My link is worse than Shodans warning. Poster intentionally misread post to launch personal attack. Please work on your critical reading skills before the years first homework assignments are due. 
The only misreading seems to be yours. He used the second person plural, and some folks interpreted it as the second person singular, because the words are the same. I’m a big proponent of “y’all” for exactly this reason, but I don’t think that should be required usage. The post makes significantly less sense with the second-person singular interpretation (“your activities” is almost certainly referencing the activities of the group, not of billfish).
But please, do condescend to me about misreading :).
Both are snarky…one is confusing trolly and the other confusing personal attacky. Neither deserve a formal warning.
If this board lives for pure-grade brilliant hilarious snark… it starved to death years ago.
And post 171 in this thread is accusing a poster of trolling outside of the Pit. Again, note worthy but probably not warnable.
Yes, they’re both snarky. So I should have said that earlier. They’re still apples and oranges
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One person writes that he repeatedly attended events that “often felt more like a KKK rally” and got snarked at for doing so in a post that raised an actual criticism of his activities.
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Another person wrote a thoughtful post about the complexities of gender and got snarked at for doing so in a post whose entire thesis was that it was a deliberately shitty way to phrase what the poster thought was his opponents’ view.
Meditate on the difference.
I, uh, I may have scrolled past that–and when I went back to check what it was, I may have decided just to take your word for it.
Why is the post being snarked upon important? Its the response that should be noted. Going 60 in a 45 is less egregious when trying to get the brat to school on time than it is trying to beat closing time at Taco Bell. But both are still speeding.
Have you ever considered that your own biases makes you immune to persuasion on this point? You claim you want a comparison of like things, but have dismissed every single example as unlike. It may be that there are no good examples. It may also be that there are plenty of good examples and your biases render you incapable of seeing them. I see no reason to dismiss the latter possibility out of hand, and I suspect that the reality lies somewhere in between.
But let’s disregard Bricker’s concerns about potential partisan bias in moderation, the case for which I agree is not compelling. Can we at least agree that the moderation on this kind of snarky one-liner ought to be basically consistent and is not?
If we disagree and you think the moderation team ought to be inconsistent, why?
If we disagree and you think the moderation team is basically consistent in how they handle snarky one-liners intended to elicit a reaction but not to advance the discussion, then I contend that you’re simply incorrect, as evidenced by the basically good standing of the poster to whom Fenris alluded earlier.
“Brilliant snark” will be too conveniently defined as “snark which reinforces my political biases.” I wouldn’t want to ask the mods to figure out the different grades of snark.
No, criticism of the Church is obviously not hate speech by any definition, just as criticism of Saudi Arabia is not hate speech by any definition. But if you make it something like “Catholics are evil,” or “Catholics want poor people to suffer,” then sure. And, indeed, I think you’ll find that among the liberal posters disciplined for borderline trolling, it has been on the subject of religion.
But I don’t think it matters.
Don’t you think that, however defined, a rule against hate speech will have a disparate impact on (self-described, at least) conservatives in 2017? Even if you disagree, if you take it to be so for the sake of argument, does that make it “partisan bias” in a way that you maintain is a distinction without a difference?
Consistent with what is known of the poster’s history? Because that determines meaning, or it goes a long way to determining meaning.
Context determines meaning. Personal history is a large part of context. Were Una Persson to say what Shodan said, it would mean something entirely different, because Una and Shodan have different histories here, and that context determines what they mean when they use words. Is it high sarcasm? Is it something they believe, said in an inflammatory way?
More to the point: Is it intended to help or derail discussion? AHunter3 turned it into a discussion-promoter, but Ivory Tower Denizen took the context of Shodan’s history here into account, and now Ivory Tower Denizen is being grilled for it.
Nobody can drop their history here, and expecting moderation to proceed as if there were no history to consider would be insane. It would deprive utterances of meaning. Our own legal system doesn’t attempt to deny history, so I cannot imagine the SDMB’s moderation trying to.
Of course I’ve considered that. That’s why I’ve established in advance what a gold standard of comparison would be. Every single example has been nothing like that gold standard, so I’ve dismissed it. Then people get all petulant about how I dismiss crappy examples. It’s an old problem: they want to complain based on weak evidence, their weak evidence is unpersuasive, they blame everyone else instead of either finding better evidence or admitting their complaint lacks merit.
Show me the good examples–the same moderator in the same forum treating two similar posts differently, based on politics. Anything else is a less persuasive example. What we’ve seen so far are different moderators in different fora treating different posts differently, which is incredibly weak evidence.
Again: you can complain that I don’t see the bias that other folks are predisposed to see, but the complaints, absent reasons why the evidence is strong, are uninteresting.
What would you have me add to what I already said on this issue:
Yes, of course.
To be clear: I would not have warned Shodan, nor would I warn the poster to whom Fenris alluded for consistently doing exactly the kind of thing Shodan did in this case. I believe the two are broadly similar in behavior and the moderation in this instance is not.
Fair enough. I suspect you’re deluding yourself as to your objectivity in judging what does and does not meet your standard, but if you think you are fairly and accurately assessing Bricker’s complaint, more power to you.
Whether you think that the moderation in this case is consistent with moderation in the past. Your choice of the word “starts” suggests to me that you think it is not. If that’s the case, then I part ways with you in believing that the change you welcome should be precipitated by issuing a warning for the kind of thing which has not consistently drawn rebuke in the past.
Exactly. And the predictable response will be to ignore the thread until the few people pointing out the hypocrisy lose interest.
How one set of potentially offensive satirical or snarky short posts can be considered trolling and another set not is a pretty ridiculous standard to base penalizing posters on.
Yeah sort of, except it would be more like Al Capone admitted to trolling a message board by finding a line where he wasn’t technically in violation of a rule but knew he was still annoying people just for the sake of annoying them. And then thumbed his nose at the posters and the mods while doing a touchdown dance on that line after they concluded there was nothing they could really do. But then later he got a warning for trolling in another way on that same message board after barely touching the line or maybe even stopping just short of it.
It isn’t exactly mind reading given an available history, but to some extent almost any moderator decision involving a poster’s intent has to based partly on assumptions.
That is how trolling right up to the line usually works. I would point out that this sensible inclination to not warn someone for something that wasn’t outright blatant, even knowing with near certainty their intent, may be what led to:
If that pattern continues unchanged it will make your prediction almost certain to come true:
Perhaps I could have been more clear - trolling is not evaluated based on shortness or satirical content. Trolling requires (from memory) posting with the primary or sole intent to rile people up. The other criteria listed above may overlap or may not, but it isn’t the basis for evaluation.
Obviously discerning intent is subjective, but that is the role of the moderation team.
This.
In judging his post to be trolling the mod must read the post in a completely different context than I do.
IMO, the post is a useful contribution as personal preference/self image is absent from the OP’s list.
While I agree that the language might be seen as “dismissive and scornful”, that does not meet the bar for trolling in my book.