That was, and is, precisely the point of my comment in that other thread.
I seems to me that the use of the Mod Hat should be when the post could not be offered by a non-Mod. If a regular poster could make the claim, challenge or offer the admonishment, then a Mod should not do it with the Mod Hat on. THAT is the problem with what Marley23 did. People ask for and demand cites all the time. As I said in the other thread, this os troubling, as I have seen Mods using their cape to steer discussions in a particular direction. Not helpful the actual discussion or, more important, the SDMB.
Marley’s post was not just a call for a cite. It was an explicit statement that KLR 650 needed to stop just throwing out one liners and actually participate.
At the point where Marley intervened, KLR 650 had not submitted a single thought out post with an actual thesis and a coherent dvelopment. You had. Bricker had. Finn had. However, it was KLR 650’s thread and everything he had posted to that point was a series of big declarations that had no substance and no development. That is the sort of thread that deteriorates into name calling and a Mod telling the OP to actually participate is something that has gone on for years.
I understand the distinction you’re making. And I think it does explain/excuse Marley23’s urging for cites in his Post #32. It was good moderation. But the way he asked asked for cite in Post #39 was different. A regular poster could NOT have delivered Post 32, without he/she meriting a slap for junior modding, but a regular poster could very well have delivered Post 39. Again, as I said in that thread, I don’t think Marley23 was wrong for Post 39, only that he needn’t have and shouldn’t have done it as a mod. Again, the rule of thumb I think is appropriate for modding is:
I’m fine here, thanks. The insistence of you and your puffed-up little junta that members contribute this board’s content for free but that you get to stipulate exactly how, where and in what form they have to contribute it means this place currently has all the freewheeling appeal of a mausoleum on a wet Tuesday night.
I understand your point on this. On the other hand, following Marley’s post #32, KLR 650 continued in the same manner, so that while Marley’s post #39 could have been submitted by anyone, in the light of KLR 650’s lack of response to post #32, I would tend to see it as a Moderating follow-up encouraging the wayward poster to get his act together and stop ignoring Mod directions.
It’s not a point that I would argue was unequivocally clear and I do see your perspective; I just think that the dynamics of the thread argue that it was still a Mod action, not a Mod using super powers to enforce a Mod-as-poster’s opinions.
If the levee breaks and your house is about to be flooded, either your neighbor or the police can come by and tell you to evacuate, but there is a difference in your responsibilities when they say it and the police don’t have to have ulterior motives to tell you the same thing as your neighbor even if they have the authority to physically remove you for your safety while your neighbor does not.
Not really, no. Since you’ve ignored a mod’s instructions to take your attempted hijack to another thread, here’s a warning directly imported from the mausoleum (which only starts rockin’ on Saturday nights).
Again, feel free to start a new thread, but don’t continue with your same complaints in this one.
Not the way I slice it, but I could see how you could fairly call it that way. But that brings up an tangential issue—one that I don’t think that mods in general appreciate to the degree that they should. That is that moderation, particularly when it’s not straight board rules stuff, can give one side of a debate undue weight. I’d say that this can be inadvertent, but it only seems to happen in one direction. To be clear, I’m talking about posts by a mod WITH mod hat on, when the post is not dealing with clear violation-type stuff Like Post 39 that we’ve been discussing.
I would ask for mods to read this and just keep it in the backs of their minds.
I don’t understand why that’s reason to suggest KLR should read carefully the civility and troll parts of the rules. It’s probably just me being thick, but could you enlighten me?
I have 2 major problems with this.
The first is the plain reality that posters ‘throwing out one liners and [not]actually participating’ is exceptionally common. You and I both would like a world where everyone is rational and well researched and post substantively. In real life that doesn’t happen here any more than it happens IRL.
So what should be done? It seems to me that the very nature of GD is that those posters arguments are self evident; that the members themselves do a more than adequate job of exposing weak arguments.
The second issue is that in the few instances where a moderator pulls rank in this regard it’s when the offending poster is posting something that the moderator disagrees with, or is posting a topic that is unpopular with the SDMB.
In practical terms, we’re more likely to see mod action against citeless, anemic posts about Obama’s failings than we are to see mod action over citeless, anemic posts about GWB’s failings. Juvenile one liners about pro-life people being women haters will routinely get a free pass, while the same comment from a pro lifer will get a rebuke.
So we’re not ever going to really elevate the discourse here (and theres nothing wrong with that. ) but to the extent we are its only directed towards the cretins who we disagree with. The cretins we agree with get a free pass.
The side effects are much worse than the cure.
Why should Der Trihs be allowed to spew and be ignored when a newbie isn’t?
Would I be allowed to pop into just about every single policial thread and just drop "All liberals/“dumb"ocrats are child molesting perverts who want to rape babies and kill nuns”? If not, why is Der Trihs allowed to? Because he’s done so for a long time?
His posts are my cite ;), but here’s a particularly obnoxious example where he’s getting in the way of grown-ups trying to have a conversation:
One basic rule of moderating should be to consider “What if I allowed everyone to post like that: would the forum be better off”? So again: If I just copy Der Trihs’s words and change Repub to Democrat and conservative to liberal, would I be permitted to post those anti-debate trolling posts at the rate Der T. does? If so, hmmm… 
If not, why not?
