symbol is upper case R in a circle. See me.
I’m just saying. :dubious:
Good to see you’re feeling better, Lynn.