Which also did not go much of anywhere, probably because it was too broad as well. So, by all the logic I have seen in this thread, we should DEMAND that Czarcasm rush to that thread and close it as well. :rolleyes:
Anyhow, reading the thread has been amusing. I understand why Czarcasm did what he did. Those of you arguing against it are quite amusing in your misinterpretations of what he tells you. But, go ahead, carry on, have yourselves a good time. Just don’t expect him to change his mind.
<delete snarky rejoinder>
never mind
You’re missing the point. It’s not an issue of how much that post was worth. It’s an issue of who should be deciding worth.
If the thread was worthless and wouldn’t have generated any responses, then it would have disappeared. In that case, Czarcasm didn’t need to close it.
If the thread had more worth than was apparent it might have gotten some responses and started an interesting discussion. In that case, Czarcasm shouldn’t have closed it.
So, Czarcasm’s action was either unnecessary or wrong.
You could say the same about the QQQQQ thread, yet there seems to be some consensus that it should be closed. Do the mods have the ability to interpret what meets the minimum threshold for a thread? Traditionally, they have had that responsibility.
I won’t claim that Qin’s thread was great but it was not the equivalent of a line of Q’s. Anyone who lacks the ability to tell the difference shouldn’t be closing any posts.
You just don’t get it. I do see the infeasibility. I just think that you should have done nothing about it when you saw the infeasibility.
Having an infeasible thread in existence is not some blight on the pristine perfectness that is the SDMB. If the other posters also judge it to be infeasible, then it will drop like a stone (and thereby no longer pollute the perfectness that is the SDMB, which is bestowed on us unworthies through pure moderator beneficence).
The whole idea of closing a thread just because you think it’s infeasible is completely ridiculous. Why can’t you just ban spammers, close QQQQ threads, warn/ban posters for rules violations, and just leave everything else alone?
I think I would have voted for “Adolf Hitler Is Killed in the Beer Hall Putsch” but Curtis (or someone else?) voted for “Theodore Roosevelt Is Elected President in 1912”, which seems a very strange choice, given all the options.
Yeah, I think the thread should have lived or died on it’s own merits, but I can’t really get upset about it. Czarcasm, did you encourage the OP to repost the poll with fewer choices? The thread had some potential, perhaps if the OP had limited it to the major wars and plagues/diseases throughout human history.
Have to agree with these folks. I don’t know which kind of poll it was (single or multi-option). If it was single option, it would be difficult to keep track of all the choices to pick a single one. But someone could still post without voting if they just wanted to defend their favorites. And a multichoice poll would have worked great, because you could pick more than one, without having to keep track of the ones you already looked at. Then the most popular ones could be debated and defended.
The examples given really don’t compare to this at all. An indecipherable OP (incomplete question) or gibberish OP (series of Qs) are easy to close because they are clearly either a mistake, or malicious - behavior that intentionally breaks stated rules. This OP was clearly neither. The mod disliked the content or the style, without being able to demonstrate which rule it breaks.
This creates a really confusing and inconsistent modding policy that cannot be easily understood or followed by either posters or enforced consistently and appropriately by mods.
It also insults the intelligence of Dopers. We dumb things couldn’t possibly handle thinking about a list with 75 items! Better save us from thinking too much! It’s not like we were forced to compare and contrast each items with every other item in turn ad infinitum. The intent was to pick the one or few each poster felt worth defending or debating.
As far as I can tell, the mods are just people. People who are doing their best to try to control quality. They face an enormous number of subjective, endlessly debatable decisions, in which they must attempt to draw a line and maintain it. The thread in question was in the fuzzy region. The mod said that he would welcome a “re-do”, a more coherent version of the thread, and did nothing to suggest an attempt to suppress or bias the thread’s content other than the generic recommendation “narrow the time frame involved and/or the number of events”. The mod has merely exerted some inert, positive organizational pressure on Qin Shi Huangdi’s drive-by thread-shotgun-vomit, hopefully forcing him to put a little bit more thought into his subsequent threads. This is an especially reasonable action given Qin Shi Huangdi’s somewhat eye-brow raising history of posting disorganized threads and then not returning to them to show any sort of personal investment in them.
These two posts pretty much say everything that needs to be said.
Regards,
Shodan
I’m afraid I can’t escape the suspicion that the thread was closed because Czarcazm just plain doesn’t like Qin. It’s not a suspicion I’m happy to have.
And how is this 51 poll option thread not “a random collection of thoughts and ideas”? Is it just because the OP took the ideas from someone else instead of making them up on their own?
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=13342899#post13342899
It’s a thread of what is the worlds greatest idea. In the options are bread, sewerage, romance, Qi and refrigeration.
Also note the OP did no “significant work” to flesh out the options. They just basically said, “Hey looky what I found. What do you think?”.
I agree that it does seem to have played a part in his decision.
As far as the idiotic claims made by some that an OP with only Q’s is in the same league as the OP we are discussing, how many people would have come to a thread to complain about the closing of an OP with Q’s in it?
At least 17. Not about a thread with all Qs, but it shows that some people complain about anything.
Did you even read that thread?
The only person to complain was the OP; everyone else in the thread basically said, “Well, it was a stupid, drunken thread and it deserved to be closed.” Even the OP came back at the end and said that starting the thread was tongue-in-cheek.
Thanks for playing anyway, though.
Sarcasm is wasted on some people.
Sorry, but there was nothing to indicate sarcasm in your post. You realize, i assume, that i cannot see the wry smile on your face while you’re typing? If you’re going to use sarcasm in a text medium, you need to be smart enough to do it so that it’s recognizable, otherwise you risk being taken seriously.
In “modding for content” news, at least one mod thinks this thread on suicide (which within 15 posts drew two posters who discussed their contemplations of imminent suicide) is OK to let stick around.
Interesting to see the divergent mod views. And to see the mods insist that we have rules here (except when it becomes inconvenient to so insist, where they fall back on “hey, I make subjective calls, I have to, deal with it”).
Suicide threads on the internet always get people agitated. They should be ignored since, a/ usually people do not follow through, and b/ it doesn’t matter in the least if they do.