The artwork does not merit the price. This is to buy influence with the President or fund a political movement - clearly. The donors names are kept secret to protect them from public scrutiny and so that the rest of us can’t quite put 2 and 2 together.
Hari calls this threadshitting. It is not threadshitting. Pinecone is expressing an opinion. It’s an opinion I disagree with, to put it mildly, but it doesn’t merit a warning. I’ve noticed Hari Seldon mod-noting and warning people for having different political opinions. This is troubling and should stop.
Agree. Threadshitting would be if a Doper shits on the very premise of the thread itself. Had Pinecone said something like, "Who cares? This is a dumb thread, don’t we have better things to talk about than Hunter Biden?" that would be threadshitting.
But Pinecone was simply expressing an opinion that was directly relevant to the topic. It might not be a view that others agree with, but it wasn’t threadshitting.
Right on topic, not threadshitting. It was the whole point of the thread that it was an ethics problem and the poster (whether you agree or disagree) said he thought that the paintings sucked and were bought by anonymous donors: exactly what makes it look arguably unethical. How in the holy hell is that threadshitting?
And the first post that this new poster has made! Welcome to the Dope! We want new members; please tell us how to keep you.
I fully concur. I disagree with Pinecone’s opinion, but it’s an opinion that is absolutely on-topic for the thread and consistent with the political nature of the forum. Frankly I can’t even imagine what Hari_Seldon was thinking when he made this judgment call.
Besides that, this was Pinecone’s first post, and new posters are usually cut some slack in marginal cases – and this wasn’t even a marginal case, it was a totally valid post. This is just incomprehensible moderation.
I agree with the other posts, but I don’t think being a new poster should be a factor, as you can just as easily go the other way with it. In this case, there’s a reply to a poster that doesn’t actually address anything that poster said, but just repeats talking points, which is a bit suspicious.
So, instead, I say to stick with moderating for content for a first post. And, again, I agree with everyone else that the content here is not moderatable. It didn’t even require a note.
What it needed was just a follow-up post about how art is subjective and asking them what they could have done so that they wouldn’t have found the transaction to be suspicious.
New posters are treated that way all of the time. They could say something that you or I get warned for but instead the new poster gets a note saying, “NewPoster. Welcome to the SDMB. Please take time to review our rules. (Link provided to rules) Your post violates these rules. Please comport your posts to these rules in the future and again welcome.”
I’m going to stretch things a ways to see how that post might be threadshitting.
Other thread posts: this is a thorny ethical question and this approach may or may not be the right way to prevent the appearance of selling influence.
This post: this plan is absolutely about selling influence, period, full stop (implying that there is no controversy and therefore no need for discussion).
Well, I had to stretch further than I expected, give me a moment to relax my hamstrings… If this is where the moderator is coming from, then he too has stretched too far to make this post warnable for threadshitting. I gave it my best shot to try to understand where the moderator might have been coming from, and I’d be interested to find out if I was even in the ballpark. Nevertheless, it’s a bad call and should be rescinded, preferably with an apology to the poster (I’m holding my breath for that).
Another poster weighing in: that post wasn’t thread shitting, it was perfectly legit for the thread. There is no way to interpret the warning except as motivated by political bias.
This moderation is embarrassing, should be rescinded, and should result in a warning for Hari Seldon for being a bad moderator. I thought we’d already gotten past Hari being terrible at separating his political opinions from his moderation. Guess not.
In case it’s helpful to have another voice here, add mine in. It’d be helpful to hear Hari’s reasoning behind thinking this is a threadshit: if it’s simply that it’s a conservative approach to the thread topic, I believe his moderation approach needs to change.
(Obviously, it’s a very silly approach to the topic. But silliness != threadshits)
I tuned out of that thread after fifty or so posts, because I find the whole premise absurd, but if you accept that there is indeed a question there worth debating, then that is a reasonable statement in the discussion. The view sits toward the farther end of one spectrum of opinion, sure, but if you start by allowing as there can be a spectrum, then that’s on it.