And if they’re really bad, you tell their mom. So how does all that relate to interactions between adults?
I expect that IRL those of who who have adults subordinate to you, at work for example, do not insult your subordinates as part of your supervisory capacity and then pile on additional penalties if the subordinate responds in kind. Unless, of course, you are prone to indulging in petty chickenshit.
Meh. I have a small business. I’ll point out if someone does something stupid and I’m not beyond (jokingly) going way the fuck overboard. I’m not petty (IMHO), but we work together and everyone, me included, is free to be themselves. It keeps the gears lubed and works for me. I’ve never fired anyone and my current staff is all long-timers.
“How the fuck could you be so retarded?”
“Oh, fuck you, I was out late last night.”
“Well, here. I’ll do xyz and have Donna resubmit this and it should work.”
“Cool. And sorry.”
“Yeah, sorry about the retard comment.”
Does your principal or superintendant regularly insult you or your colleagues as part of hir duties? Would you accept it as okay if s/he did? Why do you think similar behavior is okay here?
Easy-peasey. There are penalties in place here. Members can be noted, warned, suspended or banned.
The principal/teacher relationship is a professional one. The moderator/poster one is not. Moderators are members of the community just like us, with some added responsibilities. Why shouldn’t they be able to be just as snarky and snide as us?
Because they can hand out warnings and bans when posters are snarky and snide back? When they act as moderators rather than as posters, it’s an uneven playing field.
I don’t actually mind a little snark with warnings. I’m a bit bothered by the very expansive and illogical definition of insults that has been adopted by some mods of late.
How many people here like getting a speeding ticket from a jerky cop who is definitely letting you know that if you don’t respect his authority and put up with his rude shit you’ll get more where that came from?
Same thing here as far as I am concerned.
I think the biggest problem with that is that they sometimes do it within the mod on/off tags, thus preventing commenting on or defending the non-warning part.
The problem is the mods can’t abide criticism, even if it’s constructive.
I had a recently locked thread in ATMB that was closed by Jonathan Chance. The thread may have petered out on its own, but John, who had not previously posted in the thread, comes in and says:
There was just one post after that. Just one. It was made by Revenant Threshold and was not talking about the past, but rather Dex’s actions in the last week. And then John posts this:
The link is here.
Now, the tone of that isn’t especially rude, but the intent pretty much is. John comes in and says "I want to close this, but I’ll leave it open as long as you don’t do this ". A poster doesn’t do that, but John closes it anyway saying that he did. One post. John waited one fucking post and implied a poster did something the poster didn’t actually do.
I don’t think it even would have mattered what that post was. He was going to close that thread regardless.
I was wholly unaware of this. Could anyone provide details? When did she stop this practice? What was her cutoff for offensiveness? I tried to report my methodology in detail to provide an opportunity for comments.
Most people understood that the volunteer mods had a job to do, and that if they apply the smackdown to recalcitrant members, it’s all to the good. They also understood that stirring shit and causing problems is in the end rude. Most people understand that today.
It’s just that those comprehending such obviousness made up a larger share of the participating posters back then. Once it was broad and deep consensus. So when I dinged newbie/2 month poster showed up in the pit with a mixture of outrage and bewilderment after being thwapped with a cluestick by manhattan, it was the cause of much hilarity.
That’s an interesting hypothesis, which is proved false by the lack of any moderator warning.
Now that’s fucking funny.
It’s like saying climate change is proven false by the lack of legislative action.
I didn’t click the link but that wasn’t by any chance your thread, was it armedmonkey? Because surely you would have mentioned that if it was. If so, do you really believe that you have the best perspective on the matter? Because unnamed sources might conclude that your post reflects consternation that your idea wasn’t taken seriously. That’s probably not the case though.
Four pages isn’t long enough for you?
ETA: Does anybody have any memories of pit threads and posts being deleted in the early days as per splatterpunk’s claims?
It was my thread; a fact I didn’t hide. Seriously, it was in the second sentence of the post you’re referring to. "I had a recently locked thread in ATMB that was closed by Jonathan Chance. "
addendum to above: Measure for Measure if you can’t read past the first sentence of a post or click a link, maybe you shouldn’t comment.
My bad. I am chagrined. Apologies to armedmonkey.
Accepted. No worries.
You had a very quantifiable analysis of the threads earlier. But how are you quantifying “most people” in your comments here? And how do you know what they understood and what they now understand?
Why is it all to the good to smackdown recalcitrant members?
Could you be misinterpreting people comprehending such obviousness based on some people’s lack of care or not wanting to get involved?
Interesting, the wide range of analogies of what a moderator is. IIRC, we’ve been compared to traffic cops, to judges, to parents, to teachers, to hall monitors, to sanitation engineers, to robotic word-searchers, and to sushi chefs. All such fail, I suspect, except to make whatever the individual’s point was. What we are, we’re posters, who have been selected to help keep the boards friendly, welcoming, reasonably polite places where people can have intelligent (or amusing) discussions. As posters, we have the same rights to be snarky as any other posters.
When a poster feels they are being abused or insulted, they can REPORT the post. As moderators, there’s no one else to REPORT abuse or insult to. So we sometimes do respond with snark. (And the line between acceptable snarkiness and unacceptable insult is often a very fuzzy one.)