What description do you think I should have given it?
I labelled it as a protest song. What more is needed? Should I have typed out the lyrics?
Let me say this again. I did not think the warning to MikeF was unfair.
My point in quoting it was to show that I did not break the instructions contained within.
Again, that isn’t what happened. I have invited you repeatedly to answer a simple question, and you refuse to do so. Maybe if you answer I would agree with you. You claim my interpretation is wrong. Possibly it is, but you have not given any alternative.
It was not off topic.
The thread was about the ICE shootings.
The song was about the ICE shootings.
As the video had no preview, a description of who and why relevant would be a great start. As it was AI, mentioning that would be good. As it was not really on-topic at all, not posting it in that difficult thread would be best.
That undescribed video contributed to the thread, not at all.
I don’t know if this will help, but I will point something out.
I was the first person to talk about a protest song. Realizing that it might be somewhat off-topic, I paid special attention to tying it to the topic. I talked about it only in the context of the protest I attended, described how the protest was directly linked to the shootings, and only then talked about the song’s effect on me. I ended the post by talking about how I believe this sort of protest, including this sort of song, will be an effective response to the shootings.
It is an approach I have used before: if I realize something I am saying might be construed as a hijack, I make the effort to tie what I am seeing explicitly back to the topic.
I recommend it! Make that effort. And if it seems strained, maybe conclude what you were saying is too off-topic to tie naturally back to the topic, and don’t make the post.
Which is another technique I use: about a quarter of the posts I start never get posted, because I realize, for one reason or another, that nobody needs to hear what I am about to say.
I am not badgering. I’m simply reminding the mods of the key question.
The other stuff is irrelevant. I didn’t know it was AI, and why should that even matter? I was warned for posting off topic, not for posting AI. As for unclear labelling, again I wasn’t warned for that.
Please explain why it was off topic. That is the only important question in this thread.
I haven’t done this in a while, but maybe it will help. I am going to do the conflict resolution step of putting myself in other people’s shoes.
It is clear that Peter Morris does not believe he has received an answer to his main question. I think I can see why. The purported answers don’t actually seem to indicate being “off topic” as that term is usually understood.
The issue is not whether the song had to do with the topic. It does. It’s whether or not a song in general is appropriate to the thread. The thread is a place to drop news about the topic and discuss that news. A song, regardless of relevance to the underlying topic, is not news or discussion.
That’s what they mean by “off topic.” It doesn’t fit the purpose of the thread. You want to discuss a piece of art written about the topic? That would belong in Cafe Society. Not in either of the board’s debate forums (GD or PE).
I’m not the biggest fan of Warnings for not following instructions unless the violation is clearly deliberate. A Warning is like an infraction elsewhere, a public record of wrongdoing. Warnings here function more like infractions elsewhere, an official record of wrongdoing. Sure, some people see those and go “oops, I need to back off” but others respond with anger, feeling they’ve been unfairly treated because they weren’t trying to do anything wrong.
So I get why they sting. Same with WE’s accusation of badgering when you clearly do not feel your question was answered. It sucks when you feel like you’re being accused of being a deliberate troublemaker. Neither is the best way to resolve conflict.
I approve however 100% with the mod goal here. Even under looser standards, a song, no matter how on topic, doesn’t fit into a serious news discussion thread or a debate forum.
Another way to look at it… If someone made up a joke about the shootings, something you saw on social media, maybe a pun on “hot dish”, would it be appropriate to put in the thread? I’d say no way. It doesn’t add anything to the discussion. Maybe the ICE thread in the Pit, fine, it’s the Pit, but just because it is tangentially related to the subject, that doesn’t mean it’s going to help the discussion.
I guess the question is… What was the point of putting an AI-generated song in there? Is it gaining a lot of traction? Are people embracing the song and making a big deal about it? Then okay, there’s surely an article about that, you should link to that. That seems interesting and relevant. But some random AI song? That seems like something anyone could make. And all it does is derail a thread that has had problems with being derailed anyway.
The same difference if Kristi Noem made a statement about the event, or your neighbor embroidered a quilt about the event. One has significance, the other is trivial. Especially if you just link to a picture of the quilt saying something like, “QUILT!” If the quilt had some point related to the subject you wanted to expand on, in my personal opinion that might have some relevance, as it helps reflect your opinion on the subject. But you’d have to make that point, not just post a photo of a quilt.
No. If the head of a major Congressional subcommittee made a statement about the shootings that generated a lot of reactions in the media, that would be relevant to the thread, despite the fact that I might have never heard that politician’s name before.
There is no way you are going to get a bright line that you or someone else can nitpick to death later. It’s a judgment call, not objective fact. Reread @BigT’s post. You aren’t going to get a better answer than what she wrote.
I agree with this. @BigT write a very good explanation. But i can add a little more.
The bigger difference is that Jimmy Kimmel is well known enough that most random posters know more or less what a link to him will be.
But in general, we frown on bare links. If you post a bare link in MPSIMS to a news article, and the “one box” summary says “massive earthquake last night in northern Greece, 7 known dead and probably many more”, I won’t moderate it. Because the one box gives enough context. But a bare link to random video may get moderated even in a chatty MPSIMS thread, because it doesn’t give the next poster much to go on.
If you had written, “here’s a protest song about the shootings, i liked it and hope people find it inspiring”, you would probably still have gotten moderated, because that’s not the point of that thread. But i suspect it’s less likely you’d have gotten a warning. Because it would have been obvious why you might have thought it was on topic. So it’s less likely it would have pissed off the beleaguered mods who are desperately trying to keep that thread on topic. Honestly, it wasn’t obvious until a few minutes in that the song was even about the shootings at all, and not generally about ICE.
So yes:
Random undescribed links are not how this message board rolls.