Right. It’s like this guy I used to game with. He hated me for unknown reasons. One day, out of the blue, for no reason I could discern, he makes some crack at me about how at least he’s kissed a girl and had sex with a woman. I just laughed. I’d been married and divorced before I met him, so obviously that wasn’t true about me. How could I possibly be insulted by it? Most of the other guys at the table also knew I’d been married before, so they knew the guy was just being an ass.
Said nothing about me, showed everything about him.
The “solution in search of a problem” doesn’t really make sense. The solution under discussion is moving the thread to the Pit for the problem of too many unruly posts. I’m saying that’s a bad solution. Why not tell me why you think it is a good solution?
Are you seriously claiming that mods don’t do as they said they did and move threads to the pit? :dubious: It’s pretty common knowledge they do so. They even said they did. What I’m not about to do is link to a thread that was moved and get into an endless debate on the subjective “merits” of the move.
Therefore a lack of a so-called cite is irrelevant.
I think it’s case by case, but in general I’d say my inclination would not be to move the thread, or if a move was made, first any moderation that is called for would be executed, then a move. I don’t think there should be a heckler’s veto with forum placement.
This is also reasonable to me. A rule prohibiting a move is not reasonable.
A discussion of general principles doesn’t need to center around an extant problem.
As far as I can tell, moving threads to the pit has happened less than 200 times in the history of the SDMB. A quick search turned up about 100 of them, and I’ll guess that’s about half of all the times it happened. A sizeable percentage of those was ATMB-> Pit during the “complaints about mods go in the pit” period. As far as I can recall it only happened once in a thread that I personally was following. Since I don’t pit, I simply stopped participating in that thread. It was a minor annoyance at the time, and a long time ago.
That said, I disagree with this thread being moved, but it’s not a huge deal.
No, I don’t want to make it a “rule”. Perhaps now, that you see several posters have a issue with it, it could be more of a option of last resort, something you might do less often? That’s all I ask. Consider carefully.
All Heinlein adages are wrong, and this one is especially obnoxious.
How a writer can say that words are not powerful is beyond my comprehension. This was idiotic in the olden days and it’s worse today. I guess you haven’t noticed but we’re living in an age of internet trolling, cyberbullying, and fake news. People are literally dying. It’s true that threats against the poster are forbidden here, but we have a long history of good posters being driven away by words and nothing but words.
The Pit may be a necessity, and I agree that some threads may need to be moved there. But we also need to be aware of the damage that can be done, and never, ever minimize it by saying it’s just words.
The recent issue with Clothahump. Taking that thread to the Pit caused quite a bit of nastiness and a banning. (I am not going to discuss whether or not that banning was justified, but that move did cause much nastiness)
That’s quite different than what your OP said. I believe that every mod in this thread has said that it is an option but certainly not the only or first tool we use. I posted that way up thread. I don’t know what you’re arguing for. Yes it sometimes happens, especially when the thread is really a rant to begin with. On rare occasion it’s used when a thread goes mightily off the rails. That is extremely rare circumstance. Some posters may not like it, everyone gets that. This is neither a new idea or surprising, but sometimes it’s the best choice we have.