Please show an example of Der Trihs being told to provide a cite for his “All Republicans are deliberately eeeee-vil” spewage. He certainly interrupts every political thread with it.
I have to second this. This shit he spews is ridiculous. He’s like a parody of himself, a persona created by writers of The Onion. Yet he gets a pass because jt does it all the time (:rolleyes:), AND he’s on the left (:rolleyes::rolleyes:). Any new on the right who comes near his level of contribution gets his days to being banned counted as soon as he starts posting. I hear that, "Oh, he makes some good contributions in fora other than GD and The Pit. So fucking what?!!! Oh, and he’s honest? I think he is, but that just makes him not a liar. He’s still 1) hateful and 2) guilty of trollish behavior. And if it isn’t trollish, it’s definitely jerkish. This board would be immeasurably better if he wasn’t around, or if he wasn’t permitted to post in GD or the Pit. And it would go a long way to getting people to believe that the moderation of the board isn’y as politically skewed as the membership.
Will this happen? No. He has a free pass to be an over the top myopic hateful ass because, well, he’s an over the top myopic hateful ass. The administration of this board should wake up and get rid of him.
Note that I’m not calling for his banning necessarily (although I wouldn’t be upset if he was–he’s derailed more debates than a drunken railroad switch-operator). But I honestly don’t see any difference (except Trihs used more inflammatory language!) than what KLR was modded for.
I’d simply rather see more modding of this sort used more widely. And the “They’re known trolls but they’ve got a long posting history and people ignore them because of it” reasoning be abandoned.
One other suggestion that I think would strongly improve the content of GD: No “group” insults. If KLR wants to say “all liberals are control freaks” or Dio says “all conservatives hate reason and facts” do it in the pit. Neither one of those statement is appropriate in a debate and both are insulting individuals posting there.
I would if it did. The high number of “factless, citeless, incorrect, ill-informed, or anemic posts” is precisely why moderator intervention is needed. If people were actually capable of merely ignoring posts after asking for a citation, it might work. But we can’t even pull off DNFTT, let alone DNFDD (Do Not Feed Dishonest Debaters).
Now, you are right that it would probably require heavier moderation. And I don’t know if it can be done with the current system. But I’m behind any attempts to at least try.
BTW, I do think that everyone here is highly intelligent, at least as a general rule. But all that means is that we’re better at convincing others that our rationalizations are true. We’ll still commit the same cognitive errors; they’re just harder to pinpoint.
ETA: I don’t understand people thinking that banning is the only option: I have no problem with restricting a particular poster from a particular type of comment. I think it’s been done before on others.
As for me, I wish I had a way to ignore a particular poster, but only in a particular thread or forum. Scrolling past them isn’t always sufficient.
It does work, to the extent it needs to.
And we’ve now seen over the last year or so some noble attempts by moderators to rein in “factless, citeless, incorrect, ill-informed, or anemic posts.”
With what result? They’re not stopping even 1% of these posts, and the ones they’re catching are the ones they disagree with. Its heavy handed, heavily biased moderating by moderators who are actively engaged in the debate.
Thats not cleaning up the boards. Its giving a smackdown to the few who dare to come with an unpopular idea.
I agree that it doesn’t work if there is bias in the moderation. I just was being optimistic that it would start applying to older posters too.
I guess I’m behind the idea, just not the implementation.
Me too, actually.
I certainly agree with the bias always being against a view the mod does not want himself, and it is done to silence one side only. Someone asked for examples, here you go:
I was in a thread in GD about evolution, yet was told I can’t even mention how life began because that is not part of evolution. It certainly was in my opinion, and when I learned it, and the funny thing is the OP had asked for us to express our view of it off the top of our head, too. The OP then said the discussion was fine, but the mod did not care one bit and never said I could post there again. There is no excuse for that kind of unwanted moderation.
I mean GD is exactly where this would belong, and because others talked about it when I went to dinner, I was told I could not even post anything else in the thread, and that was many hours after my last post. Clearly the idea was being censored, no other answer. I have since asked many people I know if they think evolution theory covers life starting, so far 15 out of 15 say sure. Maybe they do teach it differently now, to cover the fact they can’t create life, but so what? I still stated my knowledge of it off the top of my head, just what the thread had asked.
The thread also said one could discuss and critic it after posting what one remembered. That is all I had done. I was told I “didn’t listen” when I was not even there to discuss it, and that I was done, to stay out of it. This was terrible moderation in GD for sure.
Silverstreak, you have an axe to grind with moderation here because you don’t like the way the board is run.
Tiny violin, very small sad song, etc…
Abiogenesis is distinct from evolution, and you were attempting to hijack a thread in a manner that would breed nothing good, same as if someone declared that a discussion on evolution had to include a discussion on the Big Bang. You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
The ‘so what’ is that they don’t teach anything differently, abiogenesis has always been distinct from evolution and positing that ‘they’ changed something because ‘they can’t create life’ is an absurdity.
So you posted in a thread (after your first “this is all the knowledge I think I have about evolution” post) to discuss a position but you weren’t there to discuss it and didn’t listen to people trying to educate you and you went on to hijack a topic with your mistakes based on a fundamental lack of knowledge about the topic, and you’re offended that a mod asked you to stop hijacking the thread?
No sympathy.