I do appreciate you politely expressing your preferences, and fully acknowledge that there are many that share it. But there are many that prefer the tighter focus. And it’s largely us moderators that try to provide the balance between those desires.
But in all seriousness, I, you or anyone in this thread could create a new general purpose discussion thread even in P&E with some clear guidelines. One of the threads I linked too for a split off came about when I realized I myself had participated in a tangent, so I took the time to create a new thread on the tangent and direct other posters to it.
Sure, writing a quality OP is a bit more work (ideally) than a casual reply, and yeah, there’s the worry that it’ll get nothing but crickets, but speaking only for myself, between the ATMB threads and moderating the Main ICE thread, I’ve spent HOURS on this.
@TroutMan, I do get it. In a prior ATMB thread on this subject, @SenorBeef asked me to clarify and try to set things out, as I was simultaneously doing so in the actual thread. But it’s in part the little bit pregnant thing. People were hijacking very early on (see my points about Noem’s hat), and expanding the topic. So we let it happen, trying to keep the evolving discussion continue, and when it was a bit more stable, we tried to set up at least general boundries.
Jonathan_Chance’s comments on Hijacks have been quoted a lot, but I really think posters would benefit from reading through the whole thing, but I think I’ll just quote a couple of small sections that tend to get forgotten in the heat of discussion and debate:
In our new world of Great Debates and Politics and Elections, posters are expected to encourage and enhance the ability to participate in discussions without distracting or discouraging others from reading and participating.
and
Keep threads specific and debatable. No wide omnibus threads. We want to see clear, specific topics and thread titles. Large omnibus threads are actively detrimental to the long-term success of the boards. A thread entitled, “Tax Policy” is too broad. One entitled, “Should a National Sales Tax be enacted” is better. Keep it clear and specific. This also requires participants in the thread to remain on specific topics as well.
We’ve generally been much more lax about the latter point, because of the repeated poster concerns about organically evolving conversations, but we could go back to being much more serious on it.
Seriously, if I had a time machine, I’d have gone back and set it up with a Breaking News thread on the shootings, a P&E thread for discussion of the political consequences, corrections and fallout of the events, and a Pit thread to express our feelings on things.
But the irony of this whole discussion, is that it seems to me that this is asking for a MORE formatted board, where the moderators (or a few “trusted” posters) are the ones in charge of setting up all the threads with either very strict or very loose rules, instead of our “trust the posters to run themselves and only step in as moderators when things get out of control”.