Back in 2008 it looks like the moderation’s view on what constituted a troll was much more narrow. As long as someone held genuine beliefs, their shitposting wasn’t considered trolling. A shift in what constitutes trolling might explain why so many conservatives are getting in trouble these days. This is a neutral observation. I don’t know what I think about the perceived bias toward conservatives as a whole.
But I will say looking back, it’s SSDD. Same complaints, same arguments, and round and round we go.
Yup. And essentially, what he admitted to was that sometimes, when he typed “regards” he was thinking “fuck you”. But he typed “regards” at the end of EVERY SINGLE POST, including completely benign ones. Trying to guess which times he might have been thinking “fuck you” and moderating him for it would have been moderation of thought crimes, which seems like a bad path.
What most people seemed to want was just that he’d be told to knock off the sign off altogether after admitting that he sometimes used it as an insult. So, instead of “we can’t tell, so we don’t mod it” it would be “we can’t tell, so we don’t allow it.”
There was also just a push that said that manual sigs were annoying, as there was no way to turn them off. I thus find it amusing that manual sigs are all we have now on the new board (unless something changed).
Okedokee. But if he uses the sign off every time, how the hell am i supposed to know when to be insulted? Do I have to engage in mind reading? If that’s the case i could get half the board banned for all the personal insults they think about me.
FWIW, I don’t buy that particular line of reasoning. I don’t think anyone is arguing that he should have been modded for any specific instance of “regards” based on the notion that that particular instance meant “fuck you”. I think the thinking was that the overall approach was troll-like in aggregate, even if you can’t pin it down to a specific instance which would be in violation.
That said, I think even to the extent that it meant to be insulting, it was benign enough to fit well within the parameters of what’s otherwise considered acceptable snark on this MB. There are many many posters who are frequently snarky in all sorts of ways, and I don’t think posting “regards” with an occasionally snide connotation is out-of-line for those standards.
I confess, I never understood why people got upset by the “regards” thing. It just seemed like a harmless affectation to me, signing off posts on a message board as if you were writing a letter.
You didn’t have to guess - that he admitted doing it ever should have been enough. It’s not a “thought crime” if the criminal is loudly shouting that he did the deed.
It was harmless until he admitted, because he liked to troll, that he meant it as “fuck you” sometimes, and then it became additional evidence that he liked to troll. That’s my read of it now. In 2008 I remember being annoyed that anyone made an issue of it. But going through those past threads I can see, he was a giant troll. He really did openly gloat about making other people upset.
Even leaving aside that he had plausible deniability in that saying “fuck you” is permitted in the Pit, the fact is that saying “regards” and meaning “fuck you” is not comparable to actually saying “fuck you”. Really, it’s a pretty mild bit of snark, as these things go.
The real reason it got people so worked up is that they hated him for other reasons, and it bothered people to see him “getting away with it”.
People were bitching about the Regards thing long before his mild admission that sometimes he did do it to annoy. I joined in 2005 and posters were already bitching about it then but generally not bitching about anybody else.
There were just enough vocal complaints that I stopped signing off like it was an email.
When I first got here I tended to sign off.
Thank you,
Jim (and I almost never got a complaint, maybe as mine varied)
It was a slight irritation…but after a few hundred "I’m not touching you! I’m not touching you!"s, the most tolerant parent in the world is going to turn around and tell their kid to sit the hell down and shut the fuck up.
Hell we have a poster that might as well be an unaware Fozzie Bear who has been dropping dumb jokes into threads forever. I largely ignore it, but that is a mild irritant.
I’m not going to call out each one individually, but there are a lot of personal insults sprinkled throughout this thread. Personal insults are not permitted outside the Pit. In ATMB, all users are expected to treat all other users with respect. Bickering and over-heated conversations are only going to result in the thread getting out of control and getting closed, which resolves nothing.
Also, Shodan’s “Regards”, while irritating to some, is becoming too much of a hijack. Let’s all focus on the actual topic as defined in the OP of this thread, please.
He admitted that he used regards as a polite “fuck you.” The thread in which he said so resurfaced when he was banned.
I think it comes down to conservatives believe rules exist to keep other groups in check and aren’t used to rules being applied to them. This coupled with their permanent sense of victimhood makes them see the world as unfair.
This is when he said it meant FU in some contexts.
Attacking someone for their unusual fetish is, in my opinion, a crappy thing to do. But it isn’t hate speech. People have historically, in the Pit, attacked others for all kinds of despicable reasons. I’ve seen people mocked for their traumatic childhoods. Relationships. Mental illnesses. I’m not defending those actions, but it sounds like you want a board standard that hasn’t existed, ever. And none of those things are hate speech.