This is the third post you’ve made a similar claim, and the second post responding to a request for cite, and you still haven’t given a single cite.
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
The gist of your comments simply sound like more of the “we can’t help ourselves” (or,“we don’t want to control ourselves”) but I do want to offer a couple thoughts.
Either we are a community, or we’re not. If so, this is real life. And many threads bear that out, including Doper meetings. If I call LHoD a “c*nt” I’m doing it to someone I know; and someone who knows me. Real people have made friends here, and they consider this place to be a meeting place for their friends.
And some have been abused here, had their feelings hurt, and some have left because of it. Those are real people with real feelings. I could never have been a Mod and have taken the real abuse doled out to them—real people with real feelings.
Lastly, it’s patently silly to say that we shouldn’t have basic civility as a goal because people will still be dickish. The new rules don’t keep anyone from being dickish.
An analogy: it’s as though The Pit was the Autobahn–there were some rules, but no speed limit.
Suddenly, a decision is made that there will now be a speed limit.
Half the people say “What? There doesn’t need to BE a speed limit. This sucks!”
"< Grumble > " sez another batch of people. “Ok, what IS the speed limit? We need to know what it is if we’re gonna follow it.”
“Ain’t tellin’” Says Ed and Dex. “We’ll know you’re speeding when we see it. Most of you haven’t been speeding. And hell, if you do something FUNNY while speeding that makes us laugh, hell, we’ll let you get away with it. Or not.”
The “standards” that have been listed by the people in charge have been (so far):
[ul]
[li]Calling someone an ass is ok but calling them an asshole isn’t[/li][li]We’ll know an inappropriate insult when we see one.[/li][li]If it makes us laugh, it’s ok[/li][li]We want you to be CREATIVE with your insults. But “Giraffe, you diseased smegma-encrusted urethra”…isn’t, somehow.[/li][li]Most of the threads in the Pit would still be allowed under this rule. [/li][li]It’s perfectly obvious what the standards are (with a strong implication that anyone who doesn’t agree is being deliberately obtuse)[/li][li]It’s ok to insult a group that someone you’re fighting with is a member of and by extension, insult them, but you can’t insult them directly (the “Bricker, you’re a Republican. All Republicans suck” type example posited earlier)[/li][/ul]
And this is gibberish. By comparison the old “Don’t be a jerk” rule was a model of clarity–at least there, there was no pretense of objectivity.
Ed–if you want to make this place more “businesslike”, I’d strongly suggest that you nail down some hard and fast guidelines because frankly this is NOT how a business makes rules: I mean imagine: “You can’t websurf on the company computer unless you find a funny site that you can share with your manager”
I don’t think these are good ideas (except for moving complaints about modding to ATMB; that’s a long overdue change). However, I doubt this will wind up being a terrible thing. These are rules designed to limit the extent to which we can be mean to one another – as very little of the meanness here is constructive, there’s an upside to be had.
A lot of it will depend on the particulars of enforcement. It’s like open container laws: good if you use them to round up drunks who are wandering into traffic and being loudmouthed assholes at 3 AM, and bad if you use them to harass people quietly enjoying a few beers on the stoop. For the most part I’d be fine with the moderators having broad discretion to determine what’s out of bounds. This isn’t government, it’s not important that the rules rule, always.
I reserve the right to change my opinion at a later date if I feel that moderators are being unduly strict.
Well thank you for inadvertently making my point, namely that civil, valuable conversations can be had without shrieking at each other.
Admittedly, I don’t go to Pit very often—for the reasons I’ve stated----and it does appear to me that it is more civil than I remember in years past. (was it you that made that point…?)
The more compelling arguments Ed’s new rules would have been a series of Pit threads replete with the rationale that there are valid, productive reasons to call someone a c*nt in a productive discussion.
You’ve given us a series of threads that you apparently hold up as model for the value of The Pit. (I’ll take your word for it as I haven’t read all of them)
Tell me then…How much gratuitous abuse was in those threads? If there was little of it, did the thread suffer because someone wasn’t calling someone else some filthy name?
IOW, aren’t you making a case that The Pit can do very well without gratuitous name calling?
We are a community. There are several posters I do not want in this community. Why should I not insult and abuse them? Especially if it gets them to leave.
So which is it, raindog?
Is abuse and invective in the Pit so bad that it make this new rule necessary? Or is it so rare that the rule is essentially pointless? You started out in this thread saying that the rule was necessary to raise the tone of the place, yet now you argue that the tone of the place is actually just fine.
No-one here has denied that civil and rational discussion can be had in the Pit. I’ve had some of my most interesting and valuable debates there. Many Pit threads do proceed without any gratuitous namecalling among the membership. But there are still occasions when it seems appropriate to call a fucking douchebag and fucking douchebag, and allowing this doesn’t detract from the conversations going on elsewhere on the board.
Clearly we’re experiencing life quite differently. So, I will gladly shut up, as it relates to citing gratuitous name calling in the Pit.
In a strange irony, even if I couldn’t find instances where Dopers were calling Dopers filthy names (and it would appear Ed is suffering from the same delusion that I am in that regard…) it would seem to make the point.
I mean, if the Dopers in the Pit are already models of decorum and grace, what in the world is Ed smoking, and why are so many Dopers fighting for the right for something they’re not even practicing?
Hang on - how is this not abusive?
I mean, at least if someone calls me a fucking dickhead, I know that they’re just searching for insults and not in fact truly calling my a fornicating penis-headed individual. But your words, on the other hand - petty, juvenile, profanity laden drivel - these are all words that make sense, and (it seems fair to guess) are intended as an accurate castigation of some individuals. I for one would be much more hurt (to the extent I am hurt by internet insults) by your words being applied to me than some random string of expletives - they are, to my mind, far more abusive in nature, since they are an attempt at an accurate sum of faults. They certainly denote effort, but it is effort to denigrate.
“Not proud of it” isn’t the same thing as “ashamed of it.”
you’re gonna need a fuckofa lot more mods for this forum.
I get it! You’re channelling Carlin’s “7 Dirty Words” routine. You are modeling yourselves on the FCC.
Hoenestly, I don’t have a big problem with these new rules. As far as I can see, the basic insults we use around here can be boiled down to 4.
- You’re an idiot.
- You’re insane.
- You’re being dishonest.
- You’re trolling.
Admittedly, I’ve had lots of enjoyment from reading some of the more creative interpretations of them.
But I gotta say I’m really tired of threads that devolve from dsiscussing an issue to simply hurling personal insults back and forth. Once the first one is on the table, almost no one is able to disengage and walk away, which is pretty much what every one of us would do in the RW. And that’s why we do it here, because we CAN. We engage in verbal behavior that’s not acceptable in the RW because there is no issue of physical intimidation to to make us stop and think, “I better shut up, because this guy is an asshole who might start throwing punches or draw a weapon.” There are no consequences to acting out.
I dunno, maybe a lot of people come here to let out their inner asshole, because it’s fun to be an aggressive jerk and they have no other place shit freely.
AFAIC, those people can go away.
But I predict that these new rules will simply lead to a whole new set of grey areas, as people try to draw a new line between “meanie” and “cunt”.
Good luck to us all, motherfuckers.
Oh, dear. I was mostly being facetious. That’s the problem with discussions of this sort, when we’re dealing with abstractions - you get little sense of what the rule means in practice. That’s why I ask everyone to give this some time and see how it works out. The point I was trying to make, none too successfully, was that context is important. The one bright-line rule I could think of was no obscenities directed at other posters - that eliminates virtually all the problematic stuff from recent times I can think of. But it’s not that hard to imagine somebody coming up with (a) a gaspingly vicious comment that (b) isn’t technically obscene but (c) was sure as hell intended to hurt. That’s what “no abuse” is meant to cover. We don’t see that kind of thing too frequently. Far more often, as you know from your own experience, we get colorful invective that was meant in jest or not aimed at anyone in particular. That’s not abuse and we’re not trying to stamp it out; that’s what I meant by my comment about making us laugh. We’re certainly not going to have a laugh-o-meter that determines who gets in trouble and who doesn’t, and I apologize if I gave that impression. I’ll refrain from any further facetious remarks of that sort in this thread.
Please understand what I’m trying to do here. I’m trying to limit outbreaks of hateful, hostile behavior, which occur fairly rarely but often enough that they bother me. I think that’s a worthwhile and achievable goal. If it emerges that there’s some different way to phrase the rules that accomplishes the same result in a way people find easier to understand, sure, we can adjust the words. But truthfully I think it’ll be pretty obvious what I’m talking about once we let this run awhile.
You’ll have to excuse me, I have other things I need to deal with, and probably won’t have much more to say on the boards tonight.
Good question, mhendo.
I don’t go to the Pit very often, however there was a time when I did and thread after thread after thread was replete with name calling and banal, teenage profanity.
I think Risha was making the point (it appears) that I was overstating my case. She/he may actually be right, and maybe I was wrong.
OTOH, she may have cherry picked threads. (although I suspect she/he may be right; and I have no time to look right now.)
In any event, certainly it exists in measure enough to be a concern for TPTB, and certainly some other posters.
Perhaps it is not as pervasive as it once was, but it would certainly appear that it exists in sufficient measure to be a problem for the brass, and I strongly suspect many more posters who don’t have the gumption to post their objections for fear that the they subjected to 20 posters posting at them.
You know what I mean?
And that is a shame.
So now the standard is “no pitting of other posters at all, no matter how creative the language?”
Um, no, it’s not. There’s a lot of middle ground between “pride” and “shame.” There’s miles and miles of neutral territory there.
Anyone think that Ed has to somehow establish he has this authority before we are forced to submit? Who died and left him in charge?
What would be an appropriate response to this post(#46) under the new rules?
No, that was not the gist at all. I don’t want to spew invective in every Pit thread I participate in, and I don’t. The gist was, sometimes invective is an appropriate response, precisely because a message board is not real life, and other options which would be more appropriate in a real life situation are not available.
That is exactly my point. The new rules won’t keep people from being dickish. They won’t keep precious real people from having their precious real feelings hurt. They won’t keep people from leaving. They won’t limit hateful, hostile behaviour. They’ll just dress up that behaviour in a “civil” guise. Oh, and limit the responses of the people who are the target of that behaviour.
Edit to add one comment about “basic civility as a goal”: civility is not an end. Civility is a means to an end.